This might come up in ds106 as an assignment- creating animated trips through Google Streetview. Jim Groom tried to take credit for “inventing: it last year, but I am not stepping into that dog pit again.
Well maybe I am— as I had done one in 2008, grabbing screen shots of Google Streetview’s trip down the “crookedest street in the world”, Lombard Street in San Francisco, in what I called Street View Movies.
Other variations I recall was a flickr group back in 2005, where rather than animating your neighborhood (because Street View was not invented yet), but using google maps to mark up the neighborhood you grew up in, and sharing it– see http://cogdogblog.com/2010/03/22/memory-mapping/.
The point is that maps are a rich terrain to used to create or spawn stories, and can be a diversion from doing videos.
I only mention because I recently found a nifty tool that generates automatically (no ripping screen shots and editing into video) a trip between two addresses by syncing Street View with the map – TripGeo.
For example, as nostalgia, I made this one tyo “drive” from the house I grew up in to my High School (Milford Mill High School in Baltimore County). It is bittersweet, as nothing is more helpful than a 16 year old male’s fragile pride than being able to drive to school– and because my Mom was working, I almost never got to drive (unlike my friend Larry, who’s @*#& parents bought him a car, and he got to drive every day). (obviously I am still not over this).
So here is my drive to high school. Maybe it is the wide angle view, but I can barely recognize the neighborhood, but I do easily see the brick prison like structure of the school.
What it needs as a music or animation track… Hmmmm…
So if you were to use this media in a story, how would you do it meaningfully? Maybe a trip between 2 historical locations? A drive down Route 66? retracing the steps of a famous protest march? other ideas?
I am sure you saw this http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ but it combines street, satellite and memory into a really wonderful music video for arcade fire.
It is not so much interesting for the technology but for the attempt by the artist to connect to the users memories of growing up.
james