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The Wilderness Downtown – Prepare Yourself for Amazement.

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the wilderness downtown

the wilderness downtown

I’m a senior citizen in the digital world.

New things come out of this web everyday – but then a day like to day happens and I am left again in awe of creativity.

In my office, prepping for a meeting with Fain walks in needing a computer with CHROME. Her old school laptop with restrictions that won’t let her play solitaire wasn’t letting her view a site, she must see. Happy to help, not sure what the heck she is needing… I open a tab, and type in thewildernessdowntown.com

The Wilderness Downtown

the wilderness downtown neighborhood

Confused by what this was – just thought she needed something for a meeting – we spent the next 5 minutes in a total state of amazement.

Stop what you are doing – and do this.

  • Open CHROME.
  • Visit thewildernessdowntown.com
  • Turn up your speakers.
  • Watch on a large monitor
  • Close all other windows
  • Type in “The address of the home you grew up”
  • Click SEARCH
  • Wait patiently…. waiting waiting….
  • Click Play Film

I’ve watched 3 times. I should be eating lunch. This is too good not too share!

This is an interactive film – but I’d say it’s a music video set in motion for Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait For It” – how could I not of known about this band before?  The brillance of this – they just made 1 customer.

The one negative to this interactive film vs a YouTube video? I can’t see how many people have viewed. I would LOVE to see the Google Analytics stats on this.

wilderness downtownThe Story Behind The Wilderness Downtown

Arcade Fire is who you listen to — the song in The Wilderness Downtown is “We Used to Wait.”

Chris Milk and a team of brilliant programmers led by Aaron Koblin created this web masterpiece.  Using a ton of creativity and crazy mad HTML5 programming skills — The Wilderness Downtown brings together sound and motion into a web experience like no other.  In my 20 years (I was a wee tweenager on Gopher, yes – I am a geek. Always have been, will always be.) – this is huge.

Huge kudos to Chris Milk, Aaron Koblin and their programming teams (and Google) on this web experience.  You have made my day complete. And I sadly wanted to cry when I saw my childhood home on the screen.

Postcard

In the movie it prompts you to write a letter to your adult self – here is my postcard to me.

postcard to myself

What does YOUR postcard say?

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  • sunshineandstarlight

    It's true. My mind was blown.

    • digitalmomblog

      GREAT POSTCARD little lamb ;)

  • Josh

    I've been thinking about this piece and think that it suggests a few important lessons for thinking about the future of journalism too. At it’s most basic, what the “The Wilderness Downtown” does is point out a new way of telling stories online. It is beautiful, immersive, and engaging. It calls us to participate, to follow up, to stay engaged. It challenges us, inspires us, awes us. All of these are qualities we need in the news.

    I break this down in some more detail here: http://stearns.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/what-the-…

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  • http://oregonjailtalk.info/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=11985 Isidro Muscolino

    Thanks for the write up! Also, just a heads up, your RSS feeds aren’t working. Could you take a look at that?