Firefox is a web browser that the Center for Creative Media uses on its computers (it is also according to Professor Jackson a glowing fungus found in Northern Georgia, but that is not what this is about). In January, we noticed that Firefox was having a contest to create a professional quality commercial, and we decided to be the contest's dark horse candidate.

Since our group was already working on two other commercials, a stop motion animation, a business presentation video, and two documentaries, it was not that hard to throw a commercial into the scheduling mix. Thus was born Hilbert College's Firefox commercial team.

Well, that is a hard question. The $5000 from Firefox would be nice (we want to buy a jib that we can name Mozilla) but lets face it, we are a little college with a lot of heart but not a lot of money, there is no way we can spend what this commercial deserves. So the money is really secondary. Firefox's Asa Dotzler promised Professor Jackson that he would slide us a few hats and shirts (we want to take a group picture wearing them) but free clothes is not a reason to do this. The reason for us to do this is to show what we can do, and to make a commercial for a good cause. If Mozilla had called us up and said, 'can you make us a national commercial' and not offered us any money, it would still be worth it because the Firefox browser, as a free way to reach the Internet, needs everyone's help to survive and grow. We cannot program C++ for the Mozilla project, but we can edit a good commercial for them, and possibly inspire others who have more money than us to also get involved.

So this is what Professor Jackson says is a "call to action." Hilbert College Communication Studies is producing a high quality video commercial with a budget of $20 (mostly to buy Sobe and power drinks) with the donated labor and time of four slightly overworked college students and one slightly overweight professor (we still love you PJ). If we can do it for the cost of a couple of Red Bulls, whoever reads this introduction can surely do no less!

Anyway, this is the call to action. If you read this and are thinking, "heck, I could make a commercial for Firefox with one hand tied behind my back," then go and do it. It is for a good cause, you will get some national exposure, and really, if a bunch of students can do it, so can you!

The chance to do a video for Mozilla was just too good to pass up. $5000 in production equipment would do wonders for what we could produce next year (we are always in desperate need for grip and lighting equipment, and we usually buy it from B&H anyway). Plus, we had a history with FireFox.

In 2005, when the Department of Communication Studies was trying to figure out which browser it was going to use (an important issue since so many students do some sort of web design) several students, including myself, tried a lot of them out. Internet Explorer was on the list, but it turned out to be a very poor browser for a number of reasons (this was where the idea of the cart before the horse came from, IE seemed to be always trying to do things backwards for its own convenience, instead of the user). In any case, it turned out that we were happy with a couple of browsers, iCab, Safari, and FireFox, and when the dust settled Firefox was the main choice. It soon went on all of our computers.

So, doing the FireFox ad was a no brainer. But first, I think some introductions are in order. Our team is a group of undergraduates from Hilbert College in Western New York, Hilbert is a small liberal arts college that could almost be called the best kept secret in the state, and if Hilbert is the best kept secret, Communication Studies is the best kept secret on campus. The team consists of myself (William Haas), Al Leight, Cheri White, and Steve Fox, and our professor Steve Jackson. Our group was involved last year in producing two 30-minute documentaries, and we work well together. Steve Fox is the creative guru, he is busy right now writing and casting a zombie movie. Cheri White is our photographer, and is recovering from some serious operation that makes us wonder if she will end up in Steve’s Zombie movie. Al is our general production person, and is up for a slot in the Director’s Guild of America internship program. Myself; (William Hass) I sell concrete in the summer, but I have been busy trying to learn filmmaking, especially corporate production, and have done a lot of work with Students in Free Enterprise, including taking our Hilbert team to the top 16 where we beat out such powerhouses as Florida State.

In any case, Professor Jackson was lecturing us on using Jungian archetypes in developing messages, and something clicked. Most of us wanted to try it out, and see if somehow Jungian archetypes could be used in a TV commercial or some other project. So anyway, the idea of the horse was born from that. At first, the horse was to be used in a SIFE project, but it just would not fly, so we took it over to the Firefox project, where it worked out quite nicely.

The horse concept is a nice fit with Firefox because of everything a browser should be. It should be powerful. It should be tireless. It should be loyal. It should be reliable. The horse pulls you, but it follows your commands. Sounds like a browser all right. At least what a browser should be.

So, we started with a simple storyboard and a rough draft voice over. The storyboard concentrated on the horse for its archetypal symbology. We kept images of computers and the like out of it, since our voice over would be the concrete pitch. As much as possible we would focus in on the horse and let the spoken message work in over top of that. As the production drawings show, we thought of trying to use close-ups of the horse combined with the long shot of the horse moving across screen to retain interest.

We had some serious problems of course. First off, we wanted snow on the ground to make the blue tint we were shooting with come out. No luck -- this year hasn’t had enough snow to give us any good shoot days. George Bush says global warming is a myth, but he needs to come to New York. Then, we had the issue of sunlight, as we needed to shoot the horse so that it would be very contrasty, to avoid identification with an individual horse and to make sure we went through with the whole Jungian thing. Ideally, we would have thrown on a contrast filter, but our main camera did not have one.

But the problems were quickly solved. It snowed. The snow did not stay, but we rushed out and were in luck -- the horses were exercising and we got our shots. The sunlight despite the clouds was out enough to give us a pretty serious contrast, and we did the rest in post. So the shots came out perfect.

The blue tint came right from the FireFox image, and the yellow in the burning firefox name was close to that of the icon. Blue is calming. Plus, it creates a nice base for a color palette.

The Firefox icon, which we planned to use in our commercial, had an interesting orange and blue palette (some of us are sure there are Syracuse fans on the design team). Of special interest to us was the center of the palette, where the orange met the blue. Blue was going to be our base, but the orange had to come from the logo. That would make the logo stand out.

FireFox: Don't Put the Cart Before the Horse was shot using a DV25 camcorder that costs roughly 1/20th the Ikegami HL79 I first used as a freshman television director in 1986, but a spot like it would have been barely possible within any reasonable budget back then. Certianly it could not have been produced by 4 college students, 2 of them seniors, shoe-horned in between three other major projects, backetball, classes, and all the other things college students have to do. Modern technology has come a long way to make creative visions possible.

One interesting direction the students chose to take was to edit the video in DV50 and DV100, even though principal was shot on the DV25 format. Before I let jargon carry us away, let me explain some terms for those reading this who need some background. The DV25 is your standard everyday DV format found in DV, Digital-8, DVCAM, and DVCPro tape formats. At 25 megabits per second (a tad more than 3 megabytes a second) it is a very convenient format to work with because of its low data rate (allowing standard IDE and SATA drives to be used rather than the more expensive RAID drives) and because, unlike many MPEG formats, it has no interframe encoding. The downside is that the 4-1-1 color encoding makes many types of special effects difficult (or provides for inferior results), and there is some noticeable noise that comes with it. Still, with camera kits as cheap as they are today, students can cut their teeth in a standard definition format, and their work is capable of being seen by audiences that are increasingly savvy about the quality of what they watch. Certianly DV25 is a quantum leap over the old SVHS and Hi-8 many colleges were saddled with in the pre-digital days, and the ability to work on nonlinear editors like Final Cut Pro is a godsend.

The limits of DV25 really hit home when you are working with an effects heavy production like FireFox: Don't Put the Cart Before the Horse. Normally, there is not much you can do about DV25, since students are not made of money and neither is a college like Hilbert. But this commercial gave the students a chance to do something unusual: editing in higher quality formats than they shot in. Ordinarily there is simply no point to work in DV50, and little point to go for DV100, when your principal was done in DV25. The old saying I teach students is "you can always loose quality, but you cannot get it back", a truism from the digital days where putting a tape through the mill to add one more layer of special effect would often not be worth it, since noise, even in clean formats like Type C, would quickly make your previous affects blurry and bad looking. But in this case, since much of the commercial would either be video with a pretty serious blur and tint applied, or photoshop graphics that we controlled the resolution of (and which started as vector based images) the worries about the limitations of DV25 are over.

To produce FireFox: Don't Put the Cart Before the Horse students shot DV25 footage and then developed a graphic inventory at 1920x1080 pixels. Graphics for the DV25 and DV50 edits had to be converted to rectangular pixels with sometimes imperfect results, while the DV100 format used rectangular pixes. The edit was first done at DV25 then that edit list was transferred to a DV50 and DV100 versions.

The importance of this is that the client, Mozilla, did not designate a technical standard for the main print. The DV50 version would produce a clean MPEG4 version of the spot for the online upload, and could also serve as the master for any additional web based projects, but if Mozilla choose a terrestrial broadcasting solution for the commercial at any point they would need a DV50 version, even if Hilbert does not yet have the tape transports in place to handle this format. I should amplify the point on the DV50 version making the MPEG-4 bump. DV50, with its 4-2-2 encoding of color and its much easier compression rate is better raw material for a compressiom master than DV25. In fact, if we could have done a straight 4-4-4 SD version of the commercial with our current resources, that would have been our base from which all other formats would derive, saving the problems with re-edits.

The 1920x1080 pixel DVCPro100 (DV100) version of the project was the compromise for an HD version of the project. Because the main DV25 version was shot at 480-60i, nothing could really be gained at this point by pushing it to a progressive format. In fact, the horse's motion was such that progressive would look a bit choppy, especially if we did the film thing and ran the project at 24p before making a last minute conversion to broadcast standard 60i. Knowing that there might be a substantial Internet usage of the commercial, we would ordinarily have done principal in 720p60 using the DVCPro100 codec, but we lack the cameras right now to do this, aside from borrowing an HDV camera from a local college supporter. Since we have been trying to avoid HDV in productions, mostly because the MPEG-2 codec with that heavy of a compression creates noticeable artifacts (despite being a beautiful consumer format), our choices devolved back to 480i60 and our trusty Panasonic AG-DVX100.