I’ve had the pleasure of working with some really talented people throughout my career — including now that I’m at the Urban Institute. My colleague Tim Meko, our infographics specialist, put together the graphic below for the Catholic News Service to explain the Papal Conclave. Even better, he put together this “making of” time-lapse video by taking a screen capture every two seconds while working on the project.
What you’re looking at here is 22.5 hours of work, spread over nearly two weeks. Watch it and see if we can get Tim over 1,000 views.
Tim Meko’s conclave infographic for the Catholic News Service.
How did a six-plus minute video on wealth inequality get to be a viral hit with over 4 million views? Marketplace’s Krissy Clark does the leg work to figure it out. Basically, a “red state designer” creates the video on his own time based on a study from some Duke marketing professors and George Takei of Star Trek fame, publishes it to his massively huge Facebook account (3.6 million likes).
After that, the video was picked up by Upworthy and Mashable and a wonky viral hit is born.
It’s early morning, the sun is shining, the trash cans are out, and the traffic helicopters buzz overhead. It’s just another day in La Crascenta, California, between the sheets of Burbank and the Angeles National Forest. Vaz Terdandenyan steps out of his house in his t-shirt, sweats, flip-flops and socks. He’s face-down in his smartphone texting his boss that he’s going to be late for work. Maybe he slept too late and he’s already grumpy. He looks up and comes nose-to-nose with a black bear that’s come out of the hills to sniff the garbage. He jumps, runs and is back in the house before the bewildered bear can even react. As crazy as this is, Terdandenyan manages to keep his shit completely in tact. He doesn’t drop his phone, he doesn’t panic, he doesn’t even lose a flip flop. It is, it seems, just another day in the Los Angeles suburbs on the edge of the Angeles woods.
If you can’t tell, I am completely enamored with this video. It is quintessential America. It could happen in a suburb of almost any major U.S. city — somewhere where the nearly insatiable roll of human progress bumps up against a still protected patch of wilderness where some, but few megafauna still reside — but it could not happen anywhere else but here. (Well, it could happen in Canada, but who’s counting…)
Only here, in America (and Canada) have we protected enough wilderness to have black bear and other mega fauna in such abundant numbers, while at the same time crowding that wilderness with dense suburbs and their sweet smelling fast food and garbage to lure these animals down into our neighborhoods to poke around. Only here, do we have such intense curiosity to spend millions of dollars flying helicopters with cameras over our cities and towns to capture traffic, high-speed car chases, riots and black bear sightings. Only here do we poses the Schadenfreude to watch a man jump out of his skin and “run for his life” 850,000-plus times and create 8.4 million pieces of content around this small human event. Only here, could Vaz Terdandenyan turn into an overnight 50 second sensation.
Laura Marling sings Neil Young’s “The Needle And The Damage Done.” Great version and a nice stop-motion animation video that pretty much nails the meaning of the song. Produced by Jack White.
