smartdown/firstvideo

This is an experiment to see if a promotional informative video for Smartdown can be storyboarded, and possibly generated, from a set of Smartdown documents.

The basic idea is to use smartdown/impress (demo here) to build a set of Smartdown documents and arrange them in a presentation that can be used as a basis for generating a conventional video. A side-effect might be that a useful interactive hypertext Smartdown presentation might be developed, but that is not a primary goal.

What's going on here?

I copied smartdown/impress and deleted the examples that were 'exampleBasic'. I then repurposed that example to be this 'firstvideo' repo.

What's the Point?

A lot of folks I've tried to approach with Smartdown (for funding or adoption or feedback) have requested a video. So a video is useful as a means of getting people to understand the potential applications and utility of Smartdown. But of course we need to geek out and eat our own dogfood by using Smartdown to produce its own video, much like using Smartdown to create its own logo.

What's the Plan?

• Author a set of Smartdown documents that each isolate a particular frame or scene that might become part of a final video (or hypertext presentation).
• Gradually refine and restructure the content so that it serializes into a credible video.
• Use Text, Audio, ScreenCasts, and Video to tell a story.
• Use this storyboard as a guide towards creating a serialized video.
• Ideally, generate this video mechanically from the Smartdown source content and metadata.

Contributing

Fork this repo

To effectively use the ghpublish capability described below, you will want to be using a fork of this repo.

• Fork the repo
• Get the URL for your fork
• git clone the fork using the above URL
• Add a git remote reference pointing to this repo. For example, upstream or integration could be a remote name.

How to build

cd firstvideo/
npm run dev
open https://localhost:5002 # Alternatively, type URL into a browser

Publish to GitHub Pages

The ghpublish command will invoke publish.sh to deploy the current contents of site/ to the gh-pages branch of this repo.

npm run ghpublish

Directory Layout

• site/ - The source for the website that will be pushed to gh-pages via publish.sh
• raw/ - Contains notes, videos, docs, images, slideshows, and other raw material that will become part of or inform the storyboard. Typically, stuff will be extracted from these files and placed at the appropriate location in the site/ tree.
• site/index.html - A top-level index pointing to the primary storyboard(s), as well as possibly other resources/projects within site/.
• site/css/ - Contains smartdown-impress.css which is identical with the corresponding files in smartdown/impress. Custom per-storyboard CSS overrides should be in site/storyboard/storyboard.css.
• site/js/ - Contains impress.js, smartdown_impress.js, and starter.js, which are currently identical with the corresponding files in smartdown/impress. starter.js may be adjusted as we evolve this storyboard and learn about its media needs.
• site/video/ - Draft version(s) of composed video.

Versions

0.0.1 - Basic skeleton of video site, including index page, storyboard, some audio, and some raw source material. 0.0.2 - Build a more coherent presentation oriented towards a 3-minute video and an elevator-style presentation. Enhance the pages.html so that there is an index and a button back to the index added to each card. 0.0.3 - Use SD/Impress v0.0.3. Eliminate use of pages.html in favor of flatten mode.