Dan Provost.com

Facebook Business Solutions

Facebook Business Solutions was the final project for Major Studio during my first semester at Parsons. It was birthed out of the desire to offer a commentary on the privacy issues that have been surrounding social networking sites on the web, especially Facebook. My solution for this was to create a “hoax” webpage, mimicking the layout of the Facebook Business Solutions page, serving as a warning to the slippery slope Facebook has started down regarding user privacy and interaction with third party companies. The website uses humor and satire as devices to illustrate the current problems with Facebook, as well as a “what could be” scenario if Facebook continues on their current trajectory. The website is designed for people familiar with Facebook, and I feel the humor is inline with the demographic that largely comprises the users of Facebook: college aged students. Creating this webpage allowed me to explore some techniques and design problems that were somewhat new and exciting. I had to learn some CSS in order to format the page as closely as possible to the original Facebook Business Solutions webpage. The logo and icon design was also something I had very little experience in dealing with. Furthermore, I employed several techniques new to me in order to achieve a higher Google index, and spread the word about the page throughout the blogosphere.

The webpage was picked up on several blogs, including Valleywag, the Art of the Prank, and Anti-Advertising Agency. Perhaps most notably though, at the height of it’s popularity, my hoax page was indexed higher on Google than the real Facebook Business Solutions.

As a result, I received this letter:

Dear Mr. Provost:

I am the in-house intellectual property lawyer for Facebook. Based on your website www.facebookbusinesssolutions.com, I’m sure you are familiar with our site.

We like to think we have a good sense of humor here at Facebook, and have no problem laughing at ourselves every now and again. As such, we have no problem whatsoever with people parodying or satirizing our web site or our services within the bounds of the law. However, it becomes a problem for us when users are confused as to whether we are actually affiliated with a parody site, or when a site is using our intellectual property rights for commercial purposes.

As you can imagine, we have expended significant amounts of time, money and effort in the development and promotion of our trademarks, trade dress, and copyrights. In order to protect our intellectual property rights, we have no choice but to vigorously enforce them against third parties who make confusing or commercial uses of such rights.

We are writing to you because we believe that your site has crossed the line from being simply a parody site to making unlawful use of our copyrights, trademarks, trade dress and other intellectual property rights. For example, your web site uses our logo, encourages users to login using their private Facebook credentials, includes numerous links to the actual Facebook site without explaining to users when they are transitioning from your site to our site, and includes a copyright notice attributing the copyright in your site to Facebook (which is not true).

Facebook is aware that you likely did not intend to infringe Facebook’s rights when you registered the domain name or designed your site. Nevertheless, your website does unlawfully infringe our intellectual property rights. Therefore, we request that you immediately: (1) remove any and all infringing materials, including our logo and the inaccurate copyright notice; (2) remove all links that direct users to the Facebook site; (3) remove all scripts that allow users to input their Facebook name and password; and (4) make it clear that your website is not authorized, sponsored by, or affiliated in any way with our company.

We greatly appreciate your anticipated assistance and look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Michael Richter

The Arrival of a Train to the Station

‘The Arrival of a Train to the Station’ is a miniature Alternate Reality Game that I constructed as a prototype for thesis experimentation at Parsons. It is meant to be a fragmented, multimedia, and non-linear experience, although I feel it holds up as a conventional short film as well.

I will briefly walk through the narrative experience: to launch the project, I sent a cryptic email containing a puzzle to theBruce, a maven (to use a Malcolm Gladwell term) and prominent poster on the UnFiction forums, a community interested in playing Alternate Reality Games. As expected, he created a thread about it, and had solved the first puzzle, leading others to somethingbadhappens.com. This webpage contains a single video clip on a blank html page. In the video, a man enters a hotel room, bloody. He struggles to clean himself, makes a phone call, and then dies. We see the number that he dials, and when a player calls said number (866-596-4450), he hears the main characters voicemail, which contains a bit of morse code at the end. The morse code is decoded to letter.html, which leads the players to the next page. This webpage contains an image of a letter from the main character to another, discussing some problems he is having with his experiments. A puzzle using a Rot-10 decryption algorithm is contained in this letter, which leads to the second video clip. In this clip, a man is working on an electronic contraption in a hotel room. He makes a phone call, then hooks the device up to himself and flips the switch. In this video, a QR code image is contained on a single frame of the video, which decodes to onelastnote.html, which leads to another letter. This webpage contains a hand written note, which is neither addressed nor signed by anyone. The solution here is simply the last line of the letter, ‘this is the start of what was,’ which leads to the last video clip. The thread following this adventure on UnFiction can be found here. I also did a launch on the Something Awful forums after the game was already in progress, found here.

Texas A&M Visual Studies Introduction

This project was essentially my first full on foray into After Effects. As my final studio project as an undergrad at Texas A&M, the assignment was to create a promotional piece for the Visual Studies program at the university, in the School of Architecture. This included designing a poster, an animation for the introduction to a promotion DVD about the program, and the DVD artwork. I created every part of the animation (those are my arms in there) as well as the audio, which I made using Garage Band.

Recess

‘Recess’ was my final project for a Videography course I took Senior Year of Undergrad. Influenced by Christopher Guest films and ‘The Office,’ The video documents a boss’s initiative to allow his workers 30 minutes of recess each day, “in a effort to create synergy, increase productivity, and boost morale.”

Project Alive

In 2004, the Beastie Boys released a live concert documentary entitled “Awesome… I F’in Shot That.” They handed out 50 minidv cameras to members of the audience, who documented the event, and everything was edited together to offer a unique perspective of the show. After seeing Pearl Jam live in Madison Square Garden on June 25, 2008, I couldn’t help but notice all of the digital cameras and camera phones that surrounded me. It seemed like a similar experiment was taking place, albeit in a less official and organized manner. I searched message boards, video hosting sites, and online communities in an effort to track down as many different perspectives of this specific performance as I could. The result is a “fan video” in the truest sense of the word.

I don’t agree with the statement that with the proliferation of camera phones and digital cameras, “everyone is a filmmaker.” Perhaps everyone is a documentarian, and it will be interesting to see what effect this will have regarding documentation of important events.

Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box

Packt Like Sardines was the final output I produced while studying abroad in Düsseldorf, Germany, during my Junior Year of undergrad. My intention was to visually represent the mass consumerism that I had been observing (in any country), as well as hone my editing skills in an attempt to marry sound and visuals. Everything was shot and editing by me, music by Radiohead.

Don't Look Down - Pitchfork TV Bumper

Don’t Look Down is a live concert series on Pitchfork TV, featuring a band playing a selection of songs on a rooftop (the working title, “Roofies,” was unfortunately not used when the project went live). This bumper also doubled as my final project in Motion Graphics II at Parsons, which I figured was a fair deal considering I was an unpaid intern at Pitchfork at the time. I shot and animated every part of this piece; the great audio was provided by Jeff Curtin and Juan Pieczanski. The animated parts were incredibly tedious, a process that involved rotoscoping in Flash, printing out all of the frames, tracing them by hand on a light table, scanning them in, and then altering them in Photoshop. Apparently I had never heard of a Wacom tablet.