for thousands of miles

using HTML5 to build film credits

Getting some really great comments and feedback from this post about film credits and HTML5, wanted to share the post here since it’s where the idea stemmed from. 

via mikeambs:

This is not a how-to post, but it is an idea that I hope someone else with the know-how runs with.

I posted a question on the FToM production blog the other day that was a question on the relevance of credits after a film, a conversation first started by Kelly Sutton, I think what I personally want to see most is not a doing away all-together with post-roll credits, but making them something useful. 

When I’m curious about an actor or actresses name, or the cinematographer of a film, I never dig out the DVD, or more accurately these days - because I don’t watch many DVDs - I never dig up the film on Netflix streaming and skip through to the credits, I use Google, or IMDb. 

Why? Well, not only do the credits after a film tell me a name and only a name - but the internet makes it easy to see other people’s work, photographs, film excerpts, biographies, etc. I can dig into a person’s involvement with a film as deep or as quickly as I feel like. And that is what I want to see happen with the credits after a film. 

Again, I am not saying that I know how to do this, but as I understand HTML5, I do believe it is more than capable of being the searchable / interactive / linkable / sharable / expandable tool that feels missing from a film.

With HTML5, an entire film can be placed anywhere with a simple < video > tag, but what if the video itself had no credits at all contained in it? So that after the < video > ended, a scrolling credits built entirely with HTML5 began? If the transition between < video > and HTML5 credits was seamless, the person watching would never really know the split had taken place, but they would be able to search through for a name, a song, a crew position, etc.

Any ideas? How could we make this happen?