Still from the Graphic Design department’s Begin Here video.

Have you watched the Graphic Design department’s new Begin Here video for prospective students? If not, do so now. All finished? Okay, now watch it again. Don’t worry, we’ll wait.

Notice anything unusual? Besides department chair Nik Hafermaas posing with a hawk?

No, you’re not going crazy—several elements in the video change upon a second viewing. For example, the individual students featured during the “people like him and her” portion of the narration. Watch it again and you’ll see yet another pair.

What’s going on here? This two-minute recruitment video is not a video in the traditional sense. Rather it’s an interactive work that mixes together a series of dynamically populated video segments as well as time- and location-based information—like the user’s current location, current weather for both the user and for Art Center students, and the current week and term at the College—into a cohesive narrative.

Still from the Graphic Design department’s Begin Here video.

Begin Here was created by a group of students—Ivhan Escudero (BFA 14), Eunsoo Ho, Ryan Kelly (BFA 14) and Ken Watanabe (BFA 14) from the Graphic Design department and Corey Howard from the Graduate Film department—in Motion Design 2, a course co-taught by Graphic Design faculty Petrula Vrontikis and Ko Maruyama, and features an original score and sound design by Shannon Michael Terry.

In that course, the students were tasked to create a recruitment video for Art Center’s Graphic Design department. In doing their research, they scoured through countless college recruitment videos and immediately discovered the inherent challenges in promoting a rapidly changing curriculum with straightforward videos.

The spark for this project began when Assistant Vice President of Admissions Tom Stern reached out to departments across the College as part of a larger initiative exploring how to provide “access” to prospective students—introducing them to Art Center where they live and giving them tools they need to get a portfolio ready to apply to the College—and also exploring what the future of online recruitment and online learning might look like.

“Graphic Design embraced the concept and began experimenting with us,” says Stern. “In their research, the students found recruitment videos lacked a vitality we wanted to capture.”

“The videos were so heavy in production costs and within a year they look outdated,” agrees Vrontikis. “We were really shocked and disappointed.”

Still from the Graphic Design department’s Begin Here video.

But things took a dramatic turn when the class discovered a dynamic film created by Tool of North America for the Art, Copy and Code Google initiative that gathered user data points and incorporated them into the film’s narrative.

“It seemed like the right mechanism to make a recruitment video feel fresh,” said Vrontikis. “It could be constantly updated with current student work.”

Once they decided to pursue this direction, the students took on the monumental task of designing, writing, shooting and curating Begin Here‘s timeline and video clips.

And when they were finished, they turned to Dave Bullock, lead developer at Edward Norton’s online fundraising platform CrowdRise and an Art Center faculty member in the Graphic Design and Interaction Design departments, for his programming expertise.

How does Begin Here work? While the audio timeline exists as one single file, layered on top of that are 38 different video slots that each contain between one and 40 clips, which are selected—sometimes randomly, sometimes based on specific conditions—to provide each viewer with a unique experience.

“There are infinite combinations, or pretty close to infinite,” says Bullock. “There’s very little chance that you’ll see the same video twice. And since the site launched, we’ve added a whole bunch of new footage thanks to a group of different students who have picked up the torch and are running with it.”

On a more technical level, Bullock points out that there’s no server-side code behind the video. “It’s all built in HTML, CSS and Javascript that reaches out to your browser and then to external APIs to get information like your location and the current weather.”

Which is all well and good, but it still doesn’t answer the question on everybody’s mind: What is Hafermaas doing with the hawk?

“I have no idea,” laughs Bullock. “He posted that picture on Facebook and we all said, ‘We need to use that.’”

Bullock will speak at tonight’s 3×3: The Smartest Guys in the Room on the power of media. Joining him in the College’s L.A. Times Auditorium will be UCLA Design and Media Arts professor and Digital_Humanities co-author Peter Lunenfeld and Erich Joiner, co-founder of Tool of North America. Students will present their process of making Begin Here at this term’s Motion Connect event on Thursday, November 6 at 7 p.m. in the L.A. Times Auditorium.