This week, my ed tech course challenged me to use Mozilla’s PopcornMaker to produce a one minute remix reflecting on the maker movement. The assignment suggested we start by playing with PopcornMaker before creating our mashup. I started with this very good tutorial. Playing with PopcornMaker wasn’t like playing with the nice new toy from the the Toy Barn. It’s more like playing with your older brother’s discarded broken thing held together by duct tape.
My completed video only plays all the way through about half the time. Notice how the lengths of video clips in my screen shot are all 3:56? For whatever reason, PopcornMaker would only import the first 3 minutes and 56 seconds of a video. I found myself thinking: why can’t this be iMovie? A product that actually works?
I started googling these problems. At the bottom of the Mozilla help forums on WebMaker tools, I noticed a challenge, “The good news is that because it’s a free and open source web project, anybody with skills and motivation can take a crack at improving the software and user experience.”
Oh yeah. This isn’t iMovie because people made it for people, for free. It might have bugs, but I didn’t have to buy a $1,400 aluminum slab of Apple product to use it. Thinking about the way big firms appropriate and commodify innovations has always interested me. How do grass-roots innovations take hold? What happens when these are appropriated by corporations and governments, commoditized, and scaled? Can the maker movement re-approprate these innovations once again, for free and beneficial use?
Inspired by thinking about PopcornMaker versus the corporate competition, I decided to apply my questions around the (re)appropriation of maker products to robots. As with software, both open-source and corporate communities propel innovation in machine learning and hardware. But with different aims and very different results.
https://jshelley.makes.org/popcorn/32yf_
References
BullDog English. (2014, March 28). English bulldog puppy rides roomba [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRGsBHu39BA
Lázaro, Edu. (2014, May 22). Automaton: the old man and the sea [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH-aJgBtuvs
MakerBot. (2013, May 8). MakerBot and Robohand | 3D Printing Mechanical Hands [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT3772yhr0o
MilitaryClips.com. (2013, July 12). Meet ATLAS! ie. The Terminator – From Petman to ATLAS DARPAs Killer Robot is almost complete! [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=959puZddZxo
Pasini, Roberto [Kalamun]. (2011). Humanature – Personal Computer [ Kalamun Rmx ] (2011) [Audio file]. Retrieved from https://soundcloud.com/kalamun/humanature-personal-computer
Quintero, Heberto. (2012, July 19). Antique singing bird cage Automaton [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3OaTKVOKc0
Rameses B. (Accessed 2015, May 20). Pride (happy theme) [Audio file]. Retrieved from https://soundcloud.com/ramesesb/pride-happy-theme
Roy, Niklas. (2012, November 25). Roboter Reiniger – Handy little household robot sweeps Brasília
[Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8539DxdmwI
TheSingingNerd. (2014, August 21). Coke Zero Robot [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuuKZ99qGFU
Vought, Jeremy [DevilDog]. (2012, October 11). Robot marines??? Coming to a corps near you… [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri61JqOGA0k
Hi Joe, I had the same problem with Popcorn Maker and the videos not loading right. My screen looked exactly like yours. And my video also plays a little choppy the first time through but it seems to play much better if I replay it a second/third time. I didn’t spend much time trying to figure out why the videos loaded wrong since they played when I actually put them in the editor, but that may be the reason why the video doesn’t always play smoothly. You are certainly right about it being a free product! Anyway, just wanted to let you know that you weren’t the only one that had that problem.