In my last post I asked for nominations for best video. All of the submissions, save four, were promotional corporate videos for particular systems. These tended to portray the advantages of a PRT system as the advantages of their own proprietary solution. One of those four, posted in a comment by alert reader cmfseattle, was a rudimentary mash-up of three promotional clips. It “got me to thinkin’…”
The problem as I see it is that the case for PRT is a multifaceted one, and not well suited to sound-bite evangelism. Sure, there’s “On Demand”, “Point-to-Point”, and “No sharing, No waiting,” but that’s all true of everyone’s cars as well. The advantages of PRT, as shown in the various promotion videos, often emphasize a comparison to other forms of mass transit. The ordinary audience doesn’t care which form of mass transit is best. Many never ride it anyway. The only, (quite predictable) result of this type of sales pitch is to get the light rail companies up in arms. Because the videos try to be upbeat and optimistic, the countless negative consequences of failure to act must be minimized. (That will be a trick for any PRT video)
We need an audio/visual approach to PRT advocacy very, very badly. When someone wants to explain PRT to a friend they should be able to say, “Look up “PRT” on YouTube,” and that person would get the whole message in a few minutes and walk away a believer. I wish we could get a Michael Moore or Al Gore to do a real documentary, but that is actually “Moore” than we need. (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself…) Heck, we don’t even have a generic PowerPoint presentation. A well constructed, 5-10 minute narrated mash-up of pictures and clips could do more to advance PRT than anything else I can think of. A picture is worth a thousand words and often a video is worth a thousand pictures. Every group on the planet has promotional videos except us. And it’s really not that hard.
It all starts with a great “storyboard.” The narrative is generally written below empty boxes, which can then be filled in with sketches or descriptions of what the viewer might see during those words. This is often done on a white board, because there is a whole lot of erasing and brainstorming involved. It does, however, make creating a coherent presentation much easier by preventing most effort from ending up “on the cutting-room floor…” (For you youngsters, that’s from when film was cut and spliced by hand.) Once a good storyboard is created, the “boxes” can be “filled” with specific images and video clips, presumably from the web, and the rest is relatively easy and cheap video editing. Speaking of editing, one thing I thought was a stumbling block is that the Flash file format used on YouTube. Yesterday, however, I downloaded a free program called “Any Video Converter” which makes downloading YouTube content a breeze and can convert files to any file format you can think of. This is a good thing for PC users because Windows Movie Maker (comes with Windows) seems (for me at any rate) to prefer WMV files over AVIs. (We will take a moment now to allow Mac users to smirk……. Thank you.)
Anyway, perhaps this site might be a useful vehicle for such a project to be done collaboratively. I do have, after all, the infrastructure in place. Just a thought.
Oh yeah, about that tilt wheel design…
I guess I’ll explain it later. Happy 2010, folks.
