Matthew Weathers: Digital World Meets Reality

Happy Weathers is a professor here by Ola. Who's kind of our YouTube celebrity? He's, I think, did you get to 10 million? On Monday. So he now, his channel on YouTube is just broken 10 million hits. He made these amazing videos. I'm going to ask him to share a couple with us this morning as we kind of close here. And then maybe you also at some point them want to talk about what your session is going to be about. Okay. So I'm turning it over to Matthew. We've walked him Matthew. I'll show you a little bit of some of the videos I've done for a class. I teach his class on campus and I have fun playing tricks on them sometimes. And I thought it'd be fun to sort of explain my thinking behind what I do for these little trick videos. They're just for fun, but they come out of my wondering about how the screen and real life interact with each other. And so that's kind of the impetus behind these things. And I suppose since I'm talking about, since I'm talking about the screen and how interact with real life, I should start off with the video, the sort of introduces the topic here. Let's see. We have to read everyone about who's finalistic. Actually it's morning. Sorry about that. It meant to say morning there. Wait. What did you say? Oh, it's morning. It's not morning. Sorry, it didn't. Yeah, it's good. Well, why don't you just start over. That's okay. Go for it. Okay. So good morning, everyone. Welcome to my overview. I'll go into those of you from out of town. Welcome to Senator California. I hope you're enjoying yourself so far. Sorry. It's been a little bit overcast lately. Actually it's been sunny recently. So, you know what? This is just not going to work. When you have video, it just doesn't work very well. So let's get rid of that. Okay. So as you can see, the problem with video is that it's not reactive. It can't. It's a one-way conversation. You can't be listening. You can't just go to video and stop me any time. Well, yeah, that's kind of how videos work. You could at least ask nicely. Fine. Will you please leave so I can take over? Fine. Okay. All right. So, but obviously, video, the screen, in truths, in our lives sometimes. And so, oh, sure, but the, oh, it's not much. Does somebody have the same ringtone as me? So, I'm not sure if we're that close. Oh, all right. And then you're free. All right. All right. So, thanks. That's just for fun to demonstrate what I'm talking about how the screen can interact with real life. And also talk about how, what is the, what is the, we're seeing increasing time where people spend time in front of the screen both on mobile devices and on TVs and all different places. And so, kind of, that, those are the questions I was thinking about when I made some of these joke videos. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of lead you through or play some clips of these and sort of talk about what they are. I don't know. This is back in 2009. I used to teach in a classroom where the screen was a little bit lower and there's this big desk right in front. And I'd been teaching there for several semesters. And I would do things like show a PowerPoint's quite a bit because I teach just math class that I talk about the history of math and I show, you know, different interesting videos sometimes. And sometimes I actually put, fill myself doing math problems and make that available for my students. But over the years, I sort of thought of the idea like, what, what would it be like to interact with it more? Because I was already interacting with the screen. So, there's the students. Here's me teaching. Here's the screen. And so, I made, made this that sort of played with that idea, so. So obviously I'm hiding behind the screen. I'm hiding behind the screen there. All right. So, so that was the first thing I did and I posted that on YouTube and a bunch of people saw it and they liked it. And so I thought, oh, I should do this again. Again, some, every semester. Well, I didn't think that everybody just sort of started assuming you should do something this semester. So, that is kind of going from the screen into the real world. And so, then I thought, oh, what other things could I do? So, here's another, oh, you know what, this is the same one again, a few more seconds of the same one. So, I thought, oh, what about going the opposite direction? Yeah, okay. And so then this next one is another semester. I did something similar. All right. So, this one I thought, oh, what about going the opposite direction? So, I think that's what I'm having. Instead of the video, the video affecting real life, you know, the race, the coming out of the screen. What, what if we do the opposite direction? Kind of you'll soon be. Because it had been giving me trouble, so I'm like, forget, this is when Windows 7 was brand new. If that lets go back to XP. So, that was, you know, kind of going the opposite direction taking stuff from the video screen into the real life. And then, okay. So then I thought, what one of the things that you see, I mean, even as I walk a period you see that what the problem with me walking in front of the screen. Recording this is because there's content on the screen, but there's also me here, and then there's the light on my face, and there's a shadow and stuff like that. So I thought I'd play with that idea some. Alright, well, they went. Like I was saying, this type of three dimensional interaction in flat land surprises surprises this where in ways. I don't know what's going on there. Well, hey, I'll do that anyway. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait hey, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, oh so so, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Oh, hey, hey hey hey, hey hey, hey hey, hey. So that was an April Fool's joke. Maybe a year and a half ago. And that was our president, Dr. Barry Corey, who agreed to do a cameo. I had to camp out upstairs outside of his office and the people who were scheduling him said, all right, he has about three minutes because he's leaving from, he has to get, he's leaving right at five and it was like two, the day before maybe two days before April Fool's. And I wanted to do this. This was the last day of class, happened to be April Fool's, but it also happened to be the last day of class right before everybody's leaving for Spring Break. Anyway. So yeah, I posted that. And then AOL.com of all places ended up featuring it on their front page. So I got about two million hits in two days. Shortly after April Fool's from that video. So that was kind of fun. Let me, I don't remember. Okay, so then I moved to this classroom. And I like the idea of breaking expectations because normally when you're looking at a screen like this, you're thinking we're looking, what it's communicating is that you're looking at a computer screen and that this is the browser and that that's a video. And then that's all those things should stay within those confines. And so I couldn't really hide behind the screen very well. I mean, obviously, well, we're in this room right now, right? If I, if I hid back here, you could sort of see me still, right? So I tried to do something different. And we were talking about, I was doing something on complex numbers. So here's a few clips from that time. You can be nervous, and there, and you just go hide somewhere. Wait, are you talking to me? Yes, you. Just get out of the way somewhere, because I don't want to see, but it, they're going to be my high two of this. So like this? Okay, good. Same thing. Okay. As I was saying, complex numbers have an imaginary part in her, hey, I see you there. No, over there on the whiteboard. If you take it real, I'm holding a laser pointer. Then you edit with a complex number. So the laser pointer is coming over here. The complex number is if you take a imaginary number like I, I, hey, what's wrong with the connection? That last thing I said was really important. Let me have a really good answer. Let's see it. So if you take I times I swear, you end up with negative one. So that's true for any of the imaginary numbers, because complex numbers are made up. Hey, what is this thing? I don't know what this is, but I don't know why this keeps happening. I'm just going to get rid of this. And this will happen again. Let me, let me move this over all the way to the, there we go. Now, well, you know what? Wait a second here. Did you start me in an internet explorer? What were you thinking? You know what? I got to start a better browser here. Let's see here. Okay. Oh, much better. Hey, hey, excuse me. Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to be distracted. Sorry about that. Actually, you know, let me just exit out of this and then we can't answer. Good idea. Oh, and then I posted this on April Fool's 2 and I ended the video with this. I said, oh, if you want to see how YouTube, so the idea is that YouTube videos interacting with outside of the confines of the browser. And so I said, if you want to see interacting with real life right now, try this. Hold down control and type W. Does anybody know what happens if you do that? Yeah, it closes the browser, right? So there's a YouTube video telling you to do something and then it did something. And then I got, apparently hundreds of people did that from the comments. Oh, I got me to, you know. So I was a, secretly gratified, quite not secretly. I was quite gratified that they closed their browsers. But then of course they couldn't click and share it. So I don't know. Maybe it's a, then let's say go back. Anyway, so the last one I'll show you is something I did last Thanksgiving. And I'm not going to show you the actual video. I'm going to show you it showed up on a media outlet. And so they cut, they did some clips. Most of these are about three or four minutes long. I didn't want to play the whole one for you right here. But you can go look on my YouTube channel if you want to see all of them. And there's actually a couple of skip because some of them are not as good. My favorite one I think is the shadow one. I don't know why. It's just, I like those ideas where I'm grabbing something and moving it. So anyway, in this one I thought, I wonder would be like to toss something into the screen and also to grab things out of the screen. And so I did something for Thanksgiving. But, and then this is my most proud moment. Not only did it show up on YouTube, but it showed up on a Japanese TV show. Which is awesome. This is kind of, this is my goal life to make it on Japanese. So it's all in Japanese. Oh, so listen for a couple words. Let's see, they call me San Se, which is awesome. That just means teacher. And they say California and screen. So you can listen for those Japanese words. It was so cute, written in the screen. This is called a volunteer. and I want to learn the unavoidable deeds of the same thing in my past, and if you like it, the video will be配led by you. Aren't you thinking that you got that you should go in the interview without any Qiansou? They interviewed me over Skype also. A half an hour interview and then they kept just like three words. In raise the standards of the classroom, you can provide a better educational experience for the students by showing the views. Rather than just simply using the blackboard. I'm going to talk about living in a visually oriented culture. And I'm going to try and convince you that we do live in a visually oriented culture, which nobody needs convincing up. And also the cultural implications of that. And I'm hoping to inspire you to go get involved and go do something visual. It's not that hard. I'm going to spend about half the time talking about the culture and ideas and then about half the time giving you some ideas of the tools that are out there. Yes, you had a question. Do you primarily use campasians? No, I did use campasia for what you just saw at the very beginning. But the other things take quite a bit of work like the shadow thing. You have to do rotoscoping and you have to do some different masking and where I reach outside that kind of stuff. But I can't... No, I'll be referencing the tools half an hour isn't much time. But the other thing is that it's beyond my ability a little bit. Fortunately, we have a whole building full of film students here at Biola. And so a couple of film students have helped me with that. It actually is a very end of our session. If there's maybe 10 minutes, if some of you want to come along or we're going to go over on a field trip and go take a look at Biola's production center for about 10 minutes at the end. And I know there's going to be this question. So ask you, now, what exactly... Where exactly is that YouTube channel? YouTube.com slash? slash MDweathers. I know you guys are going to want to go over here. I've encouraged you too. In fact, well, let's thank Matthew for a certain list of stuff. Biola University offers a variety of biblically-centered degree programs, ranging from business to ministry to the arts and sciences. Visit Biola.edu to find out how Biola could make a difference in your life.