All I can say is wow. Getting into Flash Lite seems to have been a good PR move for me.

Adobe recently launched Stories, a video series letting several developers and designers tell the story of one of their projects. I was thrilled to be included in the project and was more than a bit amazed when I heard who else is in the stories.

This has my work being shown on the front pages of Adobe and Macromedia, the Engage with Flash microsite, and now Stories.

My story is about Flash Lite development and building my NYC Traffic Cam viewer. The whole experience of participating in the video was a blast. The shot of me in front of the traffic signs is at a building that houses all of San Francisco’s (just mentally pretend it is NYC!) street and traffic signs. That was just a fun warehouse to poke around in. After the many takes there where the director was pretty much begging me to demonstrate more emotion (no future in acting for me–I guess I will stick to letting flash be expressive instead), we headed on to the taxi cab.

For the rest of the evening we drove around the city continuing the interview. When I saw “we,” I mean the director, sound person, and driver/video coordinator. Oh yeah, and the three HD cameras and lights mounted in the car. We were a little crowded in there, but we spent a lot of the time just trying not to crack up as every time I got a good take the check engine light would start making noise.

After a while the crew changed the cameras and mounted one on the outside of the car. That was when the real fun began. Try driving around a city on a Friday night with people, lights and cameras packed into a taxicab plus a rig on the outside. You will get some attention. Then gaze out the window as “the world passes by,” but in reality people are making all sorts of faces at you.

All in all, I think it was about 10 hours of filming, and lots of patience on the part of the crew. I’m sure they all had better things to be doing that night.

A few weeks later, I went to visit Scott, one of my friends up in Yahoo!’s San Francisco office. We went to lunch at a nearby soup place only to discover that there was a video shoot going on there of a bike messenger driving around. I thought I recognized the cameraman, but didn’t think any more of it. Now with the Engage with Flash project, I realized that the second segment with the bike messenger, was actually that video shoot! If you click “learn how” on the bike messenger segment, there it is again… my NYC Traffic Cam viewer and a different video taken about a year ago.