Unlogo is a web service, FFMPEG plugin, and AfterEffects plugin that eliminates logos and other corporate signage from videos. On a practical level, it takes back your personal media from the corporations and advertisers. On a technical level, it is a really cool combination of some brand new OpenCV and FFMPEG functionality. On a poetic level, it is a tool for focusing on what is important in the record of your life rather than the ubiquitous messages that advertisers want you to focus on.
In short, Unlogo gives people the opportunity to opt out of having corporate messages permanently imprinted into the photographic record of their lives.
It's simple: you upload a video, and after your video is processed, you get an email with a link to the unlogofied version (example: http://vimeo.com/14531292). You can choose to have the logos simply blocked out with a solid color or replaced with other images, such as the disembodied head of the CEO of the company. This scheme is a bit ridiculous (which is kind of my style), but I like it because it literalizes the intrusion into the record of your life that these logos represent.
What is the money for?
The majority of the money will allow me to work on Unlogo for another 2 months. These is enough time to get the filter out of training mode and into active recognition mode.
Some will go towards paying off some of the debt from the money that I have already spent on programming help and server costs.
Some of the money (probably $1k-$1.5k) will be used to pay the consultants and additional programmers who have been helping to get the filter finished and running smoothly.
Some of the money ($300-$400) will go to the hoisting bills. The CPU power to run this filter publicly isn't cheap! I have 1 Amazon EC2 server where the filtering/encoding is done, another S3 bucket where the videos are stored, and a 3rd server to host the front-end.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/816924031/unlogo-the-corporate-media-filter-0
No comments:
Post a Comment