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MyBlogLog's Ian Kennedy talked to Memcached developers who gathered last week to collaborate on code at an all-night hackfest. Memcached is "a general-purpose distributed memory caching system...distributed under a permissive free software licence."

Here's what we saw. From Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale:

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Video by Ricky Montalvo, Yahoo! Developer Network

When Chad Dickerson asked me to create a video for Pipes, I assumed we'd be doing a tech talk or an Experts @ Work episode with Jeremy Zawodny as host. Instead, Chad wanted to involve the entire Pipes team rather than the product itself. It was a chance to go “behind-the-scenes.”

I sat down with Jonathan Trevor who leads the Pipes team. I was looking for ideas. "Well, I think it would be cool to somehow incorporate these funky twisted pipes in the parking structure here at the Yahoo! campus," Jonathan suggested, "they remind me of the Internet." Right there, I knew I had my intro. We scheduled a day to shoot.

Since I wanted the video to have a raw look and feel, I decided not to scout these pipes until the day we shot. This breaks one of the most important rules a digital filmmaker should follow: Location scouting. But I liked the challenge -- it forced me to achieve a creative shot that doesn't look overly produced. The result was an informal opening, with Jonathan chatting about the pipes that were misaligned when the Yahoo! garage was built.

Next, I wanted the video to have a feel to it, a tonality that would be visually rich while making the topic itself creatively interesting. Since we weren't going to dive into the technical aspects of Pipes, I wanted the video to appeal to a broader audience. I focused on the people behind Pipes. To help set the mood, I selected music by Scott Hansen from Tycho Music.

I still had to to interview the rest of the team. This posed another challenge: Where do I shoot so it doesn't look too corporate? In a landscape of uniform cubes and computers, I tried to frame each of the team members differently and in different locations. I opted for a wide screen format so that I could focus on the individuals as they spoke, but still give a glimpse of their work surroundings.

I describe this as a "pocket documentary" -- entertaining short-form programming in a documentary-style format, with creative cutting and pacing.

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