The couple featured in the video were lucky enough to get mentioned on Apple's Hot News page for that week, and in the local paper (the Columbus Dispatch). Jennifer Wojcik and Kevin Holland got to Easton at 9:00 pm the night before and had to spend the evening evading the Easton security guards until 6:00 am when they were allowed to start forming the line. It seems the cops were fine with them standing there, but I guess Easton didn't agree. They sold an older G4 tower the night before the opening so Jennifer could get her first iBook. I think we can probably attribute some of her sappy behavior toward the new iBook to her complete lack of sleep the night before, but it's still totally adorable!

If you look close in the video, Kevin actually says iBook when he hits the end of the entrance line and sees the Apple employees. Then you see them make the very first purchase in the new Apple store.


LONG VERSION
(9.5 min)

Hosted on my iDisk
(for bandwidth savings).

Best Quality
(fed off my iDisk, so it's slow)



I shot all the footage on a stock Canon XL1 (well, it has an added Light Wave System Isolator for better shoulder work). You can see I had a little trouble with my white balance with some of the shots, especially the Genius Bar-they turned out VERY orange cast-and then you see the dramatic change to a better white in the next shot! I edited the whole thing on a G4 500 with Final Cut Pro 2 and a Matrox RTMac card.

I compressed it with Media Cleaner and for the High Quality version, I used the Sorenson Developer Codec (v. 2) with 2-pass Variable Bit Rate encoding for all the clips but the VP3 version. It's since been re-encoded as an mpeg4 for iPod. At some point I'll find the original tape and recapture/re-encode it at a larger size.

A few people asked how I synced up the clapping with the "Happy" song. It was easy if you just listen to it. They had the song playing on the store sound system and were clapping to it already. I got a copy of it from the store and if you listen close you can hear the live song fade out and the digital version fade in and get stronger. I just had to move the clips around to make sure they were clapping on the beat then, and since it was the same song, it worked perfectly.

Feel free to e-mail me at brian@thepeatgroup.com if you have any comments or questions.