Welcome to the new home of Popcorn! We’re extremely excited to bring not only a fresh face to the project, but also the release of new software, programs and partnerships.

Popcorn.js

Firstly, the Popcorn.js library has reached the important 1.0 milestone. This represents an extraordinary amount of dedication from the Popcorn developer community. David Humphrey and the developers at Seneca’s Centre for Development of Open Technology deserve huge kudos, as well as Rick Waldron and his colleagues at Bocoup. We’ve spent a year and a half iterating, testing and improving Popcorn. With the release of 1.0, our API is frozen and we invite everyone – developers, filmmakers and makers of all stripes to create work with this stable and well tested library.

If you visit the Popcorn.js section of this site, you’ll also find a build tool where you can create a customized version of the library. By selecting only the plugins + players you need, you’ll be able to ship a lightweight version of popcorn on any site you develop. Tip of the hat to Lloyd Hillial at Mozilla Labs for creating the foundation for this tool, and Christopher DeCairos for taking it across the finish line.

We’ve expanded and revamped our documentation, which we have decided to keep at the popcornjs.org site. While Mozilla is the steward of Popcorn.js, we recognize (and are thankful) that it is a community project that extends beyond our walls, and will therefore continue to maintain the core library there.

Popcorn Maker

In the spirit of “release early, release often” that served us well with Popcorn.js, we also present the alpha version of Popcorn Maker, our authoring tool for popcorn pages. While we know we have much to do before the app is ready for broad adoption, we’re proud of the potential it offers and invite interested parties to develop not only the core of this app, but also a template ecosystem. Development on Popcorn Maker was lead by Bobby Richter, with contributions from Scott Downe, Christopher DeCairos, Mohammed Buttu and David Seifreid. Brian Chirls created an excellent group of templates that showcase how the app can be used by creators.

Learn Popcorn

Looking back at the events we held in 2011, we realized that each had a strong focus on learning. Whether it was Buttercamp, a frenzied hack day for developers in New York, our work with youth media makers at the Bay Area Video Coalition, or the Living Docs partnership with ITVS, each represent an opportunity to teach “web making” skills. There are new genres and opportunities emerging in browser-based film-making, journalism and storytelling. With these opportunities are new skills and approaches that need transferring. For this reason, we’re formalizing our learning programs under the “Learn Popcorn” umbrella.

With these new changes to Popcorn, we’re also retiring the Web Made Movies program and website. It has been a successful and fruitful framing of our innovation efforts in filmmaking, but we felt that it was time to reduce brand confusion. We’ve imported all of the blog posts from that site here – they’re a great archive of the thinking that led us up to this point.

A final thanks goes to Gopal Raju at Convax Solutions, the talented designer who built this site.