Versatile Sesame Vault Drives DavidLynch.com's Interview Project

Beginning today, you can visit DavidLynch.com for what looks to be an unusual and thoroughly satisfying online video experience. Over the course of the year, Interview Project will show the results of a beautifully shot voyage to interview Americans from many different backgrounds.

The series was conceived and created by Austin Lynch (David Lynch's son) and his friend Jason S.

"Interview Project is a 70-day, 20,000 mile road trip across and back the United States," says Jason. "During the trip we found 121 people to interview about their lives."

A small operation, Austin and Jason handled the directing, filming, editing, and sound mixing for each episode. David Lynch was involved in shaping the initial concept, and will introduce each episode. The episodes will last from three to five minutes.

Getting Online
After looking around for an encoder and host, Austin and Jason decided to go with SesameVault, a platform created by Open Box Technologies. SesameVault is an online video platform that lets creators upload data in nearly any format, and then have it encoded into 11 different formats so it can be viewed on a wide variety of devices and with a range of connection speeds.

Open Box was first contacted by Austin and Jason in January, says Cameron Brain, the company's CEO. The co-creators were wrapping up post-production and were ready to get started with their website. The filmmakers wanted a platform that could preserve the quality of their recordings and integrate easily with their web presence.

Interview Project was filmed in raw HDV, with DVCPRO50 and a 1080p resolution. SesameVault has experience working with the codec.

"We decided to use SesameVault because they offered us the chance to upload videos in any format that we needed to, specifically raw HDV, without having to pre-encode the content," says Jason. "Also, SesameVault automatically encoded our files into a number of high-quality web formats, as well as allowing the smooth integration of our content with the SesameVault player."

Austin and Jason also needed a cost-effective solution that could handle a high amount of traffic. The trailer went up two weeks ago, says Brain, and had over 30,000 views in the first eight hours.

Easy Integration
Open Box was formed by Brain and some of his Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute classmates in 2005, when they were still enrolled at the school. While Cameron could see the internet video wave coming, the company was originally meant to serve the other end, letting any connected device show video. When the team realized that high-quality video content wasn't coming as soon as they had thought, they put their efforts into their publishing platform. SesameVault launched in 2007.

The company has been working mostly under the radar until earlier this year, with its 2.0 release on April 20th. The Open Box team rebuilt the entire front-end in HTML and JavaScript on the client side. The changes were made using the company's own API, making it easier for clients to integrate SesameVault into their existing workflows.

SesameVault is known for its versatility. Clients can use any third-party Flash player that they want, or use the company's universal player. There are no file size limits when uploading content, and the encoded video can be viewed with just about any device.

That versatility helped Interview Project's web presence come together smoothly in only a few months.

"For us, this is one of the more involved web-only documentary series," says Brain. "These guys are really going at the bull's-eye of original web series."

Austin and Jason appreciate SesameVault's hassle-free design. "The ease of uploading to SesameVault has made for one less thing that Austin and I have to worry about," says Jason. It's left them free to concentrate on the interviews themselves, and what they hope people take away from them.

"We hope that people are able to see these interviews and relate to some aspect of the person's personality or story and realize that even though we are all different, we are all also very similar," says Jason.