The September 11th attack
Online Sept. 11 video tributes catching on
By Jefferson Graham
USA Today
The horror and tears of Sept. 11 have given birth to a new Internet art form: homemade video tributes to the American spirit.
Techies from Texas to New Jersey have produced short videos for the Net, mixing photographs and music into uplifting productions. They're drawing such crowds that servers are shutting down from the unexpected traffic.
Where to watch
Dozens of tribute videos have been posted online. For a list, check these sites:
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wolrd trade tribute.com
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ifilm
"My site went down for five hours," said Rob Amphausen, 23, a Web site designer in Hoboken, N.J. After his site "was viewed 67,000 times in a matter of days," he said, his provider shut it down. He pleaded for a reprieve, and the company relented, but now he's asking for donations to pay the extra costs.
Amphausen's tribute is called "America Triumphant." It, like many other tributes, was produced using Macromedia's Flash software, which allows users to easily string together pictures, music and text in a presentation viewable over the Web — even at dialup speeds.
Said Amphausen: "I figured, I'm a computer dork, I'll get my feelings down digitally and put everything online."
Jason Burgess, 27, one of the founders of Dallas-area graphic arts firm Yellow7 Design, had a similar reaction. He created a tribute and e-mailed it to a few clients, set to the music of John Lennon's "Imagine."
"The next thing we knew, it had been forwarded to so many people that we decided to create a Web site for tributes."
Many others have created tributes as well. Mark West's "September Eleven" uses a collection of news footage captured in his VCR and recut on his computer with Adobe Premiere software. It's set to music from the film "Braveheart."
