Crispin Porter + Bogusky:
A Crash Course in Taxi Driving
Watching the gypsy cab — a shiny black Volkswagen Rabbit with checkerboard side stripes — pull onto Fifth Avenue, you probably wouldn’t know that its driver, Steve from Colorado, had never driven in New York City. Or, in fact, ever been to New York.
But in a reality-video experiment called the Gypsy Cab Project, Steve cruised the streets of Manhattan for 14 days, offering perfect strangers free taxi rides in an effort to demonstrate the Rabbit’s ability to negotiate extreme city traffic.
Four Mac Minis ride along in the Rabbit’s wheel well to capture reality cab rides.
The brainchild of Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Miami, the Gypsy Cab project documented, via spy cameras, Steve’s efforts explaining the project and getting 100 people to trust him to take them where they wanted to go — in spite of traffic jams, fire trucks, garbage trucks, delivery trucks, bicycle messengers, oblivious pedestrians, and 12,187 other cabbies.
CP+B captured the digital video using four Mac minis stored in the Rabbit’s wheel well, then broadcast the footage — first raw and later edited — on the Gypsy Cab website.
It’s No Accident
“One of our logistical challenges with Gypsy Cab was to find a way to mount four cameras in the vehicle and record everything so we could edit it later,” says interactive producer Marcelino Alvarez.
Working with technical director Scott Prindle and system architect Adam Heathcott, Alvarez suggested the Mac minis. “Most of the company works on Macs and I knew we’d be editing on Final Cut Pro systems,” Alvarez says. “The easiest way for me to approach this was, get the footage already digitized, give it to our editors in a format they can use, and just feed everything up.
“Besides, with regular tapes,” Alvarez adds, “we would have needed four tape decks. They only have about an hour to record, so we would have spent all our time switching out tapes, labeling the tapes, digitizing the tapes and probably missing some good footage when a fare ran over an hour. With the Mac minis, we could record over 10 hours continuously.”
Rookie on View
Alvarez also set up a wireless network in the back of the Rabbit and added an amplifier to the wireless signal. “We had a MacBook Pro in the chase vehicle so we could monitor the video and control the recording on each camera using Apple Remote Desktop,” Alvarez says. “Steve also had an earpiece so we could talk to him from the chase car.”
One fare Steve picked up, a producer for a major network news show, asked, “So where are your big chase vehicles?”
Steve: “Everyone’s running everything from a laptop in the car behind us.”
“You only have one car? You don’t have four?”
“When the news producer does shows, he has four chase vehicles and microwave technology, and everything’s beamed somewhere else,” Alvarez explains. “We had everything stored in the back of the Rabbit. Those are the really cool, key moments when you can step back and look at what you’re doing and you say, ‘Wow, this is kind of ahead of the curve, and it’s working.’”
Unifying Theory
For compression and editing, Alvarez and Prindle set up seven Power Mac G5s in a New York apartment. “We decided to go with the G5s with quad processors because we wanted to compress the footage and post it to the website within 24 hours,” says Alvarez.
Two editors matched the video to real-time GPS data the Gypsy Cab collected, then compressed and uploaded the raw footage. Two others worked in Final Cut Pro to create edited versions of Steve’s Favorite Fares.
Even Prindle was impressed by the video the production team was able to compress and upload in such a short period of time. “One of the producers who worked with us on the Gypsy Cab project had also worked on ‘Taxi Cab Confessions’ for HBO,” Prindle says. “He told us that it took them more than a month of shooting before they could fill an hour time slot on the show.
Editors use a bank of Power Mac G5 computers to compress the footage and post it to the website.
“We were turning video around left and right. Here we had these Mac Minis buried down in a wheel well, underneath people’s luggage, and we could count on them being dependable and reliable throughout the process.”
