Earlier this year Mozilla launched one of its most exciting outreach campaigns to date, Firefox Flicks. Beginning as a contest, Firefox Flicks encouraged hundreds of non-developer Firefox fans to create Firefox commercials. By the end of the project over 280 flicks had received hits numbering in the millions, marking an unmistakable victory for both Mozilla and the online video community.
Today, however, we are ready to mark the next victory for Firefox Flicks! This summer John Carey and I, Matt Shichtman, not only completed successful internships as documentary filmmakers for Mozilla, but also left a 45,000 sq. foot crop circle in our wake. Through our video blogging, we brought people a little bit closer to the heart of Mozilla, and we reached out to the community and built a team that was able to create something very special!
Initially, we had no idea how we would pull off something of so grand a scale as a crop circle. We considered bringing in a company from the UK to make the crop circle (What are we doing) but the costs were prohibitive and we couldn’t see going down that path. We began to lose momentum. Time passed, and with only a few weeks left in our internships, John and I began to think that the idea that everyone had fallen in love with was not going to come to fruition.
Then something wonderful happened. John and I were invited to OSCON, Tim O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention! (Mozilla Hits OSCON!) to present and film a screening of the Firefox Flicks top videos. 
There we met Beth Gordon and some of the folks from Oregon State’s Open Source Labs. Beth was immediately geeked about the crop circle and breathed life back into our foundering project. Within a matter of days, the OSU gang had created wiki pages, a list-serv, and had begun to work out the logistics. Beth contacted Alex Polvi who, with help from his parents, was able to locate a suitable field, and, before we knew it, the ball was rolling!
On Aug. 11th, work officially began on the Firefox crop circle. The morning was spent doing a practice run in a nearby field. By noon, we had figured out our strategy and began work on the main attraction! Everyone worked through the night and the crop circle was completed the following morning. What a blast! We took a ton of aerial footage via airplane (thanks to David “Crash” Mandrell) and helicopter.
My internship wrapped up that weekend but John headed back to the Mozilla office for his final week and started editing all the footage together so we could share it with the world.
Now, without further adieu:
Behind the Scenes: The Firefox crop circle!
(Click to play the video. 39 MB.)
(Update: a Theora version is available here.)
For a complete history of the Firefox crop circle please see our earlier podcasts:
What are we doing
Mozilla Hits OSCON!
Circle Making Part 1
Circle Making Part 2
Circle Making Part 3
Circle Making Part 4
And don’t forget OSU’s Linux User Group’s page for a the text and photo version!
Crazy Awesome!
There’s not a better way to sum this up ;) Man Firefox Fans rock!
It’s just fantastic!
I am disappoined not to read about such an event at MozillaZine. Special thanks for the theora version (not like I couldn’t play .mov files on linux) ;)
I’m glad you went ahead with it, and did it yourselves with the help of new-found friends–true open source spirit!
What can I say? Firefox fans are out of this world!
Nice Crop Circle! Greaat Job! The Firefox Community is Truely Awesome!
I’m going to keep plenty of water glasses scattered around my room just in case.
Awesome stuff right there!
Your all mad – and I love it!
It’s Just A Browser You Stupid Fanboys
That is so cool! Great work!!
Go Firefox!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!…
Excellent idea for a great browser…
Was the video corrupted for anyone else towards the end (about 5:20mins)?
I just love this! What a dedication to a very cool cause!!!
The Firefox crop circle!
The Firefox crop circle! The crop circle has been in mind for ages as something impossible for a human being to do. Only aliens are capable of doing it. Good to know what really happens behind the scenes. Long life Firefox
Only 4 words to say: Absolutly awesome and Incredible.
Cheers!
How about some high rez pictures..
This is awsome guys! Way rad. Funny, I watched crop circle programming on discovery all day yesterday and log on today to see my favorite browser going at it!
Firefox rocks the mic!
whoa, that’s awesome. i say this should go on google earth
You posers! We created the crop circle! True aliens know your feeble human attempts to lay claim to our advanced technology will fail. We laugh at your “Lowes two by fours” and primitive mechanical technologies! And 19 hours? Puh-lease! We can fabricate a REAL crop circle on your planet in 3.6 nanoseconds with our zero-point hyperspace energy beam fired from orbit — orbit of our home world on Beeblebrox Zed! Bwwahahahaha!
Yes, but we still use Firefox. Nice browser. Keep up the good work.
Too cool! Being a native of the Portland area, this is great. It was so fun to watch the video and see how everyone worked together; and there were a lot of smiling faces.
Very cool project! I took one of your aerial photos of the crop circle and have overlayed it in Google Earth so anyone can see it in Google Earth. You can go here to download it:
http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/08/firefox_crop_ci.html
Note: I didn’t see the coordinates for the field you used, but I found a field closest one to the town mentioned in the news article I saw.
That proves it. FireFox is alien technology!!
It is sad that people have nothing better to do with their lives than this, and to glorify the worst performing browser ever made is just sickening.
Pathetic victims of corporate/capitalist brainwashing.
And for the record, I do not use IE either, it equally sucks as does all micro$oft garbage.
Any plans to post Theora versions of the earlier videocasts in the series?
Gerv
Interesting that when I try to watch the videos, it crashes Firefox.
just think a secong….
and, just have a glance outside your private little US garden.
There are some people who are not young, christian, rich, free, american, european, christian, over equiped, well educated ……………………………
So, please, offer the wasted crop (or equiv.) to starving ones
Many thanks
Firefox is great. I got rid of Internet Explorer and I never got spamed since.
Firefox Crop Circle? :) And now we have to look for this image http://www.milliondollarhosting.net/upload/30735_footer.jpg in Nostradamus’s prophesies? :)
@Ken
Are you using Beta1 ofer Firefox 2? It also often crashes here. So let’s wait for Beta2 comming soon.
WOW!
I LICK THE FOX… is so nasty an..errr…
I like Firefox more than IE… even if some videos (like WMV or some MPG) doesn’t seem to work on firefox.
Firefox either seem to use in a bad way my old W98 (ok ok time to change, but actually it does his job) who crashes after 1 or 2 days… like my SWP file gets bigger and bigger, or firefox uses too much CPU power… well, but I DO PREFER IT to that microsoft’s crap…
Thank You!!
tanks firefox teşekkürler
I see……….. T shirts , Mouse mats, mugs and a National enquirer story about ‘Firefox logo on the Moon’ absolutely brill as us Brits say Five stars peeps.
Great work! That was totally awesome. A great example of how the positive enrgy of a community comming together can create innovative, compelling, and in this case entertaining work. I am a huge fan of Firefox. I am happy to see I belong to a great group of fans as well.
That is so awesome!
This definitely is just crazy awesome!
Did you guys get permission before you wrecked a nicely-sized chunk of some farmer’s crop?