Valentine's Day 2014 (US)

With a culture that values creativity and technology, Google is used to decorating our homepage for national holidays and historical figures.  When Ira Glass, of This American Life, slammed his hand on the conference table and smiled, “Why can’t we feature a random person?” the doodlers and I thought he was crazy.  I believe we laughed and moved the conversation on quickly-- none of us thought the logo space that celebrates people like Harriet Tubman could also feature a random person.  Ira and This American Life, however, were onto something.  

Specializing in extracting extraordinary stories from regular people for his public radio show, Ira proposed a doodle that features stories of love for Valentine’s day.  It isn’t “a random person,” it is a collection of unique people, all of whom have their own experiences with love-- whether fleeting or devoted, silly or life-changing.

We invite Ira himself to write about his experiences collaborating with the doodle team on this celebration of average people with beautiful stories about love.

Posted by Jennifer Hom, doodler

My favorite moment working with the Google team on these Valentine’s Day stories came during an early conference call. We were talking about how we needed music to put under the voices. Should we commission original pieces for this or just license music that’s out there already?

Of course, to license music, you need to estimate how many people will hear it. The more people, the more you pay.

“How many people will come to the Google homepage that day?” I asked.

“That would be a zillion,” someone said. “That’s the number we like to use.”

They were joking about how many zeroes are in that figure but you get the point. Licensing wasn’t an option.

Later I was talking with the composer we found, Roger Neill, about the assignment. Roger does scores for movies and tv shows, including one of my favorite film scores, for the movie Beginners. Sometimes we use this insanely great piano piece from that soundtrack on our radio show.

Anyway, Roger and I were talking about how we’d better do a good job on this, because more people would see these little love stories than anything we’d ever do in our regular work lives. Yes, radio and TV and movies get audiences in the millions. This was bigger.

I’ve been a fan of Google Doodles for a while (though I only recently learned they had a name and that their name is Google Doodles). I liked that they seemed able to do anything on their homepage, a crossword puzzle, a Dr Who video game, a tribute to Saul Bass, a Les Paul guitar and a fully functioning Moog Synthesizer (with its own four-track tape recorder). This Doodle is their first foray into documentary storytelling and I hope they do more stuff like it. I hope they reach out to Wes Anderson and Laurie Anderson and Anderson Cooper and artists whose names are not Anderson as future collaborators.

We made seven mini-love stories for the Google team but because there are only six letters in Google, one had to be cut. It’s pretty great though, a little fable about love, and it’s here: 

https://www.google.com/logos/2014/vdaystories/love_test.ogg
https://www.google.com/logos/2014/vdaystories/love_test.mp3


Three of the love stories have appeared on our radio show, in much longer forms, Puppy Love was part of a much bigger story about middle school dances, in an episode about Middle School, Crush is the opening of this episode, and Kiss is here. That’s comedian Mike Birbiglia doing the interview in Blind Date, part of a story he’s putting together for an upcoming episode. The last two interviews were done by Miki Meek, one of our producers here at the radio show, who was my partner in making the audio for these Six love stories.

Miki and I didn’t see any of the animations till this week and we both think the animators did a spectacular job. Before they began, the only general guideline we all thought would be smart was that the artists shouldn’t just illustrate what the people were saying. The images wouldn’t add enough to the experience if they were literally just showing what the interviewers were describing. (This is something cartoonist Chris Ware was concerned with when he made animated cartoons of This American Life stories for us, years ago.) I love what the Doodle staff came up with. The non-literalness is what makes them great. Some of the animations are like comic riffs on what’s being said. The people appear as dogs or hearts. And when the stories get sad, they nail that too.

One weird thing about creating audio for the Internet is that making it sound good coming out of a laptop’s or desktop’s speakers is an art in and of itself – and very different than mixing for car radio or podcast. Honestly we had no idea how to do it, so I was grateful for Jeff Seelye from Dig It Audio to take that over.

If you’re reading this on the Google blog and you’ve never heard of our radio show, we’re on every week, and we do all kinds of stories. Big investigative stories, funny little personal stories. We sent three reporters into a high school that’d had 29 shootings in one year. Our free weekly podcast is here. Probably the best place to start to get to know us is our favorites page, here. We’re non-profit, with no commercials. Like public TV, but no pictures and no muppets.

This Valentine’s Day project happened because I was in San Francisco in November, and got a tour of Google’s headquarters, and met with the Doodle team. They reminded me of the radio show’s staff, the general vibe of the group, and the sense that they’re out to amuse themselves and make whatever will be fun or moving. I think our staff size is about the same too, roughly a dozen people. It’s a weird and idealistic corner in a weird and idealistic company. There was a general sort of “hey wouldn’t it be fun to try to collaborate on something together?” They pitched July 4th as a good possibility. We counter-pitched Valentine’s Day, because the stories could be more emotional. That kind of freaked them out, to have to turn so many little animations around so quickly. They weren’t sure it could be done. Now three months later, here we are. Incredible. Valentine’s Day is a day for love and these stories are a labor of love.

Posted by Ira Glass, of This American Life