“Visual Interfaces for Shareable Media” presented by Kelliher, Seo, Pan, Lin and Davenport
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Interactivity and Fiction
Presentation Title:
- Visual Interfaces for Shareable Media
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
Shareable Media is an effort to provide a coherent structure that will facilitate distributed collaboration and communication among filmmakers, storytellers, artists and audiences. The extensible architecture of the Shareable Media Project has the capability to deploy multiple applications targeted towards a variety of uses and audiences. The visual interfaces that have been developed for current Shareable Media applications, illustrate our intention to provide easy-to-use tools and effective content visualizations, that operate coherently together to form new and engaging video-based story forms. These applications facilitate users’ creation of multiple sequences from a video clip database, and explore the juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements, the integration of video and text, and the description of edit structure. PlusShorts uses punctuation as an iconic system for describing and augmenting edited video, where the punctuation symbols are used to detail the structure of a video sequence and inspire dialogue about the essence of that structure. Individeo features a browser that visualizes the sharing of video content through a dynamic, sociable interface. Individeo also allows editing of video integrated with text, allowing media-based dialogs and collaborative cinematic productions. In combination with multifarious content, these interfaces provide prototypes of new story forms where the edited structure and the shared context are made explicit. We are partnering with several physical storytelling communities from different countries, and we wish to explore emergent storytelling techniques, virtual collaboration, community-oriented self-organization and global communication.
Intro
A comprehensive and sustainable shared media system necessitates the development of an extensible infrastructure, compelling interfaces and an active, engaged community of users. The development of novel interfaces for collaborative co-construction will be the focus of this paper.
The visual interfaces for Shareable Media seek to transform the experience of creating, sharing and thinking about video and ultimately move towards the prototyping of new story forms. These applications broaden the generally understood definition of shared video from one of simply posting an edited video on the web and emailing your friends about it, to a more wide-ranging comprehension encompassing notions of recreation and re-appropriation of original content in a search for new and diverse meanings. The PlusShorts application exemplifies a focus on movie structure, where a symbol system is utilized to directly explain and describe the structural features of a video sequence. With Individeo, the explicit visualization of the sharing process introduces a contextual level of understanding, where meaning is derived not only from the individual clips, but also from their positioning both within specific sequences and in relation to other neighboring sequences. Both of these applications, in their design and their functionality approach a new type of story form, where the navigational tools for finding content, the visual display used for reconstructing content and the final playback mechanism, operate seamlessly together to inform and evidence the meanings produced by each component.The next section of the paper will detail previous and related work to the visual interfaces for the Shareable Media Project, followed by descriptions of two current applications, PlusShorts and Individeo. The paper will conclude by describing some of the issues that arise as a result of this project and future research directions.
