Textable Movie by Cati Vaucelle
Improvising movies with a personal video database: Textable Movie
A child acting out the following: "a loud cell phone conversation due to the noise in the city."
A story that dynamically drives visuals and sounds in Textable Movie, 2002.
Vision
Marcel Proust’s experience of having tea and “Madeleines” bringing back emotional memories inspired me to conceive Textable Movie. I hoped to create the same phenomenon, linking experience, souvenir, recall and associated imagery in an immediate and intuitive way, while maintaining the opportunity for discovery that can only happen when the user gives up a certain amount of control. The scenario I envisioned was to be comfortably installed on my sofa, to tell a story, and to instantly be projected into my past in a myriad of video and sound. With sound and video elicited by the details of my recounting, the experience of recall could be further shaped by the resultant auditory and visual feedback, taking me in new directions. The original concept was that by immersion into their own memories, storytellers could become engaged to tell rich and passionate stories of their past experience.
Children transforming the traditional ‘action game’ into a ‘sport action game’ using Textable Movie.
Description
Textable Movie takes typed text as input and allows users to improvise
a movie in real-time based on the content of what they are writing. Media
segments are selected according to how the user labels their personal
audio and video database. As the user types in a story, the media segments
appear on the screen, connecting writers to their past experiences and
inviting further storytelling.
In the framework of computational storytelling, Textable Movie promotes
the idea of maker-controlled media and can be contrasted to automatic
presentation systems. By improvising movie-stories created from their
personal video database and by suddenly being projected into someone
else’s video database during the same story, users can be surprised
as they visualize video elements corresponding to a story that they would
not have expected. With Textable Movie, users make their own inference
about these discoveries rather than in using artificial systems that
make the inference for the users. They can then create a new interaction,
mapping new keywords to videos, and incorporating new video clips and
sound samples to their database. Working with Textable Movie invariably
produces a mental model of an individual’s perspective of a given
community.
A traditional action game vs the children’s personal action game in Textable Game.
The
children create a palette of actions for a set of keywords. For instance,
one user uses
the letters ‘a, s, z, x’ to control one action,
and the other one uses the numbers ‘1, 2, 3, 4’.
User A kicks user B by typing ‘1’ vs User B responds to user A by
typing ‘a’.
User studies
During user studies, when teenagers were asked to share their opinions about how it is to live in different locations, they talked about their city or even their country, grabbing video clips of key elements that would support their claims. In the outcome of these sessions, children offered 200 video clips that described where they lived. They used Textable Movie to perform clips on a projected screen. Their final movie was an assembly of media clips from their city exploration that represented the improvised narrative flow of a group of teenagers recalling their experience as they navigate their city.
I noticed that the teenagers could capture videos for a very long time, but did not have the patience to edit them. They often wanted to re-create pieces of video that they considered to be sub-par. However, in doing so, they irrecoverably lost their original vision, which all too often was dropped entirely from the final publication piece. Considering these results, a need for more fusion between creating an idea and producing it seemed necessary. My next design iteration incorporated mobile technology such as cell phones and hand-held computers for this purpose. Despite the prevalence of these platforms, a technology materialising the user’s desire to easily retrieve and reflect on clip ideas had to be implemented. The solution was tangible objects to act as metaphors of the captured elements. This work continued in the project, Moving Pictures: Looking Out/Looking In.
Textable Game
I created Textable
Game to extend the concept of transforming a user’s
environment using digitally linked media into the realm of video games.
A traditional action game vs the children’s personal action game
in Textable Game.
Textable Game aims to engage teenagers in building games using their own footage,
to generate environment, activity and sound, and to allow them to create their
own rules and scenarios from this media.
The goal is to invite teenagers to be their own video game producers. In Dublin, a workshop for 10 to 14 year-old children was conducted with Textable Game in order to examine how they create strategies of interaction for a video game they have built based on the Textable Movie engine.
More information
Continuation of the form of Moving Pictures
Full paper: An open-ended tool to compose movies for cross-cultural digital storytelling: Textable Movie. Vaucelle, C., and Davenport, G. In the Proceedings of ICHIM 04 "Digital Culture & Heritage".
Short
paper: A
system to Compose Movies for Cross-cultural Storytelling: Textable Movie Vaucelle,
C. and Davenport, G. TIDSE'04, ZGDV e.V,
Darmstadt, Germany, June 24 – 26
2004. Published in 2004 as part of the book Technologies for Interactive
Digital Storytelling and Entertainment. Series: Lecture Notes in Computer
Science. Volume 3105 pp. 126-131.
Short paper: Textable Movie: improvising with a personal movie database Vaucelle, C., Davenport, G., and Jehan, T. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH'03 Conference Abstracts and Applications. San Diego, California, USA, 27-31 July 2003. ACM Press.
Ongoing web site on Textable Movie and its international workshops.