C O N C E P T
Textable Movie is a graphical interface that takes 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 users label 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 story-telling.

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, young adults are challenged
in their beliefs about other communities.

S T U D I E S
- The Computer Clubhouse, Dulin, May 2003
- Workshop at The Ark, Dublin, summer 2003
- Pangaea - http://www.pangaean.org/

P U B L I C A T I O N
Vaucelle, C., Davenport, G., and Jehan, T. (2003).
Textable Movie: improvising with a personal movie database,
Siggraph, Conference Abstracts and Applications

S Y S T E M
Textable Movie retrieves movie segments and sounds in a specified
database, from analyzing textual input. It loads and plays them in
real time while the story is being typed. Consequently, a novel movie
gets created and generated in a very transparent, and easy manner.
The system can easily be connected to any personal movie database.
For example, the following short keyword sequence (forest, nature, tree,
wood, leaves, Yosemite] could describe a personal 10-second video
clip of the Yosemite park, called "forest.mov"
The personal labeling is important as it allows the users to give the
medium their own meaning. It loads and plays the images in real time
at a public site. Successive images thus begin to form an emerging story.

C R E D I T S Glorianna Davenport - Tristan Jehan - Vincent Le Bail -
Cati Vaucelle and Media Lab Europe

W E B S I T E http://www.mle.ie/~cati/

M A I N C O N T A C T cati@mle.ie

P R O J E C T S B A S E D on T E X T A B L E M O V I E
T e x t a b l e G a m e - Textable Game extends the Textable Movie concept
to the realm of video games. It aims to engage teenagers in building
their own games, e.g. action games, exploration games, mystery games,
using their own footage and sounds, and allowing them to create their
own rules and scenarios .
M i x e r - S u b v e r t e r - understanding the process of exchanging media over
the internet. In collaboration with Paul Nemirovsky, PhD student in the
Interactive Cinema Group at the MIT Media Lab, we have created the
Mixer-Subverter, an online system that allows children to integrate the
activities of play and video editing into a never-ending process of mixing
and “subversion” of each other’s material. In addition, it encourages
playful collaboration in an exchange network of unique media artifacts
P a s s i n g G l a n c e s (with Trinity College) is as a way to appropriate an
urban space like a bus stop or train station by using a cell phone.
This works by allowing cell phones to send SMS messages which
are then displayed publicly along with images related to the content
of those messages.
G l o b a l S t r a t e g i e s for i n t e r n a t i o n a l w o r k s h o p s - Teenagers
participating in these workshops go through the process of putting
together a piece by first storyboarding, then shooting, editing, and
projecting a video-story using Textable Movie. We have started to plan
a global strategy, which will allow us to compare how teenagers use
this system across cultures.