Imagine a story. Create a book!

Orit Zuckerman a good friend of mine from the Media Lab --we worked together on a few cool projects-- now opened her company, Tikatok, that allows you (or your child) to create books based on her stories. You can also order the books made by the children in the community. Such a neat idea! Orit regularly organizes contests, so the company is now growing as a community of young writers. Tikatok also welcomes teachers, parents and libraries.

During winter break, Lauren showed me this beautiful video of this cute French girl, Capucine, telling the most creative story (no worries, it is translated in English). Imagine how such a child would do drawing, writing and telling her creations on a real book!
Enjoy watching this ultra cute video:



... you can also help the friends of Capucine in Mongolia design books on Orit's site ...

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

Film assembly using toy gestures

My full paper Picture This! Film assembly using toy gestures has been accepted as a full paper for the technical conference on ubiquitous computing: UbiComp 2008. With an acceptance rate of less than 19% for technical papers in the field, it is very encouraging!

Abstract
We present Picture This! a new input device embedded in children’s toys for video composition. It consists of a new form of interaction for children’s capturing of storytelling with physical artifacts. It functions as a video and storytelling performance system in that children craft videos with and about character toys as the system analyzes their gestures and play patterns. Children’s favorite props alternate between characters and cameramen in a film. As they play with the toys to act out a story, they conduct film assembly. We position our work as ubiquitous computing that supports children’s tangible interaction with digital materials. During user testing, we observed children ages 4 to 10 playing with Picture This!. We assess to what extent gesture interaction with objects for video editing allows children to explore visual perspectives in storytelling. A new genre of Gesture Object Interfaces as exemplified by Picture This relies on the analysis of gestures coupled with objects to represent bits.

Introduction

We connect to our world using our senses. Every one of our senses is a knowledge shopper that grounds us in our surroundings [1]: with touch, one feels the texture of life, with hearing one perceives even the subtlest murmurs of our existence, with vision one clarifies their instincts. But human senses are not only about perception. We use gesture to apprehend, comprehend and communicate. We speak to ultimately translate and exchange with others. We visualize, record, and playback events using our memory to reflect on our history and to be immersed in experience. We as children and adults are engaged in everyday pretense and symbolic play. We embed and later withdraw from the world, using imagination to project ourselves into situations [35]. Our mental constructs are necessary to reach a deeper understanding of our relationship with our environment [3]. Children are offered stories by adults and are driven into fantasy play. They use toys to externalize and elaborate their mental constructions [8]. With character toys they create interrelationships and plots, a means to expose their social knowledge: knowing about human beings and social relationships [33]. If the toy has an immediately accessible visual perspective, a new world is opened to the child. The toy brings her into exploring visual and narrative perspectives of character props, expanding the discovery of her environment.

We imagine a world in which people play, create and exchange visual narratives with ease and transparency. Motivated by the playful improvisational environment of child storytelling with toys, we have developed a new category of video editing tools progressing towards the child’s natural expression of play. In Picture This! we combine the activity of play with the video making process. Whereas play emphasizes spontaneity and improvisation, video making necessitates structure and composition. We were inspired by the theater play of Goethe’s childhood [35], investigating what technology could add to the narrative and play experience. We use technology to offer visual feedback regarding how the scene looks like from the point of view of an imaginary audience. The child storyteller enters the world of the movie maker. Cameras become part of a toy system showing how things look from a toy’s point of view. They can be integrated in Lego people, car drivers, and even coffee mugs! The video process, supported by gesture induced editing, benefits children in practicing social interrelationships and visual perspective taking.



More about the system ->here <-

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

Algorithmic film assembly using toy gestures

A new input device for video capturing and editing! Designed for young children, ages five and up, it allows them to craft compelling movies through the motion analysis of their interaction with toys.


A child playing with Picture This and his Naruto action figure

Continuing my research on perspective taking and tangible video editing, I recently finished the development of Picture This, a video editing and capturing device designed for young children. It allows them to craft compelling movies through the motion analysis of their interaction with toys. Children's favorite props alternate between characters and cameramen in a film. As children play with the toys to act out a story, they conduct algorithmic film assembly.

Picture This's web site.

In my prior work, Moving Pictures, I wanted to offer children the opportunity to gather imagery from their environment in the form of short video clips captured on video camera platforms modified for the application. I wanted to provide a transparent experience for the user, in which the cumbersome process of capturing and editing becomes fluid in the improvisation of a story and accessible as a way to create a final movie.

Web site for my past work on Moving Pictures.



Tangible interfaces combine operations on physical objects with digital data. I have sought to develop interfaces where either digital data can be overlaid onto physical objects in a display space or physical objects can act as handles into the digital space. The tangible handle is more than a marker or place-holder for digital data. It has the power to materialize and redefine our conception of space and content during the creative process.



If the toy had a visual perspective immediately accessible to the child, a new world would be opened to her. The toy could potentially bring the child into exploring visual and narrative perspectives of these character props, expanding her discovery and understanding of social interrelationships.

A video snippet of Picture This and a 6 minutes video for its interaction design.

The Picture this tool is an audiovisual device that combines two digital video cameras and two accelerometers. The tool captures motions, video and sound in real-time while an algorithmic video editing system composes a movie from these inputs. A motion based editing engine fluidly assembles the film as its story is being narrated, while respecting the conventions of continuity editing, namely, a sequence of shots that appear to be continuous.



This style of film editing is made possible in Picture This by detecting turn taking behaviors between the toys. Two toy props are augmented with video cameras and custom accelerometer hardware. They use the Picture This tool both as a doll hand-bag or a doll audiovisual recorder. The tool is flexible for a child to take the perspective of props she selected for her movie.

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure

Video making: technology vs face-to-face

Moving Pictures

Recently, Kimberly Smith contacted me to discuss my work on Textable Movie. Textable Movie allows, by improvising movie-stories created from a personal video database and by suddenly being projected into someone else’s video database during the same story, to be surprised during the visualization of video elements corresponding to a story that correspond to someone else. I later introduced him the different stages of design from Textable Movie, Moving Pictures and Terraria. Review on these projects.

I originally created a methodology for international workshops on creative media making and sharing. My workshop is designed to engage teenagers from around the world in digital media making using the “textable movie” tool set. The workshop features a design cycle that begins with concept development and continues onto storyboarding, video production and editing; as it is realized, participants test and evaluate their video-stories using Textable Movie. 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. More about my workshop
The workshops global strategy focuses on fostering intercultural visual communication and play. One goal of the international program is to generate a cross-cultural study focused on the creative construction of media by teenagers.

Kimberly and I talked about the art of motion pictures being a language in itself.
For the past fifteen years, he has been passionately involved in using improvisation as a method for sharing what has been discovered about the language of motion pictures. His main concern is finding ways to emphasize the human element and de industrialize the process. He works with diverse groups of people ranging from severely disabled to experienced filmmakers.

All of his thinking tends to revolve around the idea of empowering people to acquire eloquence and skill with visual language and to be able to take control of the frame and thus the audience's attention. Responsibility for community and each other can be learned through this creative process. So it is more about social renewal and human development as it is about making movies, dixit Kimberly.

Kimberly sent me some samples of group movie making activities. All of these games use the same guide lines -or rules- found here.
I had integrated a few of these ideas in my international workshops with Textable Movie, but some of them are inspiring and new to me.

Ping Pong The idea is to move the audience's eye from left to right on the screen. This can be done a number of ways. dialogue is the easiest. Simply jump cut from one actor to the next and frame accordingly. Or pan from left to right. Or get the performers to move from left to right in the frame. Now the challenge is how do we smoothly accomplish this in a group where each individual gets a turn with the camera? We need common movie making language. In this case, each time a person hands off the camera, they have to tell the next person which side of the frame the visual focus was on. Thus the continuity is maintained. People learn very quickly when it is not. This game requires alertness almost the same way as something like Zip Zap Zop does. It can be timed or not. I've even had two teams compete.

In The Moment The idea is to emulate a fast paced current event news show. I did this one with the Irondale Ensemble in Halifax. We had a couple of cars so we were able to go to various locations across the city and stage "Live" interviews with group members posing as ordinary citizens. We payed attention to our framing (either left or right) and we shared the camera round robin. All edit-in-camera. Everyone had to pay close attention all the time and try to remember what had happened in the previous location as well as keep on top of the framing. The energy level was quite high. Our finished movie looked like a real live news show.

First Shot, Last Shot This game is built upon the idea that each individual shot contains an action that moves a story forward. So the first thing I do is have all the individuals in the group write down on little scraps of paper single shot ideas. For example: "angrily throwing a wad of paper in a trash can" or "biting a delicious apple or a bad one". I encourage the group to save these shot ideas on little scraps of paper that can be kept in a box or a hat. These can be used in a variety of games, but in this one, we break into two teams. Each one picks a first shot out of the hat -then a last shot. the object of the game is to create a story sequence that gets from the first shot to the last shot in twelve shots. The camera is passed from individual to individual. No one is allowed more than one shot at a time and each shot has to be no longer than thirty seconds. All members of the team must appear in front of the camera at least once. Again this is all done edit-in-camera. So everyone has to be on their toes at all times. The game can be timed or not and the sequence can have more than twelve shots or less. We've done this as an easy going, inclusive recreational activity on a Saturday afternoon and the movie was played after a pot luck supper.

Power Shift This game is challenging for performers and shooters because it requires strategic freezing of the action without losing the flow of the movie. Other games do this too, but this one emphasizes the problem. This requires a group of five or more. Three or more people must be on camera at all times. The idea is to have a spontaneous feeling, dynamic group discussion or argument where individuals come and go because they have been bullied out or are pulling a power trip. The point of focus with the camera is to be aware of the axis at all times. So when a person hands the camera to the next person they can pass the information along and maintain directional continuity. This is an advanced game and again it can be done like a team sport with two groups competing within time parameters or limited numbers of shots.

Beam Us Up This game requires a tripod. The idea is to use "lock-off" camera positions to create Star Trek like transporter special effects. The dramatic point is something is wrong with the transporter - some people disappear and new ones emerge. Again the camera is shared round robin. So this is what changes up the personnel, but the real challenge is trying to remember how people were positioned in the last location so when they re emerge, they are still in the same physical relationship with each other. Its harder than people think, but kids of all ages love this game. The way it works is the camera is rock solidly framed wide on a certain empty location and you record a few seconds. Then you bring the group in and have them freeze in transporter position. Simply roll the camera again without moving it a millimetre and the group will appear out of nowhere. Some cameras have an overlap dissolve which makes the group seem to fade in. Its fun and the dramatic possibilities are wide open. This idea can be combined with other games like "In The Moment" to create wild, Wellsian stories.

Who Am I? This is a P.O.V. game. Again it is edit-in-camera and passed round robin from individual to individual in the group. Camera operators choose a certain P.O.V. either dynamic or static and the actors interact with the camera in such a way that the identity of the camera is implied, but not expressly given away. I usually remind the players not to hog the camera and figure out how to create connecting shots so the camera can be passed to the next player. All the visual rules remain the same. This game is played in teams. One group has to watch the other's sequence and correctly identify the camera's character.

I found very interesting his approach, developed from Viola Spolin's Theatre Games.

All of them are designed with specific points of focus and they also accelerate the process of learning the language of motion pictures. But more importantly than all of this is the breaking down of the industrial hierarchy. My main goal is to foster inclusiveness, community pride and creativity.

For a researcher in HCI, who designs new tools and technology to allow improvisation, collaboration and creativity, it is very exciting to hear what video makers & educators invest and develop from a day to day basis on these subjects.

Patent the spam strategy

More spam in my mail box. Like 10 today about Chase Bank.
Checking my emails and looking at patents, I wander if spam strategies can be patented. Anti-spam patents exist for their spam filtering techniques, however spam techniques (even if illegal) should definitly be patented.

Maybe an on-the-side patent service should exist for all illegal actions and strategies that take place, innovate and succeed.