hi all

would just like to invite those interested to have a look at a couple
of projects that I have in development at InterMedia (uni of bergen)
and RMIT (Australia).

these are in beta and undergoing further development but I'm interested in
a) showing them
b) getting some feedback from those interested

first of all, the caveats:
a) they only work on broadband (they're designed for university
delivery in the first world).
b) they require QuickTime 5.x (a free download from
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/) because of the SMIL scripting that
has been employed
c) one of the projects (The Searchers) was never originally designed
for networked delivery, and so the video was not compressed for a
real time stream. This will be completely revamped in the coming
weeks.

the two projects are proof of concept developments. they are available at
http://www.intermedia.uib.no/projects/smafe/

the potemkin project is a simple demonstration of the application of
metadata to a video stream so that a search interface can retrieve
parts of the film. the metadata is derived from pretty straight
forward characteristics of Eisenstein's work (though angle of view
was overlooked as the metadata was developed). this project is
largely quantitative and tends to 'break' the film to work.

the searchers project is much more interesting and productive. here a
simple hypothesis is proposed (that doorways in the searchers
represent liminal zones between spaces that are qualities) and the
film has been encoded around minor properties that doorways have -
the camera is inside, outside, or between, and is looking inside,
outside, or between. Selecting your search criteria selects shots
that meet these conditions and presents them as stills in their
canonical (film) order. Clicking on a still presents it in context in
the film.

when you use this particularly project the engine works more as a
hermeneutic engine so that the shots that are returned form a series
that you then need to interpret. So the engine is not so much an
instrumental analysis as an invitation to think about the patterns
that it finds (and there are patterns). NOTE: this particular project
is incomplete and will be rebuilt over the next fortnight.

(one future development of this is to allow students to define and
encode their own large scale analyses of the film so that a whole
series of hermeneutic claims will be available.)

anyway, these are one part of a suite of new media networked film
analysis and 'authoring' systems that we are exploring and
developing. Once completed we hope they'll be open source or at least
available to other educational institutions, but in the mean time i'm
interested in getting constructive comments on the projects while
they're in development.

cheers
adrian miles
--

+  lecturer in new media and cinema studies
[http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog]
+  interactive desktop video developer  [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/]
+ media studies. rmit [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au]
+ InterMedia:UiB. university of bergen [http://www.intermedia.uib.no]