Simple Digital Movies
Film has now become a digital medium, and with the digital, interactivity often comes along.
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From the largest Hollywood epics to the smallest home movies, films are shot digitally, edited on computers, and distributed in digital formats in movie theatres, the Internet or on DVD. This development has received attention from scholars, see, for example, Lev Manovich
or Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp
.
When media become digital, they also tend to develop forms where users may influence the presentation of the texts and make choices, what is often called interactivity (see, for example, Lev Manovich
or Jensen
).
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It may be that making interactive video could be almost as popular as making traditional home video, but this requires both simple tools and appealing genre examples. We will in this paper examine a simple hyperfilm structure for home video editing called stretchfilm, meaning a film that may become longer or shorter as the viewer wishes.
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Stretchfilm is based on stretchtext, a kind of hypertext invented by Ted Nelson 'Dirty Looks'
, and implemented in several hypertext systems.
From its conception, the aim of stretchtext has been to be a hypertext structure that is easy to understand (Nelson, 'Dirty Looks'
), and this goal has been repeated in later stretchtext systems (Brown
).
The simplicity of stretchtext stems from the linear structure (or unicursal, as Aarseth
would call it) that orders the whole of the text, and this structure that also is inherent in moving images. Film evolves over time, so at least each film segment is linear. Like other interactive movies, hyperfilm requires a constant shifting between viewing and interacting, as Liestøl
has noted. This disrupting experience of shifting will never go away, but may be reduced in a stretchfilm system, as the strict order can make it easier to understand what is waiting at the other end of a link.
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Two prototype digital films made by the author will be examined here, one about a travel abroad, the other of a wedding. Amateur video makers often want to keep material that most viewers find tedious. In a stretchfilm, the boring details can be delegated to the stretched-out versions.
We will discuss two different ways of creating a stretchfilm story, together with two different user interfaces. Moving beyond home movies, we will discuss how stretchfilm also could be used for news and fiction.
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We will use replacement and footnotes to describe the two principles used in editing. These principles, as well as the two interface solutions were based in previous published works on stretchtext and hyperfilm. Being rough prototypes made to test some simple concepts, the two films were edited in Final Cut Pro, and assembled into interactive DVD films using DVD Studio Pro.
Travel Film
The first film experiment was to make a family film album from a seven-month stay in USA. Our daughter was six months old when we moved there, so we recorded a lot of video to document her development to the grandparents back across the Atlantic.
From these recordings, we have edited ninety minutes of video that we never show to anyone. To make it more digestive, I made it into a stretchfilm structure, so we could show a ten-minute version to polite friends, and save the hour-long indulgence for tolerant grandparents.
Wedding
The other stretchfilm was of a wedding ceremony. Together with pets and children, weddings are typical of what most people record on video. In the stretchfilm, the user can select to skip parts of the film. The thought was that for the couple, it might have value in later years to see all the guests that were present in the church, and to experience the speech once again. For most viewers, however, this would be too long-winded.
In our further discussion of these films, we will use central concepts from theorists of narrative and cinema such as Roland Barthes
, Seymour Chatman
, and Edward Branigan
.
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