Master of Science in Visual Studies, Jan. 15, 1993.

Filmmakers experience a creative reverie seldom enjoyed by novices. That reverie comes as one pieces together thoughts embodied in motion images. This these borrows the manipulation of motion images from editing for the purposes of viewing. It suggests a collection of tools for grabbing elements from video streams and for manipulating them as a way of critical viewing.

Motion images are usually conveyed sequentially. The tools suffested here allow a viewer to transfer from sequential images streams to collages of parallel images. The "video streamer" presents moviont picture time as a three dimensional block of images flowing away from us in distance and in time. The streamer's rendering reveals a number of temporal aspects of a video stream. The accompanying "shot parser" automatically segments any given video stream into separate shots, as the streamer flows. The collage provides an environment for arranging clips plucked from a sequential stream as associations of parallel elements. This process of arranging motion images is presentaed as an engagin viewing activity. The focus is on viewing utensils, but these tools provide an alternative perspective to video elements that also has bearing on editing.

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