Developer and Lead Designer
Glorianna Davenport
Alex Benenson, Vicky Bippart,
Brian E. Bradley, Meiling Chan-
Bernard, Stuart Cody, Chris Coon, Alexander Kim, Panos Kouros, Alan
Lasky, Mok, Sylvain Morgain, Joseph Vanderway, Yoyokazu Yoshida, Julie Pokorny, and Josh Kirshenbaum
The Elastic Charles evolved in Prof. Davenport's Fall 1988 Workshop
in Elastic Movie Time; the content and interactive tool set continued
to be developed during the Spring of 1989.
In this project the Elastic Charles crew casts a loving electronic gaze
towards the Charles River, (our local watering hole) as it slips past
our door, through Boston, and on into the sea
.
The "look and feel" of The Elastic Charles, in which video, graphics, text and a dynamic user interface converged, was inspired by "the American River Magazine" of the future. In this issue, the subscriber is offered a boats-eye view of the river; "micons" placed on the video allow the author as well as the subscriber to designate links to diversionary scenes and stories by Charlie who maintains the locks or Rita, an environmental advocate. A rich text history, broken into card-sized granules, compliments the whole.
In the summer of 1989, 100 copies of The Elastic Charles were
distributed to artists and representatives from industry who had
purchased the required hardware to play back this prototype
publication consisting of CR-ROM and laserdisc.
Special credits go to Hans Peter Brondmo, a Graduate Research
Assistant in the Interactive Cinema Group, for developing the
software "authoring" tools as extentions to hypercard on a Macintosh
II computer running Mac OS 5.
These tools later served as inspiration for the development of
Videoshop, the desktop editing tools. Brian Bradley and Vicky
Bippart finalized the video editing of the videodisc.
Research Supervisor/Director/Producer
Designers
Brøndmo H; Davenport G (1989).
Creating and Viewing the Elastic Charles - a Hypermedia Journal
Hypertext: State of the ART, July, Chapter 5, pp. 43-51. R. McAlesse and C. Green, Eds, Intellect, 1990.
Revised from document published in the Hypertext II Conference Proceedings, York, England, July, 1989.