publications ::   imagine magazine : focus on communications, volume 9 number 3, january/february 2002 aisling kelliher        Lights, Camera, Upload, Connect, and Action!   Editor's Introduction For the past 16 years, under the direction of Professor Glorianna Davenport, the Interactive Cinema group at the MIT Media Lab has made tools, developed content, and shaped experiences for the combined benefit of the storymaker, the storyteller, and the audience. In this article, graduate student Aisling Kelliher discusses how this group is creating a new relationship between audiences and the cinema-one in which the audience can play a more active role than ever before. Picture the scene. You're in a large outdoor arena, watching your favorite band perform live. Using the networked video camera on your phone, you capture some shots of the lead singer, the security men throwing water on the crowd, and the enthusiastic fan bouncing up and down beside you. You then use your phone to send a message to your best friend, attaching the shots you have just captured. She's at home, watching a live streaming multicast of the concert, containing all the footage being captured by the people on her "buddies" list. Later, when you return home, you log on to your video server, access the shots you took at the concert, select some additional footage captured by other people, throw in a segment from the band's latest music video, and upload the final movie to your Web site. As a member of the Interactive Cinema group at the MIT Media Lab, I am helping to make scenes like that possible. Let's Make a Movie How many times have you watched a movie and wished it had ended differently? Or wanted to know more about one of the characters and wished the movie had concentrated more on him or her? Or wondered what else was going on in a scene that the camera wasn't showing? Two years ago, I joined a group that responds to those types of concerns. The Shareable Media Project is a research initiative within the Interactive Cinema group that seeks to create an interactive Web site where filmmakers, artists, storytellers, and audiences can communicate and ultimately collaborate on the moviemaking process. The system we envisioned would create an evolving, inclusive, and dynamic story environment containing many different stories told and retold through many different voices. We want users of the system to be able not only to view, evaluate, and rank the movies on the Web site, but also to recut and re-edit any of these sequences-putting together their own optimal ending, for example. We also want users to be able to upload their own movie clips to add to the sequence, or reuse parts of the original sequence with their own footage to create an entirely different story. For example, I might upload a movie sequence telling the story of the day my little brother was lost at the fair, until we finally found him eating cotton candy behind the ghost train ride. Another user might then upload video footage of aliens flying through the sky and re-edit the sequence to make it look like my brother was abducted temporarily by little green men. Or another user could put together a scary horror sequence, detailing what my brother saw when he accidentally went on the ghost train. Each of these interpretations could be stored on the Web site, and all visitors to the site could see how the story evolves over time as more and more users tell the story as they would like it told. Cool Tools Our team has developed a variety of novel visual interfaces and editing tools to allow users to manipulate and arrange clips into sequences. For my part, I was most interested in allowing filmmakers to share thoughts about the structure of the movie sequences they were creating on the site. Thinking of a video sequence as just one instance within a larger, evolving "movie thread," I wanted to create the equivalent of a newsgroup discussion-only using movie clips instead of text. The PlusShorts application was born. Within PlusShorts, participants can begin a movie thread by posting a sequence of movie clips they have either found on or uploaded to the Shareable Media database. Other users of the system can then respond to that post by rearranging, deleting, or adding to the sequence, thus creating their own interpretation of the story. To further enhance understanding and stimulate discussion between users, the PlusShorts application uses punctuation as a markup language for describing the structure of movie sequences. Users can place punctuation symbols between clips to show what they were thinking when they put the sequence together. For example, placing a colon after a movie clip might mean that it was an introductory clip, or placing parentheses around a number of clips could indicate a dream sequence or flashback. As part of the software development process, the system was tested and evaluated at a workshop for visual artists and filmmakers, held at the MediaLabEurope in Dublin, Ireland. There, I gained tremendous feedback about the usefulness of the system as a storyboarding tool, about the problems encountered with synching audio and about possible future developments for the application. I completed the PlusShorts application as part of my master's degree. Getting Here, Going … Where? My path to MIT has had many twists and turns along the way but has always been underpinned by a deep love for movies and the storytelling power of the moving image. I made my first forays into the moviemaking world as an undergraduate in communication studies. As the digital era came into play, my explorations led me to undertake an M.Sc. in multimedia systems at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. I was fascinated by the new potential to weld computational power with sound, graphics, text, and movies. I was intrigued by the possibility of combining all this with sensing technology, interactive techniques, and distributed networks. And I knew that there was already an audience of people hungry for new experiences. It was at this stage that I first met Professor Davenport, who encouraged me to apply to the Media Lab. Coming to MIT's Media Lab has afforded me an opportunity to develop my work in even more daring directions with a team of creative researchers, all working in an environment where inventive craziness is encouraged and the absurd applauded. I am now developing my research in new directions towards a Ph.D. I am particularly interested in developing software for creating a "video blog." A blog (abbreviated from "Web log") is an online, regularly updated journal or diary where the blog owner can post thoughts, opinions, favorite links, photos, or stories. An estimated 400,000 bloggers are publishing content on the Web today. I want to develop an easy-to-use tool that will allow these publishers to integrate video content with their daily musings. As a wee girl in Dublin, I always dreamed about someday having my little stories played out on the big screen. The screen might have gotten smaller, or turned into a watch, or even be projected onto the side of a moving bus, but the desire to entertain, provoke, affect, and delight people remains the same.