[-empyre-] lecture

[Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@uib.no>]

hi all

a problem in thinking or understanding what a vog could do is caused 
by a lack of understanding about what can be done using simple tools. 
please remember the stuff about softcopy and the rest. a vog is not a 
single video stream that just plays, and quite literally pretty much 
*anything* you can do in flash you *can* do in quicktime.

an example. quicktime supports what it calls movie tracks. a movie 
track is not a video track but is a movie in a movie.

this is not embedding a video/movie window in a movie (as you would 
using fcp/after effects, premiere, etc), that's actually just adding 
another video track the content is written into the final movie as an 
integral part of it.

a movie track is actually an external track and so the content that 
you have in your movie tracks lives outside  the movie. the container 
movie is called the parent movie, and the movies in the movie track 
are called child movies.

this means you can make a movie that is very small and it has various 
scripts (buttons, time based stuff, whatever) that can then load 
other content as requested (by the user, by the scripts).

so, imagine a small parent movie that has a movie track. this movie 
track is pretty much just a description of where the child movie 
should appear in the parent, and a list of child movies. (in other 
words i can have a movie that has a movie in a movie and the movie in 
the movie is actually a list of movies, i've made one with, for 
instance 64 child movies listed).

these child movies could be made available via http, rtsp, cdrom, 
dvd, off a local hard drive. (for instance 
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/3.2002/poems.that.go.html is a movie 
that has one child movie track that contains 3 soundtracks, these are 
only loaded into the movie when the user mouses over the text tracks, 
don't mouse and the other audio content is never requested, never 
loaded, and never downloaded. these are all delivered via http.)

this means that you can build a movie that has lots of content behind 
it, but none of this content is loaded unless requested (and the 
request could be as simple as clicking a button or as complex as 
recording what you've looked at so far, where and when you've clicked 
or moused in the current movie and loading another child movie on the 
basis of this, or perhaps your parent movie has just read a xml text 
file from a database and assembles the movie on the basis of this 
script).

this means there's quite an efficient way to deliver complex content 
without requiring the user to download the lot. so you can build a 
multilinear video and/or sound piece with, say, 60 episodes but a 
user might only read/watch/listen to 5, and so they'll only load 5, 
rather than the entire 60.

but imagine this. a movie that has say 3 child movie tracks (imagine 
a triptych). you could have the same movies load each time, or 
completely different ones. each child track has, say 20 episodes. it 
is easy to script a movie such as this so that any of the loaded 
child movies (ie any of the movies in either of the panes in the 
triptych) control any of the other movies. click on this part at this 
time in movie 1, and load movie 17 in pane 2, and return the 
currently playing movie in pane 3 to the beginning.

now, while it's easy to script this, the dramaturgy or whatever you 
call it is rather hard. documentary would be pretty straightforward, 
but fictional narrative that was not just a sort of vog tone poem or 
mood piece gets hard to envision. if only because you'd have 20 x 20 
x 20 possible combinations available (not that you'd use that many) - 
or is my maths there completely wrong?

and if you wanted this to work on loband, make each movie 1 frame a 
second with continuous sound. works a treat. or have one movie with a 
video track at 1 fps and then use child movies to have a whole series 
of sound tracks which vary on whatever you like.

yes, flash mx does this too (allows you to call in external objects 
and remove them when they're finished with), but once again it's 
about working with video, and having the level of 'interactive' 
scripting to be able to discriminate within parts of an individual 
frame.

the lecture subject header? when you make an interactive movie like 
this there is longer a fixed duration, a single timeline (each of the 
video sequences can have timelines/durations independent of each 
other and the parent movie). when you work like this what is an edit? 
where does it happen? how long is a film? is it a film at all? what 
do you narrate? how? why?

and why is this any different to any other interactive extraganza? 
because the interactivity is in the video, the video is not an 
illustrated episode that runs in response to something else where the 
video is always completely unresponsive to me. it is not video as 
multimedia illustration.

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/]
+  hypertext rmit [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au]
+ InterMedia:UiB. university of bergen [http://www.intermedia.uib.no]