[ISEA2011] Paper: Michael Leggett – Physical Cinema: memory, schema and interactive video

Abstract

Session: Cinema after the Digital

The research project completed recently addressed the paucity of design evident in popular video databases such as YouTube and GoogleMovies, where the viewer has a television-like experience made up of selected individual movie productions. These are assembled by guessing words used in metadata registration of uploaded material and interaction with the movie database, thereby following in the sequential tradition of analogue video and film.

Digital video however, enables access to individual frames of a motion picture recording, where in an interactive system, the participant is able to define both duration, and relational ordering of individual ‘scenes’ and shots. The process of interaction can be compared to hypertext linking in Web-based systems, the documents instead being video files. Hypervideo is an appropriate term, though the Mnemovie experimental system is not currently accessed using a web browser or indeed, the internet.

The research project was focussed on: the syntactical ramifications of relational ordering; the role of mnemonics in this process; and the practical aspects of the interface, the performance place in which participants interact with the full-screen motion picture image.

Film Lane (1974): A 3-minute extract from a 12-min 16mm film made as part of a series, Sheepman & the Sheared (1970-1976). The film series was made within the workshops and the theoretical context of the London Filmmakers Co-operative and structural / material film. In the series, the coincidence of flora, fauna, other objects, processes and activities, with the film frame are in no way paramount to an inspection of the total film process by which an observation of this kind is made possible- specific conditions to do with both Nature and human activity with Nature are recorded with the camera, but is essentially subject to the observation and reaction of the filmmaker.

  • Michael Leggett. Visiting Senior Fellow, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia; Visiting Fellow, Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney Australia

Full text (PDF) p. 1479-1484