"MORE VIDEO!" - COLLABORATIVE MOBILE LIVE PRODUCTION OF VIDEO
Arvid is a researcher at the Mobile Life Center at Interactive Institute in Stockholm, and has a background in video and photography. Arvid presented the research project "More video!" which focuses on the creation of new and innovative services supporting the local and collaborative production, distribution and consumption of mobile media and video. Motivated by a number of contemporary trends of media production and media sharing on the Internet in the area of user content creation, such as blogging, podcasting, and wikis, and by similar attempts made by mobile phone manufacturers to incorporate mobile blogging and high quality video.
Arvid talked about creating a new design space through the juxtaposition of three parts: mobile video production, collaboration and mobile context. From this, new mobile video production facilities emerge.
The first part of the design space is "mobile video production". It is amazing to see how devices like Sony Ericsson's K850 and Nokia's N95 not only have facilities for videorecording, but also quite decent tools for editing of the recorded material. They allow an individual user to record and produce a clip of some kind, and then for example upload it on the internet. Arivd suggested to further develop this type of applications, i.e. that the platform should include support for collaborative production facilities. The devices could then communicate pre-edited material before the actual clip is made.
To get an idea of collaborative production, Arvid and his collegues went to study the collaborative TV production of 4 productions of icehockey games. In order to boradcast a hockey game 16 people work togther. There are around 5 camera men in a small production organisation. An image producer live and in real time selects what to broadcast and guides the camera men, and others. The production is made possible through intricate social interaction, the image producer talks in an intercom with the cameramen, who answer by the way they direct the camera. That and the way they use common formats for specific situations are important resources in their collaboration. In the end they normally make fantastic programs that is nice TV.
But is it possible to do something like that on a mobile platform? Maybe not exactly just that, but it is an interesting inspiration for design. One of the inspiration sources for "More video!" was car rally racing. They studied the audiences there and concluded that the audience struggles with a viewer's paradox. They want to understand the overall of the race, that is who is leading, catching up, falling behind. But they also want to understand and enjoy race driving expertise as a bodily experience. These guys get a sense of the latter but not the first. Furthermore, these people are heavy users of mobile equipment. They use Dvcams, mobile phone cameras etc a lot. In some cases, there are TV-shows that give the overall in a nice way, but only half a day later and not at the many small events. They report just about the big ones, as TV-production is very expensive.
Another use context for Mobile video! is VJ-ing. VJing is a great setting to start exploring how live editing and mixing could be done. It has a lot of interesting properties: it is very live and adaptive, it is done in interaction with both music and visitors, and VJs experiment with live input. The "More video!" team has developed a prototype and then wanted to see what happens if you let club visitors capture and provide material live to the VJ set.
Thus it is possible to
- MOVE a part of the control of the set out into the performance space
- PLAY between performer and visitors
- ADD live quality
Design problems:
- beat matching is central, VJ sets are based on loops, pieces and control playback speed to display a beat - it is hard enough to do with your own material, and now its live and unpredictable
- tech design problem building on mobile phones
Arvid suggested that VJing could be done collaboratively, using three Nokia N95 and N93 to record video, broadcast it on the internet and then capture it by a VJ-mixer to display it on screens.
