Joey van der Bie

VideoPile v0.2

VideoPile – interactive storytelling environment, is a prototype to try out if a movie can be watched by browsing through the scenes.
The environment was designed with the following criteria in mind:

playful
fast/ lightweight
easy to manipulate (few options)
allow to tell a whole story in a few minutes
definitely not looking like standard movie manipulation software

Inspired by the Dutch artist Spinvis with his video clip “Voor ik vergeet” I thought about the relationship between photos and videos. Looking at videos we can say that a film is a collection of scenes or chapters. Each chapter tells a part of the whole story, but is also a small independent story. Just like a photobook where all photos together are the holiday or event and the photos separate are a small story.

When building the prototype (in openFrameworks of course), I quickly saw that adding too much controls and buttons would destroy the concept. Therefore I tried to incorporate as less features as possible and by mouse usage only. This resulted in the options:

play/pause (by double click left mouse)
skip through timeline (by single click left mouse using the x-axis);
enlarge/shrink (by double click right mouse using the y-axis)
grab/move (by single click right mouse)
rotate (by double click right mouse using the x-axis)

VideoPile v0.3

After some try outs and evaluating with fellow student, it is safe to conclude that at this moment the platform doesn’t allow to watch a movie in a short time. More improvements should be done on the audio manipulation and scene selection. Audio is now always 100% for every movie, maybe the volume should grow with the size of the video, or controls should be added. The scene selection is more difficult, now when playing a video the first frame is always first, more advanced options are thinkable like: playing the most active parts of the scene, preselecting where to start playing or even only allowing the play specific parts of the scene depending on what is watched or the time watching.

Still VideoPile feels like a nice prototype to play with, bit like mulitouch platforms, only now for the mouse. If you want to play with it, you can find the source here: http://code.google.com/p/mediatechnology/source/browse/#svn/branches/VideoPile
And the windows executable here: http://mediatechnology.googlecode.com/svn/branches/VideoPile/bin.zip

! Note that to run the application you need at least windows xp with apple quicktime installed. This should be sufficient. But windows vista is advised.
Before starting the app 14 videos should be added in the videos folder using the naming ”0.mp4”, “1.mp4” ect. The videos should be ideally using the ffmpeg codec and having a resolution of 320 width and 240 heigh.
If you have done al this launch the exe and enjoy!