An open-ended tool to compose movies for cross-cultural digital storytelling : TEXTABLE MOVIE

This paper presents Textable Movie, an open-ended tool that allows any storyteller to become "video-jockey" able to improvise a media story in real-time drawing from an available collection of annotated images and videos. In the framework of digital storytelling, Textable Movie promotes the idea of maker controlled media and can be contrasted to automatic presentation systems. Its graphical interface takes text as input and allows users to improvise a movie in real-time based on the content of what they are writing. Media segments are selected according to how the users label their personal audio and video database. As the user types in a story, the media segments appear on the screen, connecting writers to their past experiences and inviting further story-telling. Video Jockeys perform using their own or someone else’s video database presenting different visual perspectives on the same story. By co-creating movie stories that are first improvised from a personal video database and then projected into someone else’s video database as two tellers merge their stories, young adults are challenged in their beliefs about other communities. In this paper we will present our ongoing research on a future tangible version of Textable Movie for a direct control and visualization of multiple point of views.