Visual Interfaces for Shareable Media

Shareable Media is an effort to provide a coherent structure that will facilitate distributed collaboration and communication among filmmakers, storytellers, artists and audiences. The extensible architecture of the Shareable Media Project has the capability to deploy multiple applications targeted towards a variety of uses and audiences. The visual interfaces that have been developed for current Shareable Media applications, illustrate our intention to provide easy-to-use tools and effective content visualizations, that operate coherently together to form new and engaging video-based story forms. These applications facilitate users' creation of multiple sequences from a video clip database, and explore the juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements, the integration of video and text, and the description of edit structure. PlusShorts uses punctuation as an iconic system for describing and augmenting edited video, where the punctuation symbols are used to detail the structure of a video sequence and inspire dialogue about the essence of that structure. Individeo features a browser that visualizes the sharing of video content through a dynamic, sociable interface. Individeo also allows editing of video integrated with text, allowing media-based dialogs and collaborative cinematic productions. In combination with multifarious content, these interfaces provide prototypes of new story forms where the edited structure and the shared context are made explicit. We are partnering with several physical storytelling communities from different countries, and we wish to explore emergent storytelling techniques, virtual collaboration, community-oriented selforganization and global communication.