Toward Intelligent Support of Authoring Machinima Media Content: Story and Visualization

The Internet and the availability of authoring tools have enabled a greater community of media content creators, including nonexperts. However, while media authoring tools often make it technically feasible to generate, edit and share digital media artifacts, they do not guarantee that the works will be valuable or meaningful to the community at large. Therefore intelligent tools that support the authoring and creative processes are especially valuable. In this paper, we describe two intelligent support tools for the authoring and production of machinima. Machinima is a technique for producing computer-animated movies through the manipulation of computer game technologies. The first system we describe, ReQUEST, is an intelligent support tool for the authoring of plots. The second system, Cambot, produces machinima from a pre-authored script by manipulating virtual avatars and a virtual camera in a 3D graphical environment

Looking BK and Moving FD: Toward a Sociocultural Lens on Learning with Programmable Media

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the Unexpected This chapter is a look back at ideas about programming as a form of digital media for learning in the mid-1990s to help realize more of the potential of these tools in the future. It presents a close examination of the work of children who became fluent in programming animations, games, and interactive stories using MicroWorlds Logo. A vignette from the creation of a movie remix by African American girls in a culturally relevant school is analyzed. Their work supports a constructionist perspective that children can learn both programming and other subject-matter ideas through creating personally meaningful projects with programmable media. Unexpected from this view is that the children brought practices from living culturally to define and produce their project and that these cultural practices were integral to their learning. Implications are outlined for educators, policy makers, and researchers to use views of culture in learning with programmable media to connect more children to the benefits of these media

The Prose Storyboard Language: A Tool for Annotating and Directing Movies: (Version 2.0, Revised and Illustrated Edition)

International audienceThe prose storyboard language is a formal language for describing movies shot by shot, where each shot is described with a unique sentence. The language uses a simple syntax and limited vocabulary borrowed from working practices in traditional movie-making and is intended to be readable both by machines and humans. The language has been designed over the last ten years to serve as a high-level user interface for intelligent cinematography and editing systems. In this new paper, we present the latest evolution of the language, and the results of an extensive annotation exercise showing the benefits of the language in the task of annotating the sophisticated cinematography and film editing of classic movies

Real-Time Storytelling with Events in Virtual Worlds

We present an accessible interactive narrative tool for creating stories among a virtual populace inhabiting a fully-realized 3D virtual world. Our system supports two modalities: assisted authoring where a human storyteller designs stories using a storyboard-like interface called CANVAS, and exploratory authoring where a human author experiences a story as it happens in real-time and makes on-the-fly narrative trajectory changes using a tool called Storycraft. In both cases, our system analyzes the semantic content of the world and the narrative being composed, and provides automated assistance such as completing partially-specified stories with causally complete sequences of intermediate actions. At its core, our system revolves around events -â?? pre-authored multi-actor task sequences describing interactions between groups of actors and props. These events integrate complex animation and interaction tasks with precision control and expose them as atoms of narrative significance to the story direction systems. Events are an accessible tool and conceptual metaphor for assembling narrative arcs, providing a tightly-coupled solution to the problem of converting author intent to real-time animation synthesis. Our system allows simple and straightforward macro- and microscopic control over large numbers of virtual characters with diverse and sophisticated behavior capabilities, and reduces the complicated action space of an interactive narrative by providing analysis and user assistance in the form of semi-automation and recommendation services

Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry as Ontological Probe

This thesis is about the poetic edge of language and technology. It inter-relates both computational creation and poetic reception by analysing typographic animation softwares and meditating (speculatively) on a future malleable language that possesses the quality of being (and is implicitly perceived as) alive. As such it is a composite document: a philosophical and practice-based exploration of how computers are transforming literature, an ontological meditation on life and language, and a contribution to software studies. Digital poetry introduces animation, dimensionality and metadata into literary discourse. This necessitates new terminology; an acronym for Textual Audio-Visual Interactivity is proposed: Tavit. Tavits (malleable digital text) are tactile and responsive in ways that emulate living entities. They can possess dimensionality, memory, flocking, kinematics, surface reflectivity, collision detection, and responsiveness to touch, etc…. Life-like tactile tavits involve information that is not only semantic or syntactic, but also audible, imagistic and interactive. Reading mediated language-art requires an expanded set of critical, practical and discourse tools, and an awareness of the historical continuum that anticipates this expansion. The ontological and temporal design implications of tavits are supported with case-studies of two commercial typographic-animation softwares and one custom software (Mr Softie created at OBX Labs, Concordia) used during a research-creation process