The
test with an international user group was carried out during Christmas Eve –
with users from Philadelphia and New Jersey, USA, Western and Eastern Finland
and Vilnius, Lithuania. The structure of this test was more game-like. This
small community was asked to create a story or montage containing
communication, comments or tension between the short clips. The idea was to
test how a small community could share their experiences through generated
video narration.
Saturday 8 September 2012
Community creates narratives in Jazz-festival
Video is a test with the MoViE and it was was conducted in summer 2008 during the
Pori Jazz Festival. The most popular concerts at the event are major mass
events attended by tens of thousands of people. They are held in a big field,
people spend hours at the concerts listening to music, jamming, eating and
drinking. The picnic concerts attract a wide range of visitors, including
numerous large groups of friends and families.
The aim of the test was to see
how a larger group of people would video film a major mass event with a cell
phone, from their own perspectives. By delimiting the themes of the videos, the
objective was to come up with a group of short clips featuring different
perspectives on people arriving on the festival scene, coming to the concert
site, finding a picnic place, jamming, leaving and continuing the party
afterwards.
First video montages - narratives?
The idea of a
jazz-structured narrative was tested by two users in April 2008. The shooting
time was decided to be one week, and during this time both of us were traveling
in Finland (Pori, Tampere) and abroad in Tallinn, Estonia, and Milan, Italy.
The set of rules were decided so that Marjo shot the first video and downloaded
it to the MoviE platform. Jari watched the video and tried to shoot a comment,
a variation, his own “solo video”, which might have something in common with
the first video – a rhythm, shape, image, theme etc. We wanted to test whether
it is possible to create a coherent, intense and motivated storyline out of
occasional video clips.
Video montage composed according to the structural model from jazz had lots of combinations, the clips varied the themes, such as ‘window’, ‘curtain’ or ‘movement’, and yet they created confrontation or were like visual commentaries. Also first test with MoViE showed that to be coherent and to create suspense the individual video clips have to be much shorter in order to give a certain rhythm to the narration.
Video montage composed according to the structural model from jazz had lots of combinations, the clips varied the themes, such as ‘window’, ‘curtain’ or ‘movement’, and yet they created confrontation or were like visual commentaries. Also first test with MoViE showed that to be coherent and to create suspense the individual video clips have to be much shorter in order to give a certain rhythm to the narration.
What do we do with all these videos?
The Helsinki Festival Night of the Arts in August
2009: A beautiful art performance took place at the Helsinki Senate Square; Plasticiens Volantsin Perle, by a group of artists directed by Marc
Bureau, tells the story of the journey of a pearl through underwater dangers.
Sea serpents, medusas, whales and fish dance in the air above to the tune of
music composed by Phillippe Bonnet. Thousands of people saw the
poetically beautiful work in the Helsinki summer night – and the performance
was immortalized in their camera phones. I myself also filmed the creatures
floating in the air, and afterwards noticed in the images the sea of light
produced by thousands of mobile phone cameras.
Image 22: The Senate Square in Helsinki, August 2008.
Capture from unpublished mobile video taken by Marjo Mäenpää, 2009
What do people do with all these pictures and videos?
In what kind of situations do they watch their videos? Do those who were
present compare their angles of view with each other? Do they send their
glimpses of atmosphere out as greetings somewhere to the other side of the
world?
Mobile video and visual narratives
Videos in my blog are connected to my PhD-thesis. Here I'm studying how single images or videos could be understood as a narrative.
A single video clip may last only a few
seconds and still contain an identifiable subject, object of the action and
result of the events. A mobile phone video clip lasting a few seconds is not
necessarily the most exciting story, it may not be very entertaining even to
the person who has filmed it – at least not for very long or after having been
repeated many times. At its simplest, it reminds of the moment when it was
filmed, the state of mind leading to the action of bringing out the mobile
phone and filming the clip.
Image 14. Imagine the sound, imagine the
story (Screenshot from mobile video, Marjo Mäenpää, 2010)
I have a 21-second video in my cell phone:
The image pans around in a pine forest, on the sinking moss tufts, and stops at
a grayish brown trumpet chanterelle. In the background one can hear the sounds
of a forest machine and falling trees. For the person who has filmed it the
video speaks of a beloved forest and mushroom picking site and the forest
machines that are threatening it. Is this the beginning of an exciting story
which the viewer can build on and complete in her or his mind? It could also be
a story of the crushing of one dream.
The research question, data and topic
"Co-created mobile narratives" is a qualitative study on how a video created by several
authors is constructed into a consumable medium and, potentially, into a
narrative. My research proceeds from the basis of short, co-created mobile
videos, their remixes and the narrative compilations born from these remixes.
The aim is to study visual narratives co-created by a user community with the
video cameras of mobile phones. I will explore the marginal conditions of
narrativity and whether coherent stories can be produced out of the video
material created by several users in a community.
My study seeks answers to the questions of how people tell “mobile”
stories using their phones and how a community creates narrative through mobile
phones, using video. The questions are based on claims that people today are
telling stories through social media and, also, visually – through images and
videos.
In different projects and demos the aim was test how various
narrative structures work in mobile video storytelling applications –
first of all for creative projects. The special interest was in
narratives made with the mobile phone and for the mobile phone i.e. they
are supposed to be viewed on the mobile phone. The main research data
consist of a set of test users videos and a remixes with predefined
narrative structures
MoViE -http://movie.pori.tut.fi/
For the use of MSM project the platform in University Consortium of Pori, Finland we implemented a demo platform
that enables users to create mobile narrations and stories using
narrative structures. The implementation is based on video database
(MySql), a set of interface scripts (php) and user interface design for
Nokia Series 60 phones
Mobile Social Media Research Project
The Mobile Social Media project studied how people were using the video cameras in their mobile phones,
what kind of video images they were sending each other and what they wanted to
communicate with these images. The research question was focused on the study
of social media.
The research was carried out by CAT – Culture Art and
Technology network which was a group of researchers and professionals in the Pori
units of Tampere University of Technology, University of Art and Design and
University of Turku acting at the University Consortium of Pori during
2006-2010.
The idea was to research how separately filmed mobile videos from the same event or experience could form dramaturgically intensive story after loading them into web based story generator MoViE. The implementation is based on video database (MySql), a set of interface scripts (php) and user interface design for Nokia Series 60 phones. The test hypothesis was that a community – weather it is virtual or non virtual, could create an entertaining experience through a video montage. Second sub-hypothesis was about the experience of entertainment being more visible if the community that shares mobile videos were already connected.
Narrative structures
Narrative structures not only determine the dramaturgical solutions of a story but also how the story is received. By analyzing the structures, the motives, functions and context of the story can be revealed. Structures are like building blocks made up of the actors/actants, events, objectives, time and place – and also the reception – of the story which together form a coherent whole. In the present era of interactive, digital media much has been written about narrative structures. This has given rise to such questions as how does the role or status of the author change when the user can interfere with the plot, like in games, or when there are several authors and the users can choose the most exciting one of a selection of story plots. In narratology, the starting point has been definition of structures. In my thesis I will examine how the observations made by structuralists apply to co-created narratives. Could post-structuralist narratology possibly provide better tools to study the narrative structures of digital, interactive media?
Co-creation
Film and game productions are for the most part co-created by a collective group of authors. The story is born from the collaboration of many different media professionals and writers. Narratology focuses its study on the text in general, the narrative medium and the story itself. Do I have to trace my steps back to the origins of media research to prove that the “medium is the message” if I claim that the means of production – for example, co-creation, brings something new and different to a story?
Mobile co-creation
My research into the mobile video projects proceeds from the baseline assumption that in a social community (network, event, etc. ) people can portray a one and same event from different perspectives and with a certain kind of structuralized model create automated, coherent, i.e. functional, understandable and even enjoyable video narratives. The narratives can be interesting and meaningful to the community itself. One could speak of a “whole and proper narrative”, according to the model Aristotle proposed on the structure of tragedy.
The idea was to research how separately filmed mobile videos from the same event or experience could form dramaturgically intensive story after loading them into web based story generator MoViE. The implementation is based on video database (MySql), a set of interface scripts (php) and user interface design for Nokia Series 60 phones. The test hypothesis was that a community – weather it is virtual or non virtual, could create an entertaining experience through a video montage. Second sub-hypothesis was about the experience of entertainment being more visible if the community that shares mobile videos were already connected.
Narrative structures
Narrative structures not only determine the dramaturgical solutions of a story but also how the story is received. By analyzing the structures, the motives, functions and context of the story can be revealed. Structures are like building blocks made up of the actors/actants, events, objectives, time and place – and also the reception – of the story which together form a coherent whole. In the present era of interactive, digital media much has been written about narrative structures. This has given rise to such questions as how does the role or status of the author change when the user can interfere with the plot, like in games, or when there are several authors and the users can choose the most exciting one of a selection of story plots. In narratology, the starting point has been definition of structures. In my thesis I will examine how the observations made by structuralists apply to co-created narratives. Could post-structuralist narratology possibly provide better tools to study the narrative structures of digital, interactive media?
Co-creation
Film and game productions are for the most part co-created by a collective group of authors. The story is born from the collaboration of many different media professionals and writers. Narratology focuses its study on the text in general, the narrative medium and the story itself. Do I have to trace my steps back to the origins of media research to prove that the “medium is the message” if I claim that the means of production – for example, co-creation, brings something new and different to a story?
Mobile co-creation
My research into the mobile video projects proceeds from the baseline assumption that in a social community (network, event, etc. ) people can portray a one and same event from different perspectives and with a certain kind of structuralized model create automated, coherent, i.e. functional, understandable and even enjoyable video narratives. The narratives can be interesting and meaningful to the community itself. One could speak of a “whole and proper narrative”, according to the model Aristotle proposed on the structure of tragedy.
See: Mobile Social Media Researc Project:
Multisilta, Suominen, Mäenpää (2010) Yhdessä ja liikkeellä, Mobiili sosiaalinen media http://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/62911
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