Video Sequencing Weekly Report Sep 28 (last week)

What I have done this week:

1. Taking videos for the Media Lab Picnic Event

2. Writing annotations for all the 46 clips of the Thai Night video event

3. Trying a little bit of editing Thai Night

4. Watching New Orleans

5. Borrowing books about directing/screenplay writing, and reading some articles in them.

6. Coming up the idea “The process of explanation” as well as its relationship with ConceptNet

And the ideas I got from the above work:

1. New Orleans, Picnic, and Thai Night:

1. It’s telling a story steadily, and not entertainingly

2. In terms of narrative, there’s only one time line. The events are chronologically sequenced, and this time line goes with the evolution of people’s opinions as well as the construction of the building.

3. Often, the environment is introduced first when a scene is going to be shown.

4. The whole plot is structured hierarchically. The broadest level describes the years, the finest level are the individual shots. In the middle are the events, which may be composed of several shots or even several events. In the broadest and the event level, the years and the events are sequenced chronologically, while the shots within one event may or may not be follow the time order.

5. The shots are not necessarily organized exclusively. They can also overlap or intersect each other.

6. A speaker’s voice can be played as the audio part while other related shots are shown for the video part. And the speaker’s face is hidden behind.

And the questions:

1. New Orleans is a pretty long story, and its narrative fits it because it has a well time structure inherently. But what if we have only some shots of a short story? Would there be two different kinds of systems that work differently for such two different materials? Or in fact, do we need a system to give suggestions if the shots are not that many? (When I tried to edit Thai Night, I once thought the speed should be much faster, which is a totally different narrative than that in New Orleans…)

2. How do we manage the whole story plot, in terms of the sequencing/juxtaposing of the shots?

2. Distinguishing the “sequencing” and “juxtaposing” process for the shots

I think it’s necessary, when thinking about the video sequencing problem, to separate the ideas of “sequencing” and “juxtaposing” the shots. To my understanding, when I think of “juxtaposing” the shots, what I see is the details about how shots intersects or overlaps with one another. “Sequencing” the shots, on the other hand, is in a comparatively wider sense that involves with the flow of the whole story. If we can look at the flow and think about how we should develop the narrative for the whole story told by this video, we can focus more on the sequencing work, instead of mixing the two altogether.

3. My idea, “The process of explanation”

A scene can be one or more shots. It represents a scene in the story where different thoughts are collected.