A number of emerging technologies may soon revolutionize the analysis and teaching of film and media studies. The Motionbox site allows users to upload videos, highlight and tag individual scenes, search for similar tags in other videos, and share media with others through email or Web site posting.
Creating tagged video clips in Motionbox is as easy as highlighting a portion of the “filmstrip” and then adding keywords or phrases. Users can use the tagging system to create episodes (like DVD chapters) or label very short video clips. The site also allows users to “jump” to particular tagged sections.
Demonstration of the clip highlighting tool in Motionbox.
Image this scenario:
You are teaching a course like Textural Analysis: Film, Fashion and Material Culture, a course in Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. Students are asked to consider the common language of film and fashion: how they convey identity, create narratives, and shape visual trends. A primary focus is Wong Kar-Wai’s visually arresting film, In the Mood for Love. You ask students to use a video tagging software application (like Motionbox) to tag clips from In the Mood for Love for “fashion elements”: actors’ poses, wardrobes, background settings, colors, makeup, fashion lighting techniques, etc. These tagged elements are then entered into a database and sorted, annotated by the students, compared to cinematic techniques in other films—all toward a new understanding of Wong Kar-Wai’s film and its relationship to fashion.
Another innovation for video analysis, called Metavid, is being hosted by the University of California at Santa Cruz. The project “seeks to capture, stream, archive, and facilitate real-time collective [re]mediation of legislative proceedings” through open source software.
Metavid not only captures the audio and video of US Senate and House floor footage, but also does an OCR capture of the close caption text. All of this metadata is then indexed and made available to the public for searching and downloading in a variety of formats. The project’s Wiki includes a number of compelling Metavid-enabled project ideas and a useful list of similar projects that focus on video annotation, indexing, archiving, “mashups,” and more.
