Throughout the conference, we intend demonstrating two pieces of software to the public facilitating reorganisation of cinematographic information with two separate aims : one, Time Lines software, designed at IRI and dedicated to the annotation of cine-film by groups of not strictly professional enthusiasts, the other the SLIDERS software, invented at EESI, and enabling real time play with film sequences and the reconnaissance of a new cinema form.

Time Lines Software

Functionality of Time Lines Software
The Time Lines Software is an annotation and film synopsis tool which makes the most of possibilities offered by digital support. It was inspired by timelines normally in use on a digital montage bench, time lines affords graphic depiction of the film, which updates from the outset, and gives a full account of cutting. In this way time lines offers new ingress into cine-film by substituting, for the requirements of synopsis, a 'cartography', in place of the unreeled rationale to which the viewer is normally confronted. Thus by choosing a time line segment the user directly accesses the corresponding lay-out or segment in the film, which may then be described and analysed by textual sound or video observations of the images or internet links.

From this first benchmark through which you are able to scan the film, frame by frame, other guidelines become applicable through which you may build new time lines and give new directions to fresh avenues based upon frame-scale, camera action, zoom in and zoom out and potentially anything in front of the lens. So many more ways of enhancing approach, and even more so of visualising through comparison and combining benchmarks of relevance, impression and meaning, updating, for instance, any repetition and symmetry.

“Non-pro” applications
Already historians critics and theoreticians in fine-art and cine-film students have seized on these tools in order to check out their assumptions or to explore new ones thus enabling expertise, criticism, enrichment or even misappropriation of the systems.

 

SLIDERS software

Coherent software
SLIDERS is a collective interactive cine-film project. This new form of cinema is able to foster the notion of probability clusters used today to debrief reality. To do this, coherent software has been devised allowing three performers, publicly, to play out promising scores of “film in the making”.
The SLIDERS I.T. Engine installed during performance, thus displays three dedicated spaces at three points in the film making process:
- the video data base management space
- the video handling space
- sound playability-choice space
- For each space a distinct program has been developed, which is a modifiable and connectible network data interchange protocol via the OSC (Open Sound Control).

The program enables real time combining of video and sound, and also play on effects. Each visual and sound entity is described according to previously defined guidelines which are kept in a dictionary. To retrieve an element or a whole extraction of elements among the millions held on the data base, all that is needed is to approximatively describe that which is being searched when making a textual inquiry.

Interaction form
SLIDERS models the forms according to the visual information appearing on the screen. It builds the mobile architecture of image which can be explored in all spatial dimensions. In this way one visually traces the length of the surface of images whose forms are by then nothing more than program variables.
Thus the architecture paradigms are cylindrical, cubic, hexagonal, dodecahedral etc. They are mathematical structures, abstract grids on whose mesh occasional digital elements hook up, in other terms, devices suggesting to those viewing, the very means to grasp the functioning of notions of flow and interconnection.

A regional educational strategy

The “Cinema, interactivity and society” conference provides the opportunity of reflecting upon educational strategies aimed at schools and more especially secondary high schools within the Poitou-Charentes region of France. The work has been designed, hand in hand, with the “Image Education” department of the Poitou-Charentes region and concerns at least four high schools chosen in the four local areas which make up the region: namely Charente, Charente-Maritime, Deux-Sèvres and Vienne. In the main these schools include :

- Charles Coulomb, Angoulême;
- LISA, Angoulême;
- Guy Chauvet, Loudun;
- Merleau-Ponty, Rochefort.
An educational scheme is also ongoing and aimed at the Université de Poitiers.

An educational scheme
It involves going into a high school and speaking for a day on handling Time lines and SLIDERS software following, or prior to, a conference on the subject.
In the high schools, the whole day's presentation is from 9am to 12 and from 2pm to 5pm. If it cannot take place in a high school, the class may be accommodated at the Espace Mendès-France in Poitiers.

The various meetings will take place in November or in December 2008. Lectures on cinema related issues, on interactivity and society are part and parcel of the educational organisation of classes and are coupled in strict collaboration with relevant teachers.
To begin with, a general presentation sets out an inventory on the state of digital concept, followed up by listing the integral parts toward a historical view of digital related arts, putting the subject into context. The first part represents the educational content which is essential to understanding the tools to be presented later.
Secondly a presentation of the invited artists and theoreticians themselves is delivered. Generally special attention is paid to those concepts and tools which are relevant to interactive cinema.

The general educational bias is to sensitise pupils and to cover issues of digital interactivity and cine-film of tomorrow ( high definition, relief, immersion etc.). The speakers are both academics from a go-between professional field. Their aim is to set out and put forward a thorough and intelligible educational approach towards the significance and the aims of the study work.