Video making for children

Moving Pictures : Looking Out! Looking In! is a multi-user system that invites kids to create manipulate and share video content with others.

The system consists of a video station containing two cameras, RFID tokens, a screen and a tabletop with embedded RFID readers.

A token with a digital ID is inserted into a PDA with a camera so that its ID is permanently associated with the temporal sequence of image and sound as it is recorded. Once removed from the camera, the token can be used to retrieve the sequence of images from memory, to display and to place it within a longer media sequence.

There are three operating modes:

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– In Shooting mode, the users insert a token in the camera and record a shot. They place the camera on the table and the video is transferred wirelessly to the computer.
Once removed from the camera, the tokens can be used as a composition element on the table and the resulting video clips can later be combined by the group to achieve a common outcome.

– In VideoJockeying mode, the users can improvise video compositions using the tokens to play the video clips instantaneously on the screen.

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– In Storyboarding, the user users can improvise video compositions using the tokens to play the video clips instantaneously on the screen. As they pass a token over a RFID reader on the table, the computer retrieves the segment associated with it and plays it back on
the screen.

Finally, the kids combine their video segments and a number of pre-defined sound effects to create a movie.

A work by Cati Vaucelle, Diana Africano, Glorianna Davenport, Mikael Wiberg and Oskar Fjellstrom.

Video.

Moving Pictures will be shown at SIGGRAPH.