Regine March 9, 2006 entertainment

Tangible movie editing for kids

Japanese media artist couple Mika Miyabara and Tatsuo Sugimoto‘s new concept for movie editing helps children understand the process of editing which has become too abstract since losing the actual film itself.

Movie Cards turns digital, abstract film material back into something tangible: paper cards.

1. Film your story with a digital camera.
2. Connect your camera to a computer with Movie Cards software installed.
3. The software will print out the movie cards. These small cards show the first image of each sequence taken from your camera.
4. Lay your cards on the table and arrange them in which ever order you want them to be.
5. Each card has a little QR-code or bar-code, so you can use a scanner or bar-code reader to beep-in your movie cards in the order you decided.
6. Preview on your monitor! Done.

The advanced concept of Movie Cards, enables you to print out each frame of your movie clips. The result looks very close to actually holding a film in your hand.

Since every frame has an individual bar-code printed next to the image you can edit the length of the clip by scanning the start and end frame of your sequence instead of cutting the film.

The developers also suggest to cut all of your desired frames and create a little flip-book.

Check also Cati Vaucelle’s brilliant Moving Pictures : Looking Out! Looking In!.
Via PingMag.

7Comments

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1

Ben Batschelet on March 9, 2006 at 6:33 pm

Although it doesn’t have the tactile element of these cards, this is essentially the same sort of interface Apple uses for iMovie. The visual simularites between the cards and iMovie clips is actually pretty interesting.
2

P.J. Onori on March 9, 2006 at 8:35 pm

This is a brilliant idea. I honestly think it’s just as useful for adults as it is for kids.
3

ari on March 10, 2006 at 3:28 am

The Museum of Moving Image in New York has a fantastic, hands-on animation station that is quite similar. Using cutouts with hinges, you can photograph each pose as a frame (a la Terry Gilliam) which is pretty cool. This is most excellent, as well. First posted comment! I love this blog; keep up the awesome work.
4

David on March 11, 2006 at 4:27 am

This really isn’t all that different from how any film is edited in a non-linear editing system now. Using Final Cut, for instance, involves moving the shots around and reordering them into a cut. This system just makes it physical, not virtual.
As someone who edits film professionally, I have to say that this is closer to a physical approximation of nonlinear, digital editing than it is to cutting film itself, analog style. With film, the physical length of the film made it impossible to just shuffle around the shots, the process was slower because of it. With computers, we can just shuffle around the shots, just like this.
It seems like a good starter way for kids to work, but, really, since you can see a frame of the shot you’re working on anyway, if you’re using a nonlinear editor, there’s no reason for kids to keep using this process once they understand the concepts.
5

matt on March 11, 2006 at 4:35 am

Reminds me of the Data Cards project from a little while back at sony computer science labs.
One interesting touch, would be to use RFID instead of the barcodes.
Still wish I had one when I was a kid though.
6

Todd on March 12, 2006 at 4:58 am

This is an awesome idea, Although it would take forever when doing each frame one at a time. I like the idea of RFID’s but they wouldn’t come out of your printer so easy =).
What would be cool would be if each of those were little screens that played the segment. You could lay them out and edit by placing in a different order… but that might be getting to far out there.
7

Making Movies on March 22, 2006 at 3:05 am

Tangible movie editing

Here’s an interesting idea: Tangible movie editing for kids. It boils down to this: you print out thumbnails representing each scene on your tape, then arrange the thumbnails on a table in the order you want to present them. Barcodes…

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