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ShapeShiftedTV Tutorial

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ShapeShiftedTV: Why Now? Developing ShapeShifted TV as a new artistic form of communication may be interesting, challenging and stimulating to the creative community. But will it make economic sense? It might do, if users really want the new service, or if the new services are unusually cheap to produce and distribute. This session will provide some context and market rationale for ShapeShifted TV. Attendees will learn something of the potential economic pitfalls of reconfigurable narrative productions but also learn why we believe being clever with narrative design can be profitable.
Convenors: Doug Williams (BT) and Andra Leurdijk (TNO)
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Narrativity in ShapeShiftedTV. The main objective of this session is to present traditional narrative approaches and audio-visual languages that are suitable for iTV, but also new approaches and languages made possible by iTV. The presentation covers developments on issues of narrative-grammars and interactivity as well as mise en scene, mise en cadre, colour, music and sound. For interactivity, it explores different types of immersion (spatial, temporal, emotional, argumentative, etc.). Various examples from NM2 productions will illustrate the presentation.
Convenor: Maureen Thomas (University of Cambridge)
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Computational Representations for ShapeShiftedTV. In NM2, a minimal set of recursive primitive narrative structures have been devised for the representation of story worlds – i.e. of the explorable narrative spaces. They are collectively denoted as the Narrative Structure Language (NSL) and include: narrative object, link structure, selection group, and layer. They accommodate both explicit specifications of how narrative objects are to be delivered as well as implicit specifications in the form of narrative rules. The specifications of narrative objects make extensive use of their metadata descriptions, which originate in associated ontologies. This session presents the main features of NSL together with the associated issues referring to automatic reasoning. NM2 production examples and software demonstrations will illustrate the presentation.
Convenors: Marian Ursu and Jon Cook (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Michael Hausenblas (Joanneum Research)
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Authoring ShapeShiftedTV productions. A ShapeShiftedTV production enables the presentation of a story through multiple storylines and story-angles. Programme makers (from script writers to editors) have to conceive and author ways for multiple narrative strands to cross and interweave, providing many different paths through the available material, with potential junctions and crossing points that may be chosen by the viewers during their explorations. Further, in productions whose forms can be shaped in numerous ways by the viewers, the task of testing whether all possible routes through the material are cogent, sensible and ultimately aesthetically satisfying is much harder, if not impossible. The NM2 Production Tools were built to address these issues; sketching, implementing, and testing ShapeShiftedTV programmes. An overview of the tools accompanied by demonstrations will be presented in this session.
Convenors: Marian Ursu and Vilmos Zsombori (Goldsmiths, University of London), and Michael Hausenblas (Joanneum Research)
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Delivering ShapeShiftedTV productions. A programme which can potentially provide a unique experience for each individual viewer needs a very different form of delivery system to the conventional broadcast model. In addition to a media player to render audio and video streams, the client must be provided with an application to manage user interaction, and most importantly to synchronise this with the media streams and other visual components. On the server side, new strategies must be developed to enable multi-layer playlists to be dynamically adjusted after playback has started, thus allowing the media to respond to the viewer’s interactions. This session will describe and demonstrate the capabilities of the NM2 Delivery System, and will also discuss the critical issue of scalability, presenting strategies for enabling thousands of simultaneous viewers to watch ShapeShiftedTV programmes. The session will also briefly describe how the NM2 Delivery System was adapted to drive a broadcast playout unit for one production which wasdelivered on national television in Finland (December 2006).
Convenor: Ian Kegel (BT)
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Timetable