Gormenghast will
be digitally manipulated |
Imagine editing Titanic down to watch just your
favourite bits or cutting out the slushier moments of Star Wars to
leave you with a bare bones action-fest.
Manipulating your favourite films to
make a more personalised movie is just the beginning of an ambitious
new 7.5m euro (£5.1m) project funded by the European Union.
New Media for a New Millennium (NM2)
will have as its endgame the development of a completely new media
genre, which will allow audiences to create their own media worlds
based on their specific interests or tastes.
Viewers will be able to participate in
storylines, manipulate plots and even the sets and props of TV shows.
BT is one of 13 partners involved in
the project. It will be contributing software that was originally
designed to spot anomalies in CCTV pictures.
The software uses content recognition
algorithms.
The three-year project will work on
seven productions as it develops a set of software tools that will
allow viewers to edit content to their needs.
Gothic fantasy
One of the productions will be a
experimental television show where the plot will be driven by text
messages from the TV audience.
 |
"At the moment we
have interactive gaming and a limited form of interactive TV which
usually means allowing audiences to vote on shows. We are hoping
to occupy the space in-between"
Dr Doug
Williams, BT |
Participants will text selected words which will impact
how the characters in the drama interact.
It is being developed in Finland and
will be shown to Finnish TV audiences.
Another team will work on the BBC's big
budget drama of Mervyn Peake's gothic fantasy Gormenghast.
It will be re-engineered to allow
people to choose a variety of edited versions.
"The BBC is allowing us access to the
material so that we can prove the technology and the principles,"
explained Dr Doug Williams of BT, who will be NM2's technical project
manager.
"The TV at the moment is a relatively
dumb box which receives signals. This project is about teaching the
machine to look at content like Lego blocks that can be reassembled to
make perfect sense," he said.
"At the moment we have interactive
gaming and a limited form of interactive TV which usually means
allowing audiences to vote on shows. We are hoping to occupy the space
in-between," he added.
Active TV
NM2's co-ordinator Peter Stollenmayer
explained that the new genre would radically alter the role of the
audience.
Viewers can
create their own version of the Renaissance |
"Viewers will be able to interact directly with the
medium and influence what they see and hear according to their
personal tastes and wishes," he said.
"Media users will no longer be passive
viewers but become active engagers."
It will also be important that the
tools are sophisticated enough to obey the complex rules of
cinematography and editing said John Wyver, from TV producer
Illuminations Television Limited, which is also involved in the
project.
"It's not just a matter of stringing
together the romantic or action portions of a production," said Mr
Wyver.
"The tool has to know which bits fit
together both visually, by observing the time-honoured rules that go
in editing, and in terms of the story."
"Only then will the personalised
version both make sense and be aesthetically pleasing," he added.
Mr Wyver is planning a production
entitled The Golden Age, about Renaissance art. It will allow viewers
to create a so-called media world based on their own specific areas of
interest such as poetry, music and architecture.
Other productions that the NM2 team
will make range from news, documentaries to a romantic comedy drama. |
