Tool of North America are doing some very cool things with interactive video, like their new Touching Stories iPad app.
By touching, shaking and turning your iPad, you can navigate, unlock and reveal unexpected variations in each of these four “Touching Stories.” Shot by five different directors—and contained in one single app—these interactive, live-action, short stories evolve storytelling in ways that have never been done before on the iPad.
The iPad’s big touch screen is a much more intuitive medium for a hypervideo interactive story than a mouse or trackpad.
Someone’s already set to work making a pretty (if very American) little short drama entirely within the iPhone, using its new HD video camera and built-in iMovie app:
When the iPhone 4 hit the shops last week, I was at the Cannes advertising festival, doing some mobile filmmaking to promote the Nokia N86. So it seemed like it’d be bad form to blog about the new iPhone’s HD video camera and built in iMovie editor – especially as I’ve been moaning for 2 years about Nokia’s decision to kill their excellent in-phone editor.
My mobile videoblog Twittervlog.tv started out in 2007 with videos that were shot, cut and posted straight from my N93. It frustrated me that over the years, Nokia had resigned their considerable lead in this area, and let Apple overtake them – despite Apple’s repeated reluctance to introduce video & in-phone editing.
It may seem like a geek sport at first glance, but mobile filmmaking excites me because it’s all about the ease & immediacy of having a complete filmmaking tool in your pocket – for personal & holiday videos, reporting live events and creative storytelling. Capturing, editing and posting without having to mess about with transferring to a computer, filing, converting, exporting, uploading, etc. I was excited about the quality & ease of the iPhone, and now even happier that Nokia are still pushing the boundaries too.
I just read on Nokia’s N Series Blog about an organisation called the World Film Collective – which has given old Nokia N85 video phones to 48 South Africans, and trained them with mobile filmmaking & citizen journalism skills, so that they can give their perspectives on what the World Cup means to their local communities.
I’ve done some of this work with marginalized communities here in the UK – and next week I’ll be doing it with rich kids, reporting from Cannes, where young creative teams will be making adverts with N86s – but it’s always awesome to read about phones (particularly superseded models) are being used for creative and empowering video journalism in Africa.
Makes me think we should start collecting all our old N95s and N85s, which once cost us $500, and using them to do some good… If you have an old phone you’d like to creatively recycle, let me know.
I’ve transcribed the voiceover from this video, below. Apart from the hype, it gives a pretty good introduction to what internet/TV convergence will start to look like.
I’ve been banging on about this for so long that you’ll have to forgive my teenage excitement about it. I was expecting this kind of device to have arrived in a big way by 2007/8. Most of it is not much more advanced than your TiVo, Sky+ or Microsoft system – but instead of their horrible clunky interfaces, this looks well thought out, with full search and web access, and a properly integrated browser. If only Apple had made their AppleTV more like this three years ago. I’m still not sure why they didn’t.
It’s long been my opinion that the way people really want to experience entertainment is on their couch, rather than on their laptops and at their desk. But I’ve found, when enthusing about this stuff over the years, that some people have had trouble imagining using the web on their TV from their couch – particularly because they’re confused about how they’ll control it. With a keyboard and mouse? A really big remote control? A Wii wand?
No doubt we’ll have to wait another pointlessly long time before internet TV systems start using the new motion-sensing videogame control systems.
Some things seem so obvious that you can’t believe they’re the subject of breathless feature pieces speculating about futuristic technology.
The iPad as an indie movie distribution tool, for instance. It’s all about the apps, right?
There’s an article today in The L Magazine, a NY events & culture mag, about how Behind The Scenes Of Total Hell will be the first indie movie released as an app for the iPad this summer, after selling literally dozens of copies on the iPhone.
Total Hell has used a Silicon Valley app developer called Stonehenge Productions, who specialise in getting indie films into the iTunes store and turning them into Apps.
The article weighs up the pros and cons of distributing via Apple apps and some other proprietary storefronts like Netflix and iTunes. Read the rest of this entry »
