Film Ties: Collaborative Film Editing and Teaching
William Bares – College of Charleston
Donald Schwartz – Marist College
Film Ties a Web-based collaborative tool for film editing and education. Create and share libraries of personalized camera compositions. Post text comments and suggest alternate compositions to collaborate. Learn to improve your own compositions by reviewing comments made to your compositions. An AI automatically suggests human-recommended alternate compositions and text critiques. I welcome collaborations with teachers of film production who wish to experiment with this tool as an active-learning aid. I also welcome collaborations with researchers who wish to use the tool as a way to crowd-source knowledge of cinematic narrative.
WICED 2015 and CSCW 2016 Film Ties GUI
The 2015 version of Film Ties relied on pre-defined animated scenes but allowed users to operate a motion-tracked virtual camera to compose camera shots. Users can share and critique work by posting text comments to a shot or adjusting the camera to suggest an alternate or improved composition. With the CSCW 2016 paper, the system’s AI can upon user request automatically recommend critique comments and/or alternate shot compositions suggested by other users.
The web-base GUI enables a user to record and playback camera shots, share and browse compositions, vote on favorite compositions, and post and read comments about compositions. You can even suggest a new composition as an alternative or improved to a selected composition. The system is unique in that it allows users to communicate the essence of a visual composition in terms of character size, placement, and angle, etc. These compositions can be re-applied in other novel 3d scenes. If a performance capture system is available, we can move and aim the virtual camera by holding and turning the iPad equipped with the tracking devices (see below example using PhaseSpace active red LED markers).
Filmties on iPad with Phasespace tracking
Technical Details
Please check out our publications that describes the client-server architecture. The full version includes an intelligent camera assistant, which can compute camera shots that reproduce any shared composition by any Film Ties user. In effect, create personalized, re-usable libraries of favorite camera compositions, and instantly have them re-computed to visualize any other 3D scenes
Publications about Film Ties
William Bares, Caroline Requierme, and Elizabeth Obisesan. 2017. Film Ties: A Web-based Virtual 3D Lab for Teaching the Film Art from Script to Blocking. In Proceedings of WICED 2017: Eurographics Workshop on Intelligent Cinematography and Editing. Eurographics Association. Leon, France, 2017. Film ties wiced 2017.
William Bares and Donald Schwartz. 2016. Film Ties: Crowd-sourced Teaching of Cinematography Using Intelligent Example Galleries. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Companion (CSCW ’16 Companion). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 229-232.
William Bares, Donald Schwartz, Cristovam Segundo’, Santoshi Nitya’, Sydney Aiken’, and Clinton Medbery’. 2015. Film Ties: An Architecture for Collaborative Data-driven Cinematography. In Proceedings of WICED 2015: Eurographics Workshop on Intelligent Cinematography and Editing. Eurographics Association. Zurich, Switzerland, May 4, 2015, 63-68.