Consumer Light & Magic

We want to make movies as easily parsed as text in their creation and delivery. Media becomes more accessible and more powerful when it is broken into reusable parts like words or alphabets. And yet movies are still mostly shot and consumed in whole scenes. With inexpensive cameras like the Kinect it is now much easier to capture separable elements within a scene. Movies should no longer be a collection of colored pixels but instead delivered like textual media as a combination of manipulable entities. Then the great power of computational media, reuse and analysis, can be used to make movies interactive and searchable.

Companies like Industrial Light and Magic in the special effects industry have long been able to composite disparate elements from the filmmaker’s imagination together in a way that would be expensive or impossible to assemble in actual physical space. The camera and software technologies that allow artists to capture and manipulate video elements are now available at a consumer level. But the disparate digital elements are currently flattened back into a bunch of pixels before the movie is delivered to the audience as a linear experience.

To really put the power of communicating in visual narrative into the hands of the “audience” we need to build an end-to-end system where the components of a scene maintain their separate identities, provenance and capabilities on delivery to the “audience.” By starting with recombining these elements of existing movies more people would be able to make movies or at least versions of them. It would also make movies more “Googleable” as people could form a query by composing a scene. Or more likely compose a scene so they are more easily Googleable.