Live Cinema: designing an instrument for cinema editing as a live performance

  • Authors:
  • Michael Lew

  • Affiliations:
  • Media Lab Europe, Dublin, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • NIME '04 Proceedings of the 2004 conference on New interfaces for musical expression
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

This paper describes the design of an expressive tangible interface for cinema editing as a live performance. A short survey of live video practices is provided. The Live Cinema instrument is a cross between a musical instrument and a film editing tool, tailored for improvisational control as well as performance presence. Design specifications for the instrument evolved based on several types of observations including: our own performances in which we used a prototype based on available tools; an analysis of performative aspects of contemporary DJ equipment; and an evaluation of organizational aspects of several generations of film editing tools. Our instrument presents the performer with a large canvas where projected images can be grabbed and moved around with both hands simultaneously; the performer also has access to two video drums featuring haptic display to manipulate the shots and cut between streams. The paper ends with a discussion of issues related to the tensions between narrative structure and hands-on control, live and recorded arts and the scoring of improvised films.