CONTRIBUTORS 

Sanna Vilmusenaho / Background in video and animation
Kati Hyyppä / Background in research, interaction design and illustration
Open Video Make Session / Open Culture and Science Hackday 18.9.2012

OVERVIEW

In our Horror in Kallio video project we combined openly licensed video clips, audio and images from various online sources. For example, we used old Public Domain illustrations found through Europeana, and video clips from the Kallio Archive, which provides everyday observations from the Kallio district in Helsinki. The horror theme inspired us as old videos and pictures often give a gloomy, or at least mysterious feeling. On the other hand, we were interested in twisting the mood of ordinary scenes by means of image manipulation. We made atmospheric video scenes and animated gifs, and complemented these with dark music and sound effects. The outcome of the hackday can be found below, as well as the steps involved in making the video. We plan to continue with the materials in the future: Sanna is working on her next short film and Kati will explore the possibilities of animated creatures further on.

The project documentation is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike.

STEPS & TIPS

Compositing and creating effects for background videos in Adobe After Effects

We combined all the material and rendered the final video in Adobe After Effects. Video clips from the Kallio archive were dwnloaded to the computer and imported to the After Effects composition and then edited to fit the length of the music we chose from a website called Jamendo. Video effects such as adding grain or making color adjustment were added to the Kallio Arcihve clips to create the spooky look we were looking for.

Link to a AE video tutorial on Black and White Adjustment.
Link to a AE video tutorial on Time Stretching

Looking for sounds and music

Online repository for sounds can be found at Freesound. It is possible for everyone to listen to the audio tracks but downloading requires registeration. Sounds we used in our project were found using keywords such as “owls” and “foot steps”

Jamendo is a music website where all the content is licensed under the Creative Commons licenses.  The search functionality is really helpful as it is possible to search according to the genre, instruments and mood of the songs. In order to find the right song for our project we used search words such as “horror”, “experimental” and “soundtrack” .  Also, it’s possible to filter the search results with the appropriate CC license.

Creating animated gifs

Pictures for the animated gifs were found through the Europeana portal, which provides access to a wide variety of digitized cultural heritage media. Using keywords like “insects”, we found nice high resolution Public Domain illustrations from the collections of the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands. The images were from 16th and 18th century and depicted different kinds of insects and other creatures. We made a Pinterest board of the images to aid selection and keeping track of source information.

For the hackday two gif animations were made from two illustrations, as there was not so much time. The chosen pictures contained owls (1560-1585, creator unknown) and a green millipede (1778, drawing by Martinus Slabber, print by Robbert Muys).

Photoshop was used to make the gif animations, but free and open source GIMP can also used for this purpose. First, the creatures were separated from the picture by removing the background. Then, the parts of the images which were animated were separated into different layers. For example, in the case of the owls, this included separating the bodies on one layer, as well as each eye and each tuft (the pointy things on the top of the owl’s head). Animation was done by choosing on the animation timeline which layers are shown at a given moment (see image below). The image size was also made smaller, as the original images were very large. Finally, the animation was exported as a .mov file, setting the background to transparent, so that it could be overlaid on the other videos made from the Kallio Archive materials.

Video of how to animate in Photoshop
Video of how to animate in GIMP

Contributors 

Aapo Rista / Software Developer
Jani Turunen / Software Developer

Overview

We have a strong background in software development and we decided to have a programmers point of view in this project. So we took a bunch of Kallio Archive videos and created an Django + HTML5 + CSS3 + Javascript (JQuery) application, which shows random videos in 3×3 grid in the web browsers window.

Steps & tips

1. Copied all Kallio Archive videos and converted them smaller (ffmpeg)
2. Created simple HTML5 template mockup
3. Created Django project and “kallioarchive” Django application
4. Merged HTML5 template into Django app
5. iterated until the video mosaic app was functional

Contributors 

Till Bovermann is a researcher at the Department of Media, School of Art, Design and Architecture, Aalto University.

Overview

An experiment with generative sound that is based on visual material.

I used material from the Kallio Archive. Footage by Emmi Vainio (7 videos clips), Cvijeta Miljak (2 video clips), Kalle Kuisma (1 video clip), Minna Tarkka (3 video clip). All used video material (CC BY).

Steps & tips

I selected clips from the Kallio archive and connected them to one large file within a video editing software. Then I loaded the video on Processing and extracted the average color of 25 columns. These were sent to SuperCollider in OSC messages where the sound rendering took place. The accompanying code part can be found here.

And here is a video showing the project:

By Daniel Ockeloen

Daniel works for a SME called Noterik B.V. in Amsterdam where he is involved with building video applications for online uses. He started programming in 1981 and moved from building games to online applications with a passion for building tools for content creators. He worked for TV stations for about 10 years and is now involved in European/Education and Oral-History projects that make up the core aim for the company. He was invited to the OKFest because of involvement with EUscreen.

Overview

As a programmer I am limited to how much I can make during a workshop like this, so in preparing for this workshop I had a talk with Kati Hyyppä and Sanna Marttila and decided to show and try to implement an example of a topic I am interested in, which is researching if we can change the way that a video-montage is made. In the old way, video was edited in a editing program and cut by the editor. He/she would convert the raw video into a story in a fixed way. For example, a documentary might have the following structure: opening, statement, example, example, statement, example, example, commentary and conclusion. The question we have been playing with is can we instead of cutting the video in a fix way just tag video’s in such a way that we can do the “montage”, not at the moment of production, but at the moment of consumption without loosing the creators power to tell her/his story.

Material used / input

Since some preparation was needed for the Open Video Make Session, I picked a video from Open Images called “California Dreaming” by Bregtje van der Haak. It is available under a Creative Commons license and produced by one of the Dutch national broadcasters I used to work for called VPRO.

During the discussion phase of the open video workshop, two ideas were given that I decided to use as examples of showing the basic concept of a dynamic montage. One was the theme of horror movies and moods, and the other was the idea by Sanna Marttila that involved the Kallio Archive and showing the weather in a place/time by showing a video-montage instead of telling you the weather directly (so watch what the weather is like). I decided to combine both, even if my preselected video didn’t really fit with the topics. I hoped that the ideas would be strong enough during the presentation at the end of the day that people would not mind.

Steps & tips

I used our own platform (called Springfield), which we are preparing for open source, and which is used in many of our projects to define different tagging layers.

Chapter Tagging

I added several layers to cover the two types of requests needed, and ended up adding four tagging layers: Mood, Season, TimeOfDay and Weather. Then, with some help from the group, we defined the different options for each layer that would be needed and added them to the system. The mood editor ended up like this:

Mood editor

Next I added all the layers for the other example (weather) and we ended up with a editor that was able to timebase tag the whole video. I put in some time tagging parts of the video this way, and we ended up with something like this:

All the layers after tagging

As you can see these layers can overlap and form the base of metadata we need to be able to generate a montage on the fly later. The next part I did was to try and build the output filter. Basically the part where the user would hit play with a given scenario would generate the correct video playlist. So for example, show me the weather in Helsinki now, and I am in a good mood would result use as input 18th September 2012, Helsinki, at 15:00 and mood “happy”.

Playout with dynamic playlist

Presentation

During the hackday I talked to several people about what would be possible, but since we had only couple of minutes to present our works in the end of the day, I decided to create two screencasts which showed the result. One shows the tagging tools and one the end result. You can find them here :

Tagging : http://images1.noterik.com/okfest/tagging_video.mp4
Playback : http://images1.noterik.com/okfest/playback.mp4

Now, the end result looks little bit weird in that we tagged randomly and the content doesn’t match exactly what we are trying todo. But you will notice that the clip is “cut” on the fly, and jumps around in the original TV program (sorry about that Bregtje if you see this). Given the correct tagging, and using for example the Kallio Archive videos, the end result would have been as suggested by Sanna Marttila.

Future of this prototype

After the event I took a good look at the Kallio Archive and researched a bit more what metadata is available. I am strongly considering finishing this prototype based on their content and putting it in as an example when the open source version of our platform is released, since it is a good example of what you can do, and the material is very nice and perfect for things like this since it consists of short clips taken over a longer period and conditions.

Thanks for all the fish

I would like to thank the other participants of the workshop, and Kati, Ramyah, Sanna and the sponsors for the free food, drinks and interactions. If you have any questions about Noterik, our video platform (Springfield) or this demo, you can email me at daniel@noterik.nl or daniel@xs4all.nl