Our colleagues at CWI, who were part of the development team on our prototype system for automatic compilation of videos from user-generated content, chatted recently with New Scientist magazine to tell them a little more about it. Here’s the article – http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528835.800-video-mashups-give-you-personalised-memories.html

The narrative engine developed by the Narrative and Interactive Media (NIM) group at Goldsmiths works with the help of an authored symbolic representation of the story surrounding a social event. In the case of our prototype this was a school concert. Users, via a web-based app, were able to interact with a personalised movie created from all the video footage shot and uploaded by all the friends and family who witnessed and captured media at the concert.

We are about to present a paper – ‘Interactive Video Stories from User Generated Content: a School Concert Use Case’ – about building the algorithm for the system at the upcoming International Conference on Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) in San Sebastian, Nov 12-15. In the paper I go into more details about how the notion of a ‘sequence’ was borrowed from existing TV editing practice and used to create a flexible computer based story model based on a previous NIM development, Narrative Structure Language (NSL). The last link takes you through to a publication in the ACM Multimedia Systems Journal about NSL.