MOVIE SAMPLES

SCREENSHOTS

hi-res stills for print
[3200 x 2300 ]


jpeg 2.3 Mg
tiff 5.8 Mg

jpeg 1.5 Mg
tiff 3.9 Mg

screen grabs
[800 x 580]
jpegs | 30-40 KB each

screen layout
examples:

WHAT IS SOFT CINEMA?

Soft(ware) Cinema is a dynamic computer-driven media installation. The viewers are presented with an infinite series of narrative films constructed on the fly by the custom software. Using the systems of rules defined by the author, the software decides what appears on the screen, where, and in which sequence; it also chooses music tracks. The elements are chosen from a media database which at present contains 4 hours of video and animation, 3 hours of voice over narration, and 5 hours of music.

SOFT CINEMA EDITIONS
While the underlying software which drives the project remains the same, each movie edition presents a different narrative and uses a different subset of the media database. The editing rules also vary from one edition to another.

Some movie editions are available on DVD in linear versions.

The following movie editions have been completed:

Texas (from GUI collection) release date: November 15, 2002
"The woman did not answer. She was busy mixing her own drink: one third Coke, one third Sprite, and one third 7-up. She finished, took one sip and reclined in her chair. The mixture always had the same effect on her, bringing back happy memories of her childhood in Sweden..."

Hamburg (from GUI collection) release date: February 24, 2003
This story narrated by 3 diffirent voices is about a programmer who has a crash on a woman he keeps running into at the lounge at his company's "chill-out" floor.

Moving Pictures release date: January 1, 2003
All the simulated video clips (= a still image is animated to look like a video shot on location) from Soft Cinema database have been pulled together to create this melancholic navigation through empty offices, provincial city squares, generic high-rises...

SOFT CINEMA: GUI COLLECTION
Texts used for narration in some Soft Cinema movie editions come from GUI (Global User Interface) a collection of short stories I have been working on since 1998.
Each story takes place in a different location: Texas, Hamburg, Kiev, Mongolia, etc. (In writing the short stories, I tried to follow the principle that they can only take place in locations that I have never visited.)

Typically, a story have been divided into a number of sequential parts, each part becoming a short movie. At the beginning of each segment, the software generates a new screen layout, which can be comprised of two to six different windows. Software also selects which video clips and animations will play in these windows and in what order. This process is repeated for each part of the narrative. Following the same modular logic, different voices are used for different parts of each story.

The small window that always appears in the bottom left corner identifies the part of the story currently playing (for instance, texas_01.txt, texas_02.txt, etc.) A narrow, horizontal window presents scrolling sentences selected from the same story segment.

SOFT CINEMA BOOKS
Number 1: co-production of Lev Manovich and ZKM
60 pages
release date - 1st edition: November 15, 2002
release date - 2nd revised edition: February 1, 2003
available at ZKM, ICA London bookstores


book cover

zkm bookstore, Nov. 15, 2002

zkm bookstore, Nov. 15, 2002

SOFT CINEMA: REPRESENTING INFO-SUBJECTIVITY
How to represent the subjective experience of a person living in a global information society? If daily interaction with volumes of data and numerous messages is part of our new “data-subjectivity,” how can we visualize this subjectivity in new ways using new media— without resorting to already familiar and “normalized” modernist techniques of montage, surrealism, absurd?

Today many places look and feel like composites consisting from diffirent layers: "traditional," "global," "capitalist," "post-communist," etc. How to represent the typical modern experience of living "between layers" - between the pasts and the present, between then and now, between there and here?

Soft Cinema project aims to address these questions both on the level of "form" (see the next section) and "content." Most of the clips which form Soft Cinema database have been recorded by the author while in Berlin, Tokyo, Riga, San Paolo and other locations between 1999 and 2002. The keywords which describe the location of each clip are used by software in assembling the movies. (Note that in the process of logging the clips many of them were mis-labeled — for instance a clip shot in Berlin was labeled "Los Angeles," and so on.)

Each video clip in the database follows Dogma 95 rules: it was shot in continuous takes without edits using a hand-held camera. Some of the clips are simulated — i.e. a still image was animated to look like a video shot on location.

SOFT CINEMA: FORM
Soft Cinema explorers 4 ideas:
1. "Algorithmic Cinema."
Using systems of rules, software controls both the layout of the screen (number and positions of frames) and the sequences of media elements which appear in these frames.
4. "Database Cinema." The media elements are selected from a large database to construct a potentially unlimited number of different narrative films.
2. "Macro-cinema." Soft Cinema imagines how moving images may look when the Net will mature, and when unlimited bandwidth and very high resolution displays would become the norm.
3. "Multimedia cinema." In Soft Cinema video is used as only one type of representation among others: 2D animation, motion graphics, 3D scenes, diagrams, etc.


Medium-length Version (500 words)
Soft Cinema explorers 4 ideas.

1. The first is algorithmic editing of media materials. Each video clips used in Soft Cinema is assigned keywords which describe both the "content" of a clip (geographical location, presence of people in the scene, etc.) and its "formal" properties (dominant color, dominant line orientation, contrast, camera movement, etc.). Some of the keywords are generated automatically using image processing software while others are input by hand. The program (written in LINGO) assembles the video track by selecting clips one after another using a system rules (i.e. an algorithm). Diffirent systems of rules are possible: for instance, selecting a clip which is closest in color or type of motion to the previous one; selecting a clip which matches the previous one party in content and party in color, repalcing only every other clip to create a kind of parallel montage sequence, and on on.

2. The second idea is database narrative. Rather than beginning with a script and then creating media elements which visualise it, I investigate a diffirent paradigm: starting with a large database and then generating narratives from it. In Soft Cinema, The media elements are selected from a database of a few hundred video clips to construct a potentially unlimited number of different short films.

SOFT CINEMA DATABASE VISUALISATION by Schoenerwissen
screen shot 1
screen shot 2

3. The third idea is what I call macro-cinema. While filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway and Mike Figgis have already used a multi-screen format for fiction films, thinking about the visual conventions of Graphical User Interface as used in computer culture gives us a diffirent way to do macro-cinema. If a computer user employs windows of diffirent proportions and sizes, why not adopt the similar aesthetics for cinema? In Soft Cinema, the generation of each video begins with the computer program semi-randomly breaking the screen into a number of square regions of diffirent dimensions. During the playback diffirent clips are assigned to diffirent regions. In this way, software determines both temporal and spatial organisation of a work, i.e. both sequencing of clips and their composition.



4. The forth idea is to create a multi-media cinema. In Soft Cinema video is used as just one type of representation among others: 2D animation, motion graphics (i.e. animated text), stills, 3D scenes (as in computer games), diagrams, etc. In addition, Soft Cinema supplements a "normal" video image with other types of lens-based imagiory commonly used today by industry, science, medecine and military: the low res web cam image, an infrared image, edge-detected image as employed in computer vision, etc. While some music videos and artist videos already mix some of these diffirent types of imagery in one work, Soft Cinema assigns each type of imagery to a separate window in order to dramatize the new status of “normal” video, photographic and film image today – no longer the dominant but just one source of visual information about reality among many others. The additional inspiration for using diffirent representation of the same scene next to each other comes from the display setups used in medecine, aviation and other contemporary workplaces. Finally, rather than simply using these diffirent types of representation for a purely visual effect, Soft Cinema investigates the possibilities of using them together for fictional narration.

Extended Version (1200 words)


Project History
Soft Cinema incorporates the project macro-cinema (1997-2000) which was developed as a counterpart to the earlier project little movies (1994-1997).

Additional Texts
The original Soft Cinema proposal for ZKM (2000):
www.manovich.net/cinema_future/manovich_proposal_1.htm

The text from The Language of New Media on macro-cinema (1999):
www.manovich.net/macrocinema.doc

Soft Cinema is an example of a "database narrative" proposed in my article Database as a Symbolic Form (1998)

SOFT CINEMA: ARCHITECTURE
Referencing “brandscaping” (the three-dimensional design of brand settings), early algorithmic computer art, and the logic of modernist art movements (in which painting, graphic design, architecture, and industrial design were typically driven by a single aesthetic system), we used the same algorithm to generate the screen layouts, the layout of the Soft Cinema book, and the 3D layouts of the Soft Cinema installation. If Le Courbusier’s system of proportions was based on the dimensions of a human body, our system takes as its origin the dimensions of a DV NTSC image: 720 x 480 pixels. In addition, the contrast between various types of images (video, 2D animation, etc.) used in Soft Cinema movies is translated into the contrasting materials used in the installation.

(Concept by Lev Manovich + Jason Danziger_think/build group)

Soft Cinema Installation @Future Cinema: design history

Lev Manovich: Initial Concepts | July 2002
1 | installation description
2 | theory part 1
3 | theory part 2
4 | overall view
5 | possible spatial layouts


Andreas Kratky: Soft Cinema installation design| August 2002
3D view 1
3D view 2

Jason Danziger_ think/build group:
Soft Cinema Installation design| September 2002
plan PDF
elevation PDF
3D view - small (800 x 669)
3D view - big (3000 x 1773)

Ruth Lorenz_maaskant: ZKM Future Cinema version | October 2002
two alternative elevations
final elevation (built version)
axonometric view

Andreas Angelidakis: two proposals | 2001-2002
soft cinema 1: image 1 | image 2
soft cinema 2: image 1 | image 2

RELATED PROJECTS

www.thickspace.net
[ AVRA - free software for random playback of video]

www.korsakow.com
[Korsakov tool - free software for the construction of interactive movies]

www.muvee.com
[commercial software]

VideoWave Movie Creator
[commercial software]
"users...select a creative style that determines the pace of transitions and the length of individual clips."

www.artscilab.org/expandedcinema.html
[text of Expanded Cinema, 1970]