As Matti and I weaved around central London on foot for hours, we conceptualized the next BCG Labs experiment – the idea is around designing a system that is able to perform any number of randomized cuts on set of video clips, sync it with music, text, beats, or even meta-tags, and apply that specifically to Indian content.

Interestingly, as Matti pointed out, there have been several such experiments in the past in the european art scene, but very few have been automated, and none of them have played with Indian content.

Fact is, between Tatu (filmmaker and friend) and myself, we have hours of extremely diverse footage from India – from the weddings, to the stray dogs that live in Mumbai, to Rajasthani life and other such tourism cliches. If there was a way for us to compile and tag the usable bits, and the system is able to map that to a script, and generate thousands of cuts to the video, which I could then do next few cuts with, it could actually turn out to be a very useful tool. We’ll see anyhow.

The plan is to work on it over the next few months on a slow burner, as NewsRoots is on highest priority (with an impending prototype deadline). But once an initial model is ready, we will put it up on both our labs section, and here. In the meantime, we will continue the brainjamming here, while sipping on bottles of Kingfisher and playing with Flash, Ruby-On-Rails and After Effects code.