auto-cutting of indian weddings, stray dogs and rajasthani men footage!
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.
Matti is a researcher, designer and visual artist working with emerging digital technologies globally. He is currently dayjobbing as a Teaching Fellow in Digital Culture at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and spends time shuttling between London, Helsinki and the rest of the world.
Soum is a new media technology architect, ex-mixercast founding member, filmmaker, photographer, and a general wanderer who lives partly in London and rest of the time in Mumbai. He builds scalable web sites, dabbles in emerging technologies, and spends rest of his time in various film and photography projects.