The artistic workflow

Two teams of specialists prepare the terrain :

1. A production team survey a delimited territory and gather audiovisual fragments which reveal the specific characteristics of this space : details, portraits, fictional elements… Emphasis is placed on the uniqueness of the viewpoint and on the intensity of the relation with the reality.
See how we did it in Geneva.

2. The collected images and sounds are indexed and assigned to a geographical location on a digital map by the team of editors. Each audiovisual fragment constitutes an asset which will be indexed according to objective and subjective attributes. Our editing engine and web services will then make the “magic” to create a meaningful and surprising movie.

The public enters the scene and can use the system :

3. Equipped with an iPhone (personal or borrowed) and the WE app’, visitors wander through the urban space. They hear in real time the soundtrack of the film which they are walking and watch the editing process taking place on the smartphone interface. Their trajectory will “awaken” the existing images and link them together…

4. Once the walk is complete, the visitors, now become viewers, can watch “their trajectories translated into films” on the internet site and can share them. Each generated film makes it possible to (re)immerse oneself into the “digital memory” of the urban space.

memoways workflow

 

The technical platform

On the road of building up this project we have developed Memoways, a generic software platform in the cloud.

The central piece of the Memoways software platform is a Mac OSX application, enabling any content producer to create a searchable, categorised and intelligent library of audiovisual files. The Memoways Platform holds unique features such as the spaceline concept; “magic” metadata; mobile creation and a programmable editing engine.
The application has 2 main modules:
  • Database management (upload, indexing of the assets)
  • Project management (project creation, managing the usages)
Around those two modules, it is possible to access to statistics (of the assets, usages, users etc), to manage users and lists, create and import contacts and more.
Next to the Memoways application, there are following modules that complete the platform:
  • A generic architecture for mobile applications. By using this architecture, content producers will be able to build efficiently a mobile application with their own content, for their own public or customers.
  • A series of public API’s. Those API’s will open access to the public content in a managed way, letting any developer build up he’s own mobile applications or website.
  • A web SDK provides the content producers with embed code that will enable them to simply integrate functionalities (video player with map) and content (assets & metadata) into their own CMS and web presence (Facebook, LinkedIn etc).
  • A innovative editing algorithm: our editing engine. This algorithm (explained more in detail on page 6) is a very special filtering algorithm that uses a form (human behavior) as an input to create another form (storyline) as output.