2010-12-19

Turbulence TAU Hyper-Narrative Interactive Movie -- Change a Plot While You Watch

Change the course of a film plot--while you watch | Crave - CNET



Ever found yourself yelling, "Noooo, don't do it!" at a movie screen? Or been in the mood for a happy ending and found yourself halfway through a film you knew would leave you in a puddle of tears?

A new system out of Israel's Tel Aviv University allows viewers to influence a movie's plot while viewing it, thus affecting the progression of events. For now, audiences are testing the technology with a full-length interactive pilot feature, "Turbulence." But the plan is to extend the tool to other "hyper-narrative interactive movies," including commercials and television series, said Nitzan Ben Shaul, a professor of film and television studies at the university who created the system.


American Friends of Tel Aviv University: Choose a Movie's Plot -- While You Watch It


On the set of Turbulence

Utilizing complicated video coding procedures, the new format provides smooth interaction and transition between scenes as audience members watch — and determine the plot of — Turbulence, created by Prof. Nitzan Ben Shaul of Tel Aviv University's Department of Film and Television. Made with his unique scene-sequencing technique, Turbulence recently won a prize at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival for its technological innovation.


Nitzan Ben-Shaul Researcher's site

Prof. Nitzan Ben-Shaul Ph.D. Film And Television
FACULTY OF THE ARTS
Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel

Nitzan Ben Shaul is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies and former acting chair of the Film and Television Department at Tel Aviv University. He received his PhD from the Cinema Studies Dept. at New York University. He has authored several scholarly books among them Mythical Expressions of Siege in Israeli Films (Edwin Mellen, 1997), A Violent World: TV News Images of Middle Eastern Terror and War (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), Film: The Key Concepts (Berg, 2007), and Hyper-narrative Interactive Cinema: Problems and Solutions (Rodopi, 2008). [...]


Turbulence on Channel 10 News on Vimeo



Turbulence is an Israeli start-up commercializing a TAU patent that greatly simplifies and makes possible compelling interactive professional movies and audiovisual content. Their patented authoring tool and player software greatly simplifies and automates the current labor-intensive, complex process of creating an interactive video.


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