e-Dance project

This series of movies brings together Choreography researcher Sita Popat and e-Science researcher Simon Buckingham Shum, who demonstrate and discuss the adaptation of one of the project’s e-Science tools for Choreography, the Open University’s Compendium tool for mapping ideas and annotating media. Acknowledgements to Michelle Bachler (Open U.) and Andrew Rowley (U. Manchester) for expert software development, and webcast wizard Ben Hawkridge (Open U.) for helping us migrate the footage to Web. High-resolution versions of the screen recordings are linked to the relevant tracks.

The video-enabled version of Compendium will be going into alpha release this month with invited testers, for full release within a couple of months.

The academic context for this work is set out in a recent article:

Bailey, H., Bachler, M., Buckingham Shum, S., Le Blanc, A., Popat, S., Rowley, A. and Turner, M. (2009). Dancing on the Grid: Using e-Science Tools to Extend Choreographic Research. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 13 July 2009, Vol. 367, No. 1898, pp. 2793-2806. [PDF]

The movie summaries are listed below… high resolution versions of the screen recordings are linked to the web versions for detailed viewing.

1. Demo: Sita takes us through a demonstration which illustrates how Compendium can be used to annotate video footage as part of choreographic scholarship.
2. Background: The e-Dance project conducted rapid application development through asynchronous collaboration between the partners, punctuated with intense day long workshops. At these, the choreographer would demonstrate how she used (or wished she could use) the Compendium e-science tool. The software developer would then code changes for feedback.
3. Demo: Sita explains how and why she requested a feature to create Transition Points in video footage.
4. Demo: Sita explains the value of placing images into key moments in a video, as supplementary material that she can use to support discourse in scholarship or teaching.
5. Demo: Sita explains the value of being able to lay out an arbitrary number of videos on the canvas.
6. Demo: Following the last clip, Sita discusses opportunistic and planned juxtaposition of video.
7. Interview: Simon asks Sita to consider how hypermedia annotation tools such as this could scaffold students’ project work and reflection as they track and communicate their work.
8. Demo: Sita works through an example of linking three interconnected video clips
9. Demo: Following the last example, Sita shows how annotations in one context can co-exist in multiple other projects.
10. Interview: Sita and Simon discuss to what extent a hypermedia tool such as this might shape practice, and reflect on other aspects of the project.

View the movies…

They are finally catching up to CSAGE work (Remote recording, annotation and live interraction with stereoscopic video conferencing) from four years ago. Then the key performance was StereoBodies.

Inition, using better quality equipment admittedly but similar principle “Inition and Can Communicate worked with Orange Labs to simulcast the first ever live opera performance in 3D. The performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni took place at Rennes Opera House in Brittany last month and was viewed by a combination of paying and VIP audiences at cinemas in Paris, Avignon and Brest.”

A quick pointer to the “Another Language” newsletter from our friends in Utah: Volume 6 Issue 3 is just out. The next INTERPLAY: EVENT HORIZONS is due in March 26 – April 4, 2010

A series of test were carried out in the recent long intensive. The following shows both screen views of the eDance Scene Editor.

The left hand side is controlled by one console terminal, incorporating all the controls te user sees, and the right hand side (cropped in the image) is the projected view.

I was reminded of a paper from a few years ago visualizing Benesh notation for ballet, via VR (avatar 3D geometry models) the following image is a “pose annotating using Benesh notation of an arabesque posed by a real dancer and virtual ballet dancer”

Reference “Neagle, R. J., Ng, K., & Ruddle, R. A. (2004). Developing a virtual ballet dancer to visualise choreography. Proceedings of the AISB 2004 Symposium on Language, Speech and Gesture for Expressive Characters, 86-97. Leeds, UK: Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour. ISBN 1 902956 39 0.”