

James George and Jonathan Minard are creating a new type of documentary: one that films itself. The pair, based at Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, began collaborating last October after George demonstrated a Kinect hack: he combined a Microsoft motion-sensor with an SLR camera to create a filming rig, then rendered the hybrid CGI and video images using the open-source editing suite RGDB Toolkit (which he also created). Minard had already been planning a documentary on software art: "There was something very compelling about seeing the human form presented as a real-time 3D scan," he says.

Cloud effectWired UK

That form shaped the function: "The aesthetic changes the way we think about structuring the narration of a film," says George, 26. The pair abandoned a linear approach. "What we have is a database of conversations, so we can link topics together through metadata systems." The end result, Clouds, is "as much a navigable database as it is a documentary."

George and Minard, 27, interviewed 31 contributors using their rig, including Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the New York Museum of Modern Art, data artist Jer Thorpe and author Bruce Sterling. When an interviewee is speaking, cues pop up which allow the viewer to take a different path in the documentary, going deeper into a topic or moving on to a new one. The content is rendered in real-time: talking heads dissolve into particles, then form new figures, based on interaction from the viewer.

The pair are launching a Kickstarter project this month to raise funds to build an engine which will auto-complete the narratives; they also want to create a YouTube channel containing videos where "we set the system loose on a theme, it generates video and is linked to a Twitter account that releases content at certain times," explains George.

"We're influenced by Bruce Sterling's idea of the camera of the future. It would record all the photons in a room, then turn cinematography into a computational problem of selecting scenes and camera angles from an infinite data set." 


Latest on