On September 18th, 2012, Sanna Marttila, Kati Hyyppä and Ramyah Gowrishankar (Aalto University) organised the Open Video Make Session in Helsinki as a part of EUscreen and the Open Culture and Science Hackday of the Open Knowledge Festival.
Report by Kati Hyyppä, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture.
The hackday included various activities involving working with and building things with open cultural and scientific data. The Open Video Make Session focused on video as a rich resource for creative use. Despite recent technical developments such as Popcorn, it’s still rather complex to take video to the next level: beyond traditional remixing.
Programming skills are usually needed for making use of temporal and spatial video characteristics and metadata. Combining video with other content, such as open data, also has unexplored potential. In order to tackle these challenges and to promote new uses for audiovisual materials in the cultural heritage domain, about 10 experts from different fields were invited to the Open Video Make Session to open up video as an exploratory medium. The session was open for anyone to join in, either to make something or to see experts at work and to learn more about open video.
The Open Video Make Session provided insights into the different dimensions of archival video that can serve as inspiration for creative works. While some participants focused on mood and storytelling, others utilized audio, visual details, timeline and APIs. You can find documentation of the projects made in the session here: Open Video Make Session projects (currently being updated).
