Circles and Ladders with Google+ Contact Classification Paradigm

Grouping contacts is an impossible feat isn't it? We have to add Bob to Sport, Work, Musician, 'Allowed to Call after 10pm' and all those other groups we never keep up to date.

Like all user supplied up-front people classification systems Google+ Circles can quite quickly turn into hierarchy ladders when you manage your contacts using them, especially in a social context. 

Contact grouping, grading and intimacy-scoring questions arise like : "Why am I not in your Personal folder?" "Why am I only in Acquaintances?", "Why am I not in group X?"

It makes for unhappiness not to mention all the manual labour of managing those connections. 

The flat monism of classifying all your people as simply 'friends' and allowing the system (not you) to speculatively match between profiles managed by the identity owner is elegant. It causes less arguments over status and how other people classify you. 

Baboons would be relieved to have such a thing. 

Flat'ish, loosely coupled metadata overlaps between people such as : attended same school, favourite band is x, graduated in Kent, holiday in France, has photo of Mt Everest provide a more resilient model in the end for both programmatic and humanistic reasons. It also a more natural petri-dish for harmonious social groups when developing new services.

The degree to which this metadata is enhanced as you interact with 'your people' defines the living breathing classification of what they mean or meant to you. It allows for relationship management (manual and auto) between the people you already know and it also allows for the emergence of machine dialogue such as 'People You Should Know'

It's dynamic and weighted through use - it's no longer the leaden categories of 'Work', 'Home', and 'France'.

Stop Motion Animation on Mobile devices

I thought my recent foray into stop motion animation using mobile devices would be worth a few words. 

Timeline

Prehistory : A while ago I bought a cheap model of our solar system from a physics supply shop in South India. It was rusted and had been sitting there in the odd shop for ages. I shipped it back to the UK and it has been taking up space for a while without good reason. Recently, before moving house, I found a reprieve for it by deciding to use it in a stop motion music video. 

This blog is a look at how I got from that idea to a finished stop motion animation video and the software, hardware and people observations along the way.

Step 1 : Choose the track.

First things first was to choose the track - one I had in both English and Spanish - double search engine and geo-juice. Easy.

Step 2 : Storyboard the idea and the props

If you can't draw like your comic book heroes then a photo based approach to creating a storyboard is a good method. I wanted something on mobile that would let me quickly shoot, arrange and annotate the scenes. 

The unbeatable Cinemek Storyboard on iPhone does this job better than any other. I'm not aware of any compeition. You can just shoot and annotate anywhere meaning when inspiration strikes you move things along quickly. Projects in their early inception stage do depend on thinking done away from desks and desktops. The Cinemek UI is simple and storyboard arranging has a great 'physics' feel and touch making it  easy to swap the scenes around.

The screenshots below show how you can use it to 

• arrange
• camera movements against scenes  : tracking, pans, zooms, focus, lighting. Your still images can come to life.
• add notes and titles

I went and bought a new lamp, some special 'daylight' bulbs, black fabric, plastic bin bags, props, glue, wire and imported a iPhone4 stand from the US (Naja King). This stand allowed me to hang or stand the iPhone4 camera in all the different angles I imagined I would need. Word of note on the Naja- it can drive you mad with the slight movement it has once the new shape 'settles' thereby skewing the framing down after positioning responds to gravity. Naja has more flexibility and positioning capability than a Gorilla stand but less sturdiness - a trade off.

Naja King Flexible iPhone Stand

Step 3 :Choose Stop Motion apps and Prepare to Shoot!

Stop Motion Recorder

iTimeLapse

I must have bought and tried out all the stop motion apps that were in the Apple store.

The most fit for the job seemed to be Stop Motion Recorder and iTimeLapse.

What came out to be most important in the end was how reliable a program was. Losing 30 mins of work every 5 hours is not acceptable even if the application has all the whiz-bang features. iTimelapse wasn't reliable enough. After losing footage and periodic crashes and I resigned iTimeLapse to be a back up only. The trade off with using Stop Motion Recorder was that it was the 12 frames per second and low capture resolution. 

Step 4 : Shoot

People-ware : After doing a session or two on my own trying to get finished scenes I knew that an assistant with nimble hands could help me with the separation of shooting and set adjusting roles. Too much movement back and forth from camera to set takes up time and makes the whole thing slow. 

I hired someone I knew who studies fine art to help out with further set-making and the shoot. This was a wise move. 

We slogged it out and got most of the first half of the video. Stop motion animation is always more effort than you imagine. It's finicky! People say you should double estimates on average - with stop motion you treble it and budget for extra medication.

High Spec for
iTimelapse

After my time had expired with the assistant I had to shoot the remainder myself. Mostly the solar system scenes.  I noticed that iTimelapse had released a new version of their app and it was more stable. Quandary. Do I double the quality of image capture half way through the shoot or keep with the look/feel I have?

Using the logic that the video was in two halves 1) man in the house) 2) man in the solar system) I convinced myself that it could change resolution for the second half.

I looked more seriously into the audio trigger method on iTimelapse to take a photo i.e. shout "now!" then 'click' a shot is taken. It worked well once the sound levels were tweaked and even the misfires due to my thumping around in the 'scene' positioning things were easily edited out.

I managed to get the rest of the footage.

Step 4.5 - Make the decision about whether to continue developing the project solely on mobile. ..

This was quite a quick decision.

iMovie iOS (the major compositing tool on mobile for video) wasn't suitable because  :

• It has some memory problems and performance issues
• I simply needed a bigger screen to see what I had shot. It was time to take a good look.
• No ability to run plugins in-line and a lack of features
• I am more able with Final Cut Express than iMovie so pre-production with the mobile iMovie being imported into PC based iMovie wasn't a draw either

Maybe an iPad would have helped with the bigger screen but at the present time nothing beats editing and compositing on a powerful machine with a big screen.

Desktop and big screen win then.

Step 5 - Import

QuickTime import of Image Sequences

I imported the stop-motion data from my iPhone and quickly filled the iPhoto library up with thousands of photos only slightly different from one another (my wife took it well given it is a shared Mac). I spent some time fixing the orientation of some of the shots, due to the phone gyroscope flipping periodically, and then they were ready to use.

Final Cut Express does not do importing of individual frames to create video so I had to buy QuickTime Pro to get a good method of creating video footage from a sequence of photos. QuickTimePro also allowed me to specify the exact dimensions of the photos. The mobile apps had cut and trim problems when they exported video which is why I was working in photos and not video by this time.

Step 6 - Edit

Final Cut Express

Final Cut Express is a really good tool once you put some time in to learn it. My work with audio editing and compositing is translatable to video editing concepts so I had a quicker start when I first used it.

I have one of the KB Rubber Keyboard Covers that shows all the Final Cut Express shortcuts which is really useful. Shortcuts for me however are only a band aid as there are so many pieces of software I use that the only real solution for being quick with all my apps would be to have voice recognition.

I used only two plugins very sparingly - a contrast and brightness adjustment to make sure the plastic bin bags representing the cosmos looked dark enough and a plugin called  Lock and Load Express which smooths out shaky footage. Using Lock and Load has a tradeoff though as it selects a subset of the frame which bests stitches with the next frame. Using this approach it finds subset squares per frame as a path through the stills - like threading a needle almost. When shooting at 12 frames a second this was quite noticeable from a textural and resolution standpoint so I restrained to using it only for the manual stop-motion zoom effects I had tried which were very shaky.

Lock and Load Express

Step 7 - Master and Export


All done in Final Cut Pro. The export options are very simple and allow you to select high speed broadband as the likely consumption method making a QuickTime file small enough to upload to YouTube and other services.

I had an English and a Spanish version of the video so one export each while muting the other language track.

Step 8 - Promote

To get it indexed properly by the 'machine' I did the following :

• I used Spanish metadata for the Spanish language version whenever posted
• Put direct hyperlinks into the YouTube metadata pointing to my website
• Did a short music blog on Blogger and pinged feedburner.
• Put the video on Musician Profile Aggregator sites such as Artist Data, MusicSubmit
• I wrote this post to improve search engine links. This post is a technical article to create a cross domain link from science and technology into the arts and music
• Put it on my music website (both the front-page, videos section and on the album pages that it was taken from)
• Updated my YouTube channel to have this as the default video
• Put it on MySpace
• Did status update on my personal Facebook and my Facebook music page
• Put it on Twitter with hashtags to catch those searching for video and animation.

I could have done more submissions to other sites (Yahoo, MetaCafe) but I couldn't be bothered - YouTube, Google, Facebook and Twitter and the behemoths for video discovery. If need be I'll add more node juice later on.

I'll keep an eye on Google and YouTube Analytics for now to see how it gets on and whether the Spanish or the English version gets the most eyeballs.

Final

So is it possible to shoot and edit stop motion animation entirely on mobile? 

The short answer is that for preparation and capture that mobile is preferable but for editing and mastering the final video piece you still need a big machine.

Enjoy the video!

    

The final video is here in English. 

and here in Spanish

Photosynth and how the 'collective image memory' is harversted

We're building a collective digital memory with all those:

• votes and ratings
• comments and blogs
• tags and bookmarks

We can put this data on google maps, and provide strong links between place and time as well as invent applications that use this data to create new environments. We don't even need to use the common map metaphor to see our data with IBM's wonderful tool 'Many Eyes' which allows us to analyse data in interactive graphs and visualistions. Data can be processed by simple XML allowing for automated feeds of information and graphic representation such as the example below:




And then there is some next level image-onomy or whatever new paradigm term we need to invent that Photosynth ushers in. A technology acquired by Microsoft and originally developed by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.

It allows a feed of photos to build up a map of the earth and places not just using flyover images by aeroplanes or satellite data but by using our own photographs and even illustrations. Photosynth uses public images and it doesn't matter whether these photos are taken by a £10 disposable camera or a posh SLR - it can stitch them together and produce a never ending tapestry that allows you to move around geographic areas and locations with ease.

With Photosynth you can:

• Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
• Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it's megapixels or gigapixels in size.
• See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
• Find similar photos to the one you're currently viewing.
• Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend.

Zooming in might have you moving through 10 photos using your own as a starting point. Your landscape shot of the fair ex-mining town of Cowdenbeath on your digital camera might be part of a family of 1000 photos of Cowdenbeath. Using this pool of images like stones in the middle of a pond you can step and zoom in deeper and deeper to find the Forth Road Bridge in detail when it was just a red spec on your own photo.

Photosynth takes data from everyone - from the collective memory of what the world looks like. A model emerges of the entire earth as our own photos get tagged with other peoples metadata and the mesh of linking becomes tighter and stronger. The network effect continually enriches the space and easily provides cross user and cross model experiences and information.

This is the real semantic web or 'Web3.0' along with the Social Graph developing through the use of people networks. These inferences are taking a life of their own and one can only wonder at what Web5.0 might be.

There's a great demo hosted by TED where Blaise runs through the application with jaw dropping effect.

Photosynth modestly state "Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space."

This experience is on the web to try right now but be warned Mac fans - this web experience is PC only for now.