Harnessing hypermedia for the construction of audiovisual storytelling
THE COMBINATORIAL PROJECT
Accidental Occurrence (AO) is a film project that seeks to use computers and computer networks in innovative ways. The project does this, first, by offering a series of algorithms, combinatorial paths, and randomness to create a large number of variations of the story. The film project seeks to use computers and computer networks in second way: We invite filmmakers, filmmaking students, and enthusiasts, to edit versions of the film manually.
Anyone who purchases an Accidental Occurrence USB drive has access to the project’s media at its highest quality. The media in there is copyrighted to Diego Bonilla, director and producer of the project, but released for remixing with the Creative Commons Attribution and Share Alike licenses.
Filmmaking instructors are welcome to use Accidental Occurrence's media in their courses; especially so, if it helps our project achieve its purpose of obtaining masterfully handcrafted versions of the film. As simple as the story is, it can be weaved together in significantly different ways, many more than we, creators of the project, can imagine. Successful remixes of the film should be added to Accidental Occurrence’s YouTube channel. The settings of the channel have been set to allow people to freely add videos to the playlist, making this our main space to share handcrafted variations. Our Accidental Occurrence YouTube playlist will be reviewed periodically to give emphasis to the best edited versions of the film.
If you are a film (or related fields) instructor wanting to participate in this project (that is, create an assignment that asks your students to use the media to edit meaningful variations of the narrative), please fill out this form. In these cases, we can make the media (without the main programs) available online for downloading (29 GB) on a one to one basis.
CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES
AND HOW TO GIVE CREDIT
Creative Commons licenses are a series legal documents that help creators manage their copyrights. If you would like to learn, in general, about CC licenses, go here. AO’s media have the (1) Attribution and the (2) Share-Alike licenses, this means that the media can be reused and remixed as long as 2 conditions are met: (1) Give credit to the creators of the original media and (2) the resulting work is also licensed with the Attribution and the Share-Alike licenses.
The purpose of doing this is to promote the remixing of the Accidental Occurrence’s media to tell the story in innovative ways and build collaboratively on each other’s work. If you re-edit the film, give us credit by showing this screen (BMP format or TIFF format) for 5 seconds at the end of your credits. Your participation acknowledges the positive, purposeful, and collaborative nature of the project.
INFORMATION ABOUT THE MEDIA
The media has the following naming conventions for video, music, and sound files:
Maxi’s story
AO Pursuit 01 a.mov
AO Pursuit 01 a - ambience.mov
AO Pursuit 01 a - music.mov
Hal’s story
AO Quotidian 01 a.mov
AO Quotidian 01 - ambience.mov
AO Quotidian 01 - music
The first word is the acronym for the film, the second word is the plot taking place, as a third word the scene number, as a fourth word the video channel (a, b, etc.), and, in case the filename has a fifth word after the hyphen, ambience sound or music for that specific scene. The convergence of Maxi’s and Harold’s paths are included in the last Quotidian files.
The files have the following technical specifications:
Video
Enclosure: MOV
Size: 1280 X 720 (1.0)
Frame rate: 24 p
Compressor: H.264
Bit-depth: 24 bit,
Data rate limit: 16,000 kbps
Audio
Compression: Uncompressed
Frequency: 48,000 hz
Bit-depth: 16 bit
Number of channels: Stereo
Total size of the AO media files: 29.31 GB
* The numbering of the scenes denotes chronological time even though there are some gaps in the numbering of the files.
* Not all scenes have a corresponding ambience or music file.