Watching people use Media Clips

I wrote previously about our work to add Media Clips to Popcorn Maker. Since then we've watched as people have started to make things with it, from Ron Swanson dancing to any song to the International Space Station orbiting Earth, which has been a lot of fun.

One project Brett showed me today was done by BBG as a procedural storytelling experiment using a SoundCloud audio monologue about the election of the new Pope.  It's a really good example of how one can take a bunch of source media (multiple YouTube clips, images, text, audio clips) and mix them together into a more complete, seamless, web-media experience.  What's even better is that you can click "Remix" and see how it was done.  I've done just that in the image below, which shows the media clips they've used in the Media Gallery, and the timeline where they get used.

I love the final effect--it really feels like something new, something I don't see on the web right now: people have all kinds of tools for telling stories spatially, but not in time, linearly.  We've long had people making fully rendered videos, but that's not what this is: this is taking media and resources from across the web and mixing them together in the browser.  We're still testing and evolving this, but already it's getting to be quite usable.

I'm equally interested to see what people will do with another experiment we're trying, using YouTube's webcam uploader.  I think when we combine user created media with the ability to mix audio and video from other sources, we're going to have something really interesting.  Almost there...