Building an HTML5 Video Remixer at the Open Video Conference 2011

Elisa Kreisinger shares her experiences using the app to teach media literacy skills in the classroom

The 2011 Open Video Conference at New York Law School was devoted to “builders, tinkers, makers, and doers” and with that in mind I was excited to lead a session (entitled Building a Better Remix Maker) which focused on creating intuitive, accessible open tools to make video remixing easier and promote media literacy.

During the 2010 OVC Hack Day the original flash based Gendered Advertising Remixer Application was born from a collaboration with Zohar Babin from Kaltura. So the first order of business this year was to try and re-create a new open source version of the tool using HTML5 and JavaScript.

And after three days of collaboration with an incredible team of people at the conference we were able to achieve just that! We currently have a working HTML5 demo version up and running. At the moment it requires either the latest Firefox or Chrome web browsers to work correctly. You can take a look at the code on github and fork the project to expand it or create your own version.

Martin Leduc leads a brainstorming session with educators on future HTML5 remixing apps

As part of the session we also sat down with media literacy advocates, educators and video artists to brainstorm ideas for future HTML5 video remixing tools for use in the classroom and beyond.

The flash version also got some exciting new features including the ability to swap selected clips and instantly see the inverse of your mashup pairing. Even better you can now download your remixes to your desktop or publish them directly to YouTube all from within the app! (You can also fork the Flex version on github.)

Jonathan McIntosh and Boaz Sender discuss goals for building the HTML5 Remixer

Stay tuned for more updates on these project!

Special thanks to the truly impressive groups of people we assembled to make this HTML5 remixer a happen. The core team included: Boaz Sender (@BoazSender), Zohar Babin (@zohar), Martin Leduc (@ikat381),  Elisa Kreisinger (@elisakreisinger), Mark Reilly (@alien_resident), Greg Dorsainville (@ScienceLifeNY) Brian Chirls (@bchirls) and me – Jonathan McIntosh (@radicalbytes).

– Photos via curiousjohn on Flickr.