Automation within digital videography: from the Ken Burns Effect to ‘meaning-making’ engines

Abstract

A key feature of entry-level software tools is the emergence of various forms of automation to allow quick and easy generation of short video material. Higher level forms of automation are prevalent particularly at the prosumer or entry-level end of software culture, and illustrate how software culture serves more broadly as a realm for the evolution of hybrid assemblages of human and nonhuman. This paper addresses a number of patterns of automated practices within software-based videography, including the Ken Burns Effect and the emergence of mechanisms we can identify as ‘meaning-making engines’. These enable the harvesting and curating of networked material into a variety of cultural forms, encouraging both individual and collaborative practices that engage with all manner of data structures (including video). This part of the digital ecology is still in its early stages but nonetheless features experimentation with and expansion of ‘meaning-making’ practices that have implications for the nature and ‘evolution’ of user-generated culture (and for emerging documentary practices).