Mise en Scène: A Film Scholarship Augmented Reality Mobile Application

Abstract

Introduction The presentation of film scholarship in the United States, like the majority of scholarship in academia, has remained relatively unchanged for decades; it was, and is, primarily textual. However, in addition to printed text, film scholarship has often employed the still frame or screen capture as a way of integrating film's visual dimension. And while the screen capture continues to be a valuable tool in the presentation of film analysis, it is only one of many possible forms of multimedia. Mise en Scene, an augmented reality (AR) mobile application, is a tool that has been designed to bring cinema scholarship into a kinetic and auditory realm more closely in line with the actual medium being studied: film. By embracing digital mobile technology, specifically AR, Mise en Scene is able to augment printed articles and books with short video examples, audio clips, and image galleries. Mise en Scene can augment both existing scholarship and works that are crafted with the technology specifically in mind. It should be noted that some attempts have been made to implement audio and video into film scholarship, but these attempts have been limited in both the technology used and the exposure achieved. Journals like Mediascape, Brighlights Film Journal, Refractory, and Underground Film Journal do embed videos into their online articles using Flash players like YouTube or JW Player, but in a rudimentary way that resemble blog articles. Additionally, the PDF versions of their articles that are available to print do not contain any ability to access the selected content. This project was a result of frustration with the current limitations in traditional scholarly exhibition. The impetus was an unpublished article on Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train that included nearly 30 still images in a protracted appendix. Due largely in part to physical space constraints, the inclusion of more than only a few still images in a single article on film is largely discouraged within the community of publishers and editors and thus the Hitchcock article was untenable from a publishing perspective. It became apparent that the number of still images in the Hitchcock article could have been reduced had the exhibition format of scholarly findings allowed for the inclusion of video and audio clips instead of just screen captures. Augmented reality offered two unique opportunities for film scholarship: a seamless merging of digital content and physical paper and the ability to more easily enhance archived works of nondigitized film scholarship. In the original conception of Mise en Scene as an enhanced PDF reader, film scholarship would either have to be created digitally with the application in mind or already-printed, pre-digital texts would have to be digitized and then enhanced. With augmented reality, physical books and articles could be enhanced/augmented without the need for digitization of the original work--digital and analogue would no longer have to be mutually exclusive. It is easily within the realm of possibility that a book or article from the early 20th century could, without digitization, be enhanced with digital multimedia. While this cross-generation augmentation was purely conceptual in the early stages of the project, the concept became reality when the Mise en Scene development teams were not only able to isolate specific articles to ensure there wouldn't be any overlaps between documents, but also figured out a way to instruct the AR software to recognize unique chunks of text, not just images. These breakthroughs allow any book or article from any time and any printer to be uniquely augmented with digital multimedia content without having to digitize the original source. Mise en Scene not only addresses an enormous technological gap in the film-scholarly exchange, it accurately reflects the complexity of the medium of film; cinema scholarship, for the first time in its history, can be presented in a way that utilizes the aural and kinetic nature of film itself. …