Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

As the trend has been lately this is inspired by Adrian Miles. It is actually six movies playing simultaneously. Three large movies and three identical, but smaller movies. Only one of the large movies is in view at the time. You can click on each of the smaller movies to bring that one to the front. Network congestion means that the smaller movies will not be in synch with their larger counterparts. No big deal.

The movies are not looping. At first this was a choice on my behalf — I like the idea that the viewer becomes the editor and makes the cuts. And once the movie is done playing it's done playing. You will never be able to ‘see it all’. After watching my own movie I don't know if this is too frustrating. Unfortunately my demo version of LiveStage Pro has expired so I am unable to open the project and change the movie to loop.

Without further introduction here is my first interactive Quicktime experiment that I built from scratch. It is a tour of my hometown Aalborg one Danish winter day (yes, the idea for this movie is that old).

You can use this movie as a template!

Like Adrian's Rhizome 1.2 and Rhizome 2 you can download a copy of my template and create your own versions of this movie! First download a copy of the template:

• Download Quicktime Template (solQT.mov)

The next step is to create your three movies. Shoot some footage and compress the hell out of them — remember the viewer has to play six movies at the same time. Bandwidth is a concern here. You should save a large and a small version of each movie. The large version should be 320x240 pixels, the small version should be 80x60 pixels. The small movies should not contain any sound! Otherwise all three soundtracks will play at the same time, confusion will be the result. You should now have six movies (three different movies in two versions each).

Upload these six movies to the web. While you're at it upload the Quicktime template (solQT.mov) as well. The next step is to tell the Quicktime template where to find your six movies. Go to the Totally Amazing XML Generator. There you should create a track list which contains three movie tracks and three video tracks. The movie tracks should be the URLs to your large movies, the video tracks the URLs to your small movies. Do the movies in the same order in both lists. In the end your track list should look something like this:

Click the ‘Create XML Document’ and save the resulting file as solQT.xml. This is important! Make sure that the ‘QT’ is uppercase. Upload this solQT.xml in the same folder as the one you uploaded the template file (solQT.mov) to. And you're all done. All there's left is to call up the template file in your browser (or directly in the Quicktime player) to see if everything worked.