[LRUG] [JOBS]: Senior developer for an ambitious data-intense media project

[Elena Lyubarskaya]

Hi, my name is Elena and I am a product manager on a project called DAU. It
is one of the most ambitious interactive film projects in the world with
500 hours of non-linear film (all based on the same universe and
narrative), a lot of metadata and a road map  to create a system for
automated montage/ social montage as well for the quazi-gaming experience.
The project is part of a larger DAU initiative which is a work of an
award-winning film director http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Khrzhanovsky.


Obviously in this project we are trying to do something no one has ever
done before. We are now starting to build our first prototype to test some
hypothesis about the project. We are looking for Senior Developer on Ruby
who would join our team and take on the project with us. This job would be
especially cool for someone interested in integration probles (we have many
of those), data management, semantics.

We are based in central London at Moorgate and have one of the most
artsy/informal work environments in London.

If you are interested please e-mail me at elenalyubarskaya at phenomenfilms.com
or at asucka at gmail.com.

Here is more about the project:

The project has won a reputation for being one of the wildest experiments
in a filmmaking history. It is inspired by the history of Soviet Science
and private lives of the scientists, involved in a creation of a ntomic
bomb. The project involved creating am immersive reconstruction of a Soviet
restricted-access Institute, where the participants lived fictional lives
and worked 24/7 for more than 3 years in conditions, exactly mathcing the
historical realities of 1938-1968. The innovative directing technique was
used with participants' stories evolving naturaly while the DP Juergen Juerges
and his team filmed them on 35 mm.


 Peter Sellars, Marina Abramovic, Romeo Castellucci, Boris Mikhailov, David
Gross, Nobel Prize inner in Physics, and other famous artists, scientists,
musicians, shamans and members of radical movements were involved in a
production and appear on screen together with more than 200 other
participants.

   This resulted in 700 hours of filmed footage, shot on 35 mm, and more
than 2000 hours of audio, as well as artifacts, documents, thousands of
props and costumes and other materials. Currently the project is at its
post-production stage and is basedin London. DAU products will comprise a
string of feature films, TV/VOD series and a transmedia project.


 The DAU material is transgressive in itself, balancing on the border of
fiction, non-fiction, documentary and reality. The transmedia project adds
even more dimensions to this work – from gaming to social media to
human-computer interfaces.


 *DAU TRANSMEDIA PROJECT*


 *DAU Database*


 DAU is a media database that comprises of 500 hours of cleaned footage
(200 hours have been cut out in post-production), 2000 hours of transcribed
audio as well as thousands of costumes, physical objects, artifacts,
photography, sounds and noises, music and other types of media – all
centered around the same narrative. The database has a set of qualities
that make it a unique research and experimental ground, including:


 - *Common narrative and universe.* All our media is united around the same
myth, location, set of characters and a complex non-linear narrative that
spans across more than 30 years of fictional time;


 - * Unprecedented content. *In DAU the large volume of materials, usually
characteristic for massmedia or user-generated content, meets acute
dramatism and artistic qualities of a high-brow festival blockbuster. The
content of DAU relates to almost all possible human situations – from
pregnancy to murder, from fear to incest - and emotions, while at the same
time covering a wide array of themes including sex, authority, war,
science, psychedelics, shamanism, esotericism, philosophy, art, etc.


 - *Linked data.* The video is split into 448 scenes and 2887 sub-scenes.
There are multiple types of metadata being attached to material, including
thematic, character, time and locations tags, full transcripts for all 2000
audio tracks, translations, loglines, descriptions, synopses, etc.


 - *Opportunities for timecode-based analysis of video and user data.* We
are currently transferring our database to a timecode-based data structure,
where we would be able to attach metadata and analyze user responses and
activity for every frame of video. The implications of findings made
thereof could go far beyond our particular project and be applied to any
media-related technologies.


 *Possible implications for research and production *


 At the moment DAU project is in its exploratory stage. We are open for
collaboration with researchers and artists in a variety of interest areas,
including, but not limited to:


 - *Metadata strategy*/*Semantic descriptions of video material.* Video as
a type of object represents a special challenge for a metadata strategy.
Transcultural/translinguistic semantics.

 We are looking into expanding our team of analysts who can work on
creating and implementing a metadata strategy with us.


 - *Semantic gaming as social discovery tool. *Semantic games are widely
used to crowd source object descriptions. Currently we are looking into
possibilities to use semantic games to allow future project users to
discover like-minded or opposing personalities among their peers.


 - *Therapeutic and Emotional media – *DAU has become a life-changing
experience for everyone involved in it. We are looking at ways to leverage
our media and combine it with emotional sensors, interactivity and social
mechanics to make the similar experience available to end-users.


 - *Crossing mediums: from film to gaming to real life.* To create a
life-changing experience we are looking at practices that would travel from
virtual spaces to real-life and back.


 - *Creative computing/Machine learning for automated montage. *DAU
database allows for infinite number of films of any length to be derived
from it. One of projects objectives is to use machine learning for
automatic film sequence creation in relation to various subject matters,
genres, moods, user profiles and other data and to study the impact those
sequences will have on end users.


 - *Social montage. *As one of the database applications we will be looking
at user-created video sequences (or as we call them - “trips”), as a means
to communicate different experiences. Those can be compared to
machine-generated sequences and give insights into human vs.
machine-generated narratives. The “trips” creation can bring about new
social mechanism for mutual therapy and artistic message exchange.
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