Walking the Edit

Developed in the framework of the Master cinema of the HES-SO, the project Walking the Edit seeks to combine the field of cinema and the territory of new technologies in order to try out the potentialities of narrative constructions between, on the one hand, an audio-visual geolocalized data base and, on the other hand, the recorded trajectory of a person passing through an urban space.
Concretely, the device implemented during this research is as follows:

Film making and indexing of the media

A production team surveys a delimited territory and gather audiovisual fragments which reveal the specific characteristics of the space : details, portraits, meetings. Emphasis is placed on the uniqueness of the viewpoint and the intensity of the regard of the authors which document the reality. The collected images and sounds are then indexed and are assigned a geographical location on a digital map by the team of editors. Each audiovisual fragment constitutes a medium which is indexed according to objective and subjective attributes. Then, these attributes permit selection of the media according to the analysis of the visitor's trajectory.

Realization of films by the visitors

Equipped with an iPhone and the software created as part of the project, visitors wander through the urban space. They hear the soundtrack of the film they are walking and watch the editing process taking place on the screen of the IPhone. Their trajectory "awaken" the images and create links between them.

Diffusion and exchanges

Once the walk is completed, visitors become viewers. They can watch "their trajectories translated into films" on the project's internet website and they can publish them if they wish to do so. Each film thus generated makes it possible to (re)immerse oneself into the "digital memory" of the urban space.

The process contributes to the construction of a collective memory of the city, made up of the various recorded walks: between the media documenting the territory and the imaginary of the walker, a living memory is consolidated; between the material city and the imaginary city, a third cinematographic city appears.

A phase of valorization and widening of the project is currently supported with the help of various partners.