Swan Lake: Moving Image & Music Awards

Swan Lake: Moving Image and Music Awards (SL:MIMA) is an education project which originated from the need to join the efforts of multimedia teachers in Europe and open minds to new ways of multimedia expression. The project builds upon the cooperation of young musicians, students, video makers, story tellers, technologists and partners from the industry. SL:MIMA aims to be a truly international event bringing together students from different European countries.

The focal point of the programme is the students’ competition, the creation of stimulating visual imagery set to the new age piano music. A series of workshops accompanies the programme and is aimed at familiarising students with the whole range of digital art technologies – from visualisation and rendering techniques, to digital aesthetics, dramaturgy, interactivity in virtual environments and experiments from the ambient multi-medial area. The award itself aims to focus on discovery and promotion of young talent from university environments across Europe. The main goal of this scheme is to realise the idea of networking. The programme also forges links with the industry.

"Emergence" - Producer: Markus Mayr (Germany), Winner of the SL:MIMA 2009 in the category 'Digital Film'. Music by Clifford Borg (Malta), Winner of the "Best Music for Digital Film Award".

Project's website: www.swan-lake-award.org.

GAMECAST

GAMECAST is a multi-episode television broadcast, merged with a video game paradigm. It relies on a collection of scripted scenes with alternative storylines combined with live-rendered player interaction.

GAMECAST has been designed as digital interactive broadcasting system, which lets the viewers actively influence the plot of a TV program via internet. It enables viewers to impact the storytelling and even watch one's own digital-self in form of an avatar live on TV screens. The main part of the system consists of a special server-client network capable to generate a video data stream out of the player interaction. The result is streamed just-in-time to a TV station and broadcasted from there via TV and IPTV.

The goal of the GAMECAST system is to take the concept of virtual communities within a broadcast to the next level where the aspect of controlling a character on the TV screen finally can unfold its true excitement: appearing as digital actor and grasping towards self approval and digital fame. Therefore GAMECAST aims to create a solution for enriching the genre of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), with the emotionality and social acceptance of television.

Please refer to the GAMECAST website at www.gamecast-tv.com for more information. Also, find the papers about GAMECAST in our 'Publications' section.