MAD (Movie Authoring and Design) is a novel design and authoring system that facilitates the creation of dynamic visual presentations such as motion pictures. MAD supports the creation process by enhancing the ability to visualize the ultimate result at any time during the process, by allowing the development of movie ideas both from a top-down and bottom-up approach and through the integrated handling of scripts, dialogue or narration, music, sound effects, storyboards and video shots. It thus supports the flexible inclusion and combination of words, images, sounds, and video sequences, and provides the ability to play back an approximation to the ultimate result.

In previous research, we completed a prototype of MAD (Rosenthal and Baecker, 1994), observed its use in 11 short productions by students and children as young as 11 years old, redesigned the user interface based on these experiences, and re-engineered it for greater reliability and flexibility. We also investigated the roles of collaboration and visualization in the filmmaking process.

Current research proposes to explore further the use of MAD by novice moviemakers such as children and students and well as by professional filmmakers; extend the uses of MAD to allow the creation of informal video documents such as personal statements and records of creative activity; extend the mechanisms by which such statements and records can be transmitted via Internet transmission and viewed via remote playback; extend MAD's metaphors and representations to support the creation and display of dynamic visual sequences with mechanisms other than that of the script and the storyboard; investigate collaboration in the process of designing movies with MAD; and extend MAD to support the development of interactive multimedia.

Ron Baecker
Mary Alton Ann-Barbara Graff	Alexandra Mazalek Ilona Posner	Eric Smith Vanessa Williams

Diba Bot Emanuel de Rege

Naomi Friedlander Jesse Reiter

Alan Rosenthal Patanjali Venkatacharya



	Baecker, R.M., Rosenthal, A., Friedlander, N., Smith, E., and Cohen, A. "A Multimedia System for Authoring Motion Pictures." ACM Multimedia '96.
	Rosenthal, A.J. and Baecker, R.M. "Multimedia for Authoring Motion Pictures." Proceedings of Graphics Interface `94, pp. 133-140.