We explore creating “cliplets”, a form of visual media that

juxtaposes still image and video segments, both spatially and

temporally, to expressively abstract a moment. Much as in

“cinemagraphs”, the tension between static and dynamic elements

in a cliplet reinforces both aspects, strongly focusing

the viewer’s attention. Creating this type of imagery is

challenging without professional tools and training. We develop

a set of idioms, essentially spatiotemporal mappings,

that characterize cliplet elements, and use these idioms in an

interactive system to quickly compose a cliplet from ordinary

handheld video. One difficulty is to avoid artifacts in the cliplet

composition without resorting to extensive manual input.

We address this with automatic alignment, looping optimization

and feathering, simultaneous matting and compositing,

and Laplacian blending. A key user-interface challenge is to

provide affordances to define the parameters of the mappings

from input time to output time while maintaining a focus on

the cliplet being created. We demonstrate the creation of a

variety of cliplet types. We also report on informal feedback

as well as a more structured survey of users.

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Publisher  UIST

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