Who is the Author?

Digital multimedia systems provide much greater flexibility than the traditional textual documents; this predicates the need for redefining the meaning of authoring. We can get some insight into this new meaning of authoring by exploring the question, “Who is the author of a movie”?

As shown in table 1, a movie is created by a series of transformations. The inspiration and ideas for a story come from life. The Writer uses life experiences to create a story plot; at this stage the Writer is a user, while Life is the author. The Writer then writes a film script, or screenplay, which is used by the Director. Then the Director becomes the author of the raw footage based on the script. Often people consider the Director as the ultimate author of a movie; if this was true, then we should all be happy watching the raw footage. It is the Editor who puts this raw footage together to make the complete movie that can be watched as a meaningful presentation. Therefore, we can say that the Editor is the final author of the movie. However, with a videocassette or a DVD, the Borrower can use the remote control and change the order in which the various scenes are viewed. Now the Borrower is the author, and the other home viewers (deprived of the remote control) are the Users.

Interactive multimedia systems provide the users with the ability to change the presented content, making them the final Authors of the presentation. However, with the ability to easily manipulate multimedia content, new collaborative authoring paradigms are constantly being invented, based on the ideas of remixing and Open Source software (Manovich, 2001b).