The film|minutes video|graphic workstation is a combination video player and text editor designed for close analysis of moving image media in scholarly research and academic writing, including student writing about film and video. The app plays videos on loop, one minute at a time, while the user enters notes or commentary on that segment. Timestamped notes are saved as txt files that can be reloaded and revised at a later time. Accordingly, the app serves either as a writing tool (as an informal notebook, for example, or for composing more complex and detailed close readings of films) or as a platform for reading previously compiled texts. The app was designed to facilitate the type of writing featured in Lever Press’s film|minutes book series, from which the workstation takes its name. Each book in the series takes a minute-by-minute approach to an individual film and conducts a close analysis on this basis. The software's creator, Shane Denson, is also the author of the first book in the series, on the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein. A demo featuring the video and corresponding text of the first ten minutes of the book/film are included in the app.
In addition to its use as a tool for writing, the app promotes reflection on the relation of text and image in an age of digital media, where conventional scholarly writing now competes with “videographic criticism” (or video essays). Instituting what might be called a videographic method, though not necessarily producing a strictly videographic product, the film|minutes video|graphic workstation invites users to reflect on the status of the seen (video) and the written (graphic) more generally.
The app is open access (CC-BY-NC-SA) and available for Windows and Mac. You can download it here: https://doi.org/10.25740/xq320wq3449.