Openness & Fragmentation
By "rendering" a film, we permanently seal it and "burn" all its fragments into it. FrameTrail is about preserving the openness of film that it has in production environments, so raw videos, cuts, text overlays, effects and included documents can be explicitly referenced, changed and remixed forever (and live!) beyond the frontiers of proprietary editing software and platforms.
Film as Architecture
We want to re-imagine the organizational concept of hypertext for a film environment. Think of a World-Wide-Web, where all the interconnected text fragments are replaced by film. Instead of a scrollbar, a timeline becomes the controlling instance and spatio-temporal links the basis for document access. In other words: we want to include the web into hyperlinked film and not vice versa.
Simplicity
In order to allow everyone to freely install, adjust and extend FrameTrail, we decided to use intentionally simple technology and self-contained formats. Everything is filebased (no database) and there are no complex build environments or media transcoding frameworks included. The drawback of this approach is that some things might not always work as easy as on a fully-fledged media platform.
The way you use, arrange and display the different components of FrameTrail is up to you and the affordances of your project. From just using FrameTrail as a full-site video player up to using it as a highly interactive hypervideo solution, everything is dynamically configurable (see also: Getting Started > Layout Areas).
