A while back, I was invited to participate in a think tank about mobile/entertainment put on by Nokia. I pitched to them an idea that I still really want to see happen: the idea that an intelligent video camera (like Nokia’s N95) could become the filming media and platform for self-generated first-person documentaries.

First-person documentary is a bit of an obsession of mine. I’m making a documentary on my friend, Fi, and 90% of the footage is stuff he shot. His self-filmed DV is far more interesting, raw, and compelling than our “professionally filmed” HD.

The challenge to this methodology is editorially – how do you filter hundreds of hours of video diaries? How do you sculpt a journal into a narrative?

This problem is the same problem that keeps people from cutting home movies into anything self-contained. Editorial is time-consuming, tedious and requires a custom skill set. But, what if you could take the judgments that are behind editorial decisions and automate them? What if you could use thumbs-up/thumbs-down voting and/or tagging to allow people to shape an edit? What if you used social networking behavior to allow an automated edit to know that John is more interested in footage pertaining to his friend Sam and his girlfriend Kate than he is in his acquaintance Mike?

I proposed a system of mobile devices that recognize proximity, social relationships and shoot high-quality video. Picture this: you go to a party with a bunch of friends. All of you film with your smart, high-quality cameraphones. At night, while you sleep, the phones upload footage and create an assembly based on the order in which things happened and physical proximity (i.e. the phone knows if two people were filming the same conversation, dance, striptease, etc). When you wake up in the morning, you watch a video. You click a thumbs up for shots you like, a thumbs down for shots you don’t, and you tag people you recognize. When your friend watches the video 2 hours later, the choices you made about the video have further refined the edit. He, too, makes decisions. Each re-viewing of the video produces a more finished version.

If you and your friends did this all the time, you’d end up with an on-going series about your lives – particularly the events when cameras are most present: concerts, parties, weddings, graduations, sports events, road trips, etc.

I worked with my friends Tony and Sooyoung at Favorite Medium on this deck. Nokia didn’t go for it, but I still believe in the idea. Someone should do this. If you think it’s a good idea, call me.

A PDF is here.