When I first saw the Google IO presentation on Google wave I was blown away. It was one of the what if moments, where at 2AM I would ponder the possibilities. It was these possibility that led me to start a draft for developer access to the Google Wave sandbox. Specifically I envisioned a collaborative media production environment with-in Wave. I started penciling out my ideas and then life, as it often does, took my attention to more pressing matters I have a mortgage to pay and all.

Fast forward to last week and I find myself with a Google Wave account and now that I actually have my hands on Wave it’s time to dust off the idea. So I started doing some research and what should I come across but this article Google Wave for Filmmakers: A Concept and said well I must not be too crazy if others had put so much thought into this idea as well.

So I left this comment :

Brilliant! I love this ball and will roll with it until I am using it to create collaborative media on a daily bases. Imagine if you will hooking the API to the open source Celtx – http://celtx.com – (all-in-one media pre-production software) Just from having the Wifi feed the video into the WAVE feeding Celtx you could do things like:
drop still’s into story board
adjust scene length based on footage
script annotate video edits
adjust scheduling based on amount of actual footage shot
These are just a few for only a segment of what you COULD do. Going to write up more ideas over on my blog.

Great work and I would love to “brain storm” more ideas with you drop me an email.

Keep up the good work!
Johnny

So this is the post I spoke of in the comment.

Let me expand on other options for how we might use Google Wave.

***note- Thank you to my unwilling participants in the sample blips.

So first scouting a location

Scouting a Location

Second is choosing talent (imagine a bot that replies to the appropriate agent when the talent is chosen)

Choosing Talent

I also added a bit of script notes about character development I can see a ton of potential for script writing and collaboration. Hook this to Celtx or other production software using the Google API.

The third example is integrating Robots into the process with video examples.

Adding Robots to the Production Wave

The elephant in the room that I have not talked about yet is the ability to use this to proof shots. Imagine if you will the wifi camera idea posed by Jonathan in his blog post ties to a Final Cut Server that has the ability to publish to embeddable video platform. The editors could rough cut push and embed the video for feed back directly into Wave. Excuse me I am starting to drool.

Now I know looking at the current state of a limited release product it is hard to see beyond the current state of blips and the choppy small Waves. But go with me on this and imagine the epic Wave and you just rode it out.

Like this Dude you might call me crazy but COWABUNGA I’m droppin’ in!