Yahoo Develops Online Movie-Making Tool

Yahoo Inc. has launched an online video tool that promotes the San Francisco International Film Festival by letting people mix snippets of film entries to create their own movies.

The video re-mixer was developed by Yahoo Research, Berkeley, Calif., in partnership with the San Francisco Film Society and San Francisco State University Institute for Next Generation Internet.

Using the tool, people can preview portions of films in this year's festival and extract snippets and place them in a clip bin. The clips can then be organized into a one-minute film.

"We've had fun flexing our media hacking muscles to build this research prototype over the past month," developers Jeannie Yang and Ryan Shaw of Yahoo Research said in a company blog.

A selection of the best re-mixes will be screened in San Francisco April 24. The 49th annual film festival runs through May 4.