saved by grace, coder by calling
Our Language Software Development group was honored to receive the Exelerate Award, given in celebration of excellence, innovation and partnership.This award recognized three specific language resources that we produce: Keyman, Bloom, and Scripture App Builder. See more details about the award or watch the ceremony. Past winners of the award include the YouVersion Bible app and Jesus Film app.
Scripture App Builder (SAB) can create Scripture videos based on templates and the audio included in an SAB project. ScriptureEarth has used this feature to create thousands of videos with millions of views. However, the process has been time intensive and has required a commercial slideshow video product to generate the videos (so not many people have used it).
In 2018, some developers from our language software development team participated in the Urbana Hack4Missions where participants worked on 9 challenges of missional importance. One of these challenges was the “automatic creation of text-based Bible story videos.” Due to the work of these participants, they proved that it was possible to use free software libraries to integrate the process directly into SAB. We have been wanting to take this research and include it in SAB but have not had the time to pursue it.
Last year, students from Gordon College decided to work on this project called Story Builder as their Senior project. This open-source software takes the text, audio, and images for a story and generates a video with Ken Burns effects (panning and zooming) of images during the reading of Scripture verses. They based their work on what was demonstrated at Urbana and developed it into a full product. Chris mentored and directed the student team.
At the end of the school year, the students completed the project and we were able to include what they developed into Scripture App Builder 10.0 as one of the major new features. It is already being implemented by our users and is saving them time and producing valuable video for language communities. What used to take weeks to do can now be done in a day or overnight! Read below the feedback that we have received from one of these users.
The Story Builder has automated the video creation process. I have built literally hundreds of Scripture videos in the past couple months. Just today I built a whole collection of videos —Bible stories from the Gospel of Mark in the Keyagana language of Papua New Guinea. 40,000 people who speak this language can now watch for the first time the stories of Jesus in their own language.
Bill Dyck, Publications Services Team Leader, SIL International
What a time saver —I can have the process work even when I am away from my computer. And it has relieved my carpel tunnel issues! Besides dozens of hours in the past couple months, it has saved me multiple thousands of mouse clicks and fixing typos.
