On Friday we launched a new range of courses at AFTRS to be run in 2009. More information can be found here.
Among the new courses are Graduate Diplomas in Game Design, Animation Directing and Virtual Worlds. The unique approach of these courses is to share core coursework in Directing Concepts and Skills, Emerging Media and Production Workshops with Directing students in Fiction and non-Fiction areas. We want to encourage experimentation, creation of hybrid forms and groundbreaking ideas that lie at the frontier where film meets games. Students in the year long course will all get to work on a major production project and will be able to complete electives in areas including Character and Performance, Script and Narrative Structure, Level Design, Story, Space and Performance, Character Design and others.
I instantly fell in love with Jenova Chen’s game FlOw when I first played it last year. It’s such a contemplative experience to play the game - a rare thing in an increasingly accellerated and anxiety ridden world. Tonight I discovered Jenova’s earlier game Cloud which he completed while a student at USC.
I had such a strong emotional response while playing the game although it is clearly unsophisticated graphically and simply structured compared to commercial titles. It’s a bit like watching a low budget film with raw production values but a great story. But Cloud doesn’t really have a story though it manages to evoke the wonder of playful childhood daydreams and experiences. In a recent article in Gamasutra Jenova compares his games to experimental film and I think this may be a useful comparison.
story is a tool, but not the goal of video games. In the past, when you say “entertainment” — I mean, we care about entertainment more than story — so “entertainment” in a sentence, basically, it’s food for feeling. If you are hungry, you go to eat; if you are thirsty, you will drink; and if you feel sad, you want to do something to entertain yourself; or even if you feel too high, you want to do something to calm yourself down…But story is only a vessel. If you want people to feel a certain way, you don’t necessarily start with, for example, music. A lot of people use music for entertainment, but do you see story in music? Maybe in the lyrics, right?
And then, even for visual media, like animation or movies, it’s just right now the most popular genre uses narrative structure, but you’ve seen experimental movies and animations which have nothing to do with story, but are really intriguing to watch, and make you feel a certain way.
So I think story, or narrative, is a very powerful vessel to carry emotions.
I think experimental film has often pushed film grammar and language forward and helped it to evolve to new levels of sophistication. Jenova’s work is achieving a similar function in the games world and it’s going to be interesting to watch what comes next.
I’m now a commuter and becoming an avid podcast listener while traveling to and from work. My journey has been particularly quick the last few weeks as I’ve become totally addicted to JC Hutchins’ 7th Son. Have even found myself having ‘driveway moments’ sitting in the car waiting to hear the end of an episode when I’m already at my destination. I’m half way through the second book ‘Deceit’ and finding it really gripping.
I was a big fan of William Gibson and Neil Stephenson in their cyberpunk days but I’ve got to say 7th Son is giving me some flashbacks to Snowcrash, Neuromancer and other early masterworks of the genre. I don’t mean by this that I think it’s derivative but I am finding it similarly compelling.
I wasn’t expecting much when I started listening to 7th Son and the first book was a bit clunky at the start. It’s a very difficult expository task to introduce seven characters and get us to know and love them but I can recommend sticking with it. By the second book the writing and the podcasts are really cooking and I for one am totally hooked.
Recently we have been brainstorming concepts and furiously writing new curriculum which we are going to teach at AFTRS in 2009. The work we have been doing at our Laboratory of Advanced Media Production has been influencing many of our new offerings in games, virtual environments and more generally in screen content. The process of rapid prototyping, user-centred design and iterative project development is something we have been seeking to firmly implant in the new curriculum. Came across this great definition of experience design from Nathan Shedroff via our own very talented designer Catherine Gleeson.
There are, at least, 6 dimensions to experiences: Time/Duration, Interactivity, Intensity, Breadth/Consistency, Sensorial and Cognitive Triggers, and Significance/Meaning. Together, these create an enormous palette of possibilities for creating effective, meaningful, and successful experiences.
The most important concept to grasp is that all experiences are important and that we can learn from them whether they are traditional, physical, offline experiences or whether they are digital, online, or other technological experiences. In fact, we know a great deal about experiences and their creation through these other established disciplines that can-and must-be used to develop new solutions. Most technological experiences-including digital and, especially, online experiences-have paled in comparison to real-world experiences and have been relatively unsuccessful as a result. What these solutions require is for their developers to understand what makes a good experience first, and then to translate these principles, as well as possible, into the desired media without the technology dictating the form of the experience.
Any new idea for a product or service should start with meaning and progress from there. These ideas are the basis of a Design MBA which is being run at the California College of the Arts which claims that Design is the Future of Business. A noble aim indeed which has a place in any future looking creative content educational program (or should that be experience)?
Last year I was lucky enough to meet Miles Beckett, one of the creators of Lonelygirl15, when I moderated a symposium for the Portable Film Festival team. Young British director Luke Taylor and Australian actress Tara Rushton were also on the panel and were promoting the Kate Modern series which had recently been launched in the UK as a spin off of Lonelygirl15. At the time the investment of Bebo in Kate Modern was a talking point, particularly as LG15 had cut deals with MySpace in the US.
The Show is Everywhere is the motto of the new entity Eqal which was announced in April 2008 to supplant LG15 which was the company behind Lonelygirl15 and Kate Modern. The business strategy seems to be to cut non-exclusive deals with the big portals to provide video entertainment which is tailored to sit within a social network. Beckett calls Eqal a ’social entertainment company’ and this is the distinctive formula has made their work a success on the internet. If you look at Lonelygirl15 or Kate Modern they aren’t just shortform linear video posted on the web. While they can be enjoyed as a ‘lean back’ experience they are also highly interactive experiences which encourage audiences to participate in the creative process. This is how they see it:
Eqal is backed by $5 million dollars of venture capital investment and backers include Netscape founder Marc Andreesen among others. ‘Social entertainment’ is similar to TV but it’s a distinctly new form which has been designed for the internet and the ecology of social networks. The rules of engagement with audiences are changing and Eqal is one great example of innovation in form. More information about the Eqal deal here.
New Australian feature film Black Water is getting good critical acclaim in Europe and has just been released in Australia. Made by Australian filmmakers Andrew Traucki and David Nerlich it has reportedly already made its money back, a rarity for any Australian film. This is one of the viral videos being used to promote the film. You can find more under the user decembergirl888 on You Tube. It’s an effective campaign and the film consistently comes up high in search rankings for ‘crocodile movie’ which is an achievement in itself seeing as Crocodile Dundee and more recently Rogue were much bigger players. One of the Black Water team used to work for Yahoo and the other is a deft hand at visual effects. Good to see all their hard work beginning to pay off for them.
It’s on the grapevine, Baz Lurhrman’s Set to Screen podcasts have hit the iTunes store offering young filmmakers an insight into the process behind the making of new feature film Australia. Critic Lynden Barber mentions it in his blog Eyes Wired Open and credits Luhrmann and Fox for a genuine effort to reach out to new filmmakers. There’s definitely something in this and, from someone who teaches at a film school, I know you can’t get better educational resources than this kind of on-the-spot, behind-the-scenes coverage.
It’s interesting to watch the evolution of what were standard DVD extras features only a few short years ago. Hasn’t the landscape changed when the studio marketing machine needs to release the extras ahead of the feature film, all noble intentions aside. The only thing is they’re not doing as good a job as Peter Jackson did on King Kong in 2005 with his on-set video diaries being posted on the web every week of the shoot. The site is still up here and it’s maintained by King Kong fans but includes all those original production diaries which are such a mine of information for film students everywhere. And they’re distributed by Bit Torrent as opposed to Baz Luhrmann’s material going through the Apple iTunes walled garden. Common guys, get with the program - and I mean Apple, Fox and Luhrmann - make this stuff freely available everywhere and it will actually have a much bigger pay off in terms of generating pre-release buzz. And it won’t harm your street cred with an internet savvy audience.
Had the pleasure interviewing Current TV’s Ezra Coopenstein as part of the first Portable Film Festival being run in Singapore. The old parliament house was a spectacular venue for the symposium and Ezra and I were seated in the centre of what used to be the Singapore government chamber. I had to try not to end all my questions with ‘Mr Speaker’ - I’ve never felt so close to the seat of power!
After overcoming the weight of the venue we launched into a discussion of Current TV and Ezra’s role as leader of the Viewer Created Content team. VC2, as they call it, is at the heart of the Current philosophy and makes up about one third of their on air content and all of the content on their web portal. Current TV is a clever amalgamation of cable television and web community. The first filter on viewer created content is the viewers themselves and the process of viewing, commenting on and assessing content is also a means of constituting a creative community. Current has been very successful in bringing younger viewers back to television because gives them an opportunity to express themselves and communicate. The TV offering has recently been extended to the UK and Ireland and in May will open its doors in Italy. Who knows, tomorrow it may be as ubiquitous as CNN or the The Discovery Channel. It certainly offers cable networks a model to upgrade their cross platform capabilities as Current offers an effective format to drive viewers/creators from web to TV.The initial vision of Current revolved around creating an independent news network to counter the top-down media networks. It has managed to create a service that is suited to the times, both politically, and in a media landscape beset with challenges. It’s heartening to see an activist community of citizen journalists emerging and Current TV seems quite comfortable fostering them and letting them express their voice.
In the coming week Ezra will be appearing in a range of cities throughout Australia and I highly recommend you come to hear him. I’ll be hosting the Sydney session which will be held on Tuesday 8th April at 6pm at the Museum of Sydney. More information about Australian appearances can be found here.
This is not an alliance that I would have predicted but boy does it have potential to produce something interesting. There’s a great series of interviews available with both Corey and George (separately) on Ngai Croal’s Level Up Newsweek blog which you can read here. The big news is that they are going to make a Mad Max game together alongside the next Mad Max film. George Miller has some very interesting comments about how making Happy Feet, his first CGI feature, opened his eyes to the possibilities of the games medium. Here is some of what he says:
The realization was, as I started to work in the digital realm, that film suddenly is able to do things that you weren’t able to do before. And once I got into that, like everyone else, I saw the obvious convergence of film towards games and games towards film. So, I got swept along and found myself sort of in a current that was heading towards games.
The other big thing for me was the fact that film is a pretty closed narrative–it moves along at 24 frames a second, it’s extremely linear, and in that sense rigid, whereas games bust that open. So in a way, with games being more exploratory, it’s closer to what a novelist can do in many ways. A novelist can stop the forward momentum of their story and go explore little cul-de-sacs and then come back again. Games allow you to do that as well. Basically, games and films and just about everything else comes from the heading of storytelling. So it’s just another way to tell stories, I think.
The interviews are well worth a read and Corey also lets slip a few secrets about why he left Sony after God of War I, 2 and half of 3.
I’m not a huge Oprah fan but this is an amazing video from a courageous and inspiring man called Randy Pausch giving his ‘last lecture’. I’ve blogged about Randy Pausch before - he is one of the founders of the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center and was jointly responsible for developing an amazing and forward looking educational program. It doesn’t get much more public than appearing on Oprah but Randy bravely confronts knowledge of his impending death of pancreatic cancer and reflects on the importance of keeping childhood dreams alive. A fuller version of the lecture was delivered at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007 and can be found here and it has lots of detail about the ETC program. Randy continues his battle against this horrible disease and you can follow his progress here
