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.
