Why Difficult Movies Are More, Um, Difficult - Design Principle? Leverage What Your Audience Already Knows To Your Advantage

Original Article by Manohla Dargis via NYTimes.com

"...Filmmakers employ an arsenal of narrative strategies to hook and keep your attention. In February a psychological researcher in Britain, Tim Smith, posted an experiment on Mr. Bordwell’s blog that illustrated how a filmmaker can focus your gaze. Using an eye-tracking technology to trace the movements of pupils (when they’re somewhat fixed or darting about), Dr. Smith was able to map what viewers looked at when they watched a somewhat static interlude from Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” (2007).

“Viewers think they are free to look where they want,” Dr. Smith writes, “but, due to the subtle influence of the director and actors, where they want to look is also where the director wants them to look.”

What happens, though, if a director doesn’t direct your gaze in familiar ways, shuns classic compositions on the one hand or fast cuts and close-ups on the other, plays with or disrupts narrative norms? What happens to even those enthusiastic moviegoers who — much like that chess master who was able to re-create chess pieces from memory because he recognized familiar patterns — know how Hollywood movies work? Maybe some moviegoers who reject difficult films don’t, like the chess master who didn’t recognize random positions, have the necessary expertise and database patterns to understand (or stick with) these movies. When they watch them, they’re effectively (frustrated) beginners and don’t like that feeling..."

Love that this article captures one of my key design principles - design to leverage what your audience know, ie. genre, allusions to other narratives, patterns are all a shorthand that will get your audience busy adding meaning to your work. Smart signalling to what is already familiar is a highly efficient tool that adds layers to new works.

New Edition of StoryCentric Features Mike Monello, of Campfire, Discussing Work on "Game of Thrones" | InteractiveTV Today

[itvt] is pleased to present the latest edition of StoryCentric, our video column from Brian Seth Hurst, CEO of The Opportunity Management Company and former second vice chair of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. StoryCentric focuses on the business, technology and art of interactive storytelling, and highlights new technologies and other industry developments that have the potential to fundamentally change the way we create and interact with stories and narratives--in television and beyond.

Fascinating Story of a Nutter: Wilhelm Reich: the man who invented free love | The Guardian

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Women at Adolf Koch’s socialist body culture school, which drew on Reich’s ideas. Photograph: Mel Gordon Collection

Excerpt:

"...In the ideological confusion of the postwar period, when the world was trying to understand the Holocaust, and intellectuals disillusioned with communism fled the security of their earlier political positions, Reich's ideas landed on fertile ground. After the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Moscow trials, Reich's theory of sexual repression seemed to offer the disenchanted left a convincing explanation both for large numbers of people having submitted to fascism and for communism's failure to be a viable alternative to it. Reich, capturing the mood of this convulsive moment, presented guilty ex-Stalinists and former Trotskyites with an alternative programme of sexual freedom with which to combat those totalitarian threats. In his biography of Saul Bellow, who bought an orgone box in the early 50s and sat in it for daily irradiations, James Atlas wrote that "Reich's Function of the Orgasm was as widely read in progressive circles as Trotsky's Art and Revolution had been a decade before."

In creating a morality out of pleasure, Reich allowed postwar radicals to view their promiscuity as political activism and justify their retreat from traditional politics. Reich made them feel part of the sexual elite, superior to the "frozen", grey, corporate consensus. People sat in the orgone box, whose empty chamber reflected the political vacuum in which the left then found itself, hoping to dissolve the toxic dangers of conformity, which, as Reich had eloquently suggested as early as 1933, bred fascism. As Michael Wreszin put it in his 1994 biography of Dwight Macdonald, who promoted Reich's ideas in his anarchist-pacifist magazine Politics and hosted nude cocktail parties and orgies at his Cape Cod retreat: "In the gloom of the cold war years intellectuals whose historicism had been shaken faced the choice of either accommodating themselves to a prosperous anti-communist society or taking a stand directly on what Mailer, citing Reich, called 'the rebellious imperatives of the self'."...

Addiction to Romance Novels leads to unprotected Sex, unwanted Pregnancies, unrealistic Sexual expectations...| guardian.co.uk

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Excerpt:

"...Blaming romance novels for unprotected sex, unwanted pregnancies, unrealistic sexual expectations and relationship breakdowns, author and psychologist Susan Quilliam says that "what we see in our consulting rooms is more likely to be informed by Mills & Boon than by the Family Planning Association", advising readers of the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care that "sometimes the kindest and wisest thing we can do for our clients is to encourage them to put down the books – and pick up reality".

Her comments follow a recent claim that romance novels can "dangerously unbalance" their readers, with Christian psychologist Dr Juli Slattery saying she was seeing "more and more women who are clinically addicted to romantic books", and that "for many women, these novels really do promote dissatisfaction with their real relationships".

Writing in the latest issue of the academic magazine, published by the British Medical Journal, Quilliam said that the messages of "the post-sexual revolution bodice rippers of the 1970s", which typically see "the heroine being rescued from danger by the hero, and then abandoning herself joyfully to a life of intercourse-driven multiple orgasms and endless trouble-free pregnancies in order to cement their marital devotion", run "totally counter to those we try to promote"...."

Must Read: Paul Shuttle - Hollywood's Bubble Is Bound To Burst

Excerpt:

"....Consider the career of Edward Burns, whose performances in Entourage and Saving Private Ryan have overshadowed compelling work as a writer-director of 11 films. His fourth, the well-regarded Sidewalks of New York, cost $1,000,000; Newlyweds, his latest, just $9,000. His is an example of the emerging phenomenon. Today, with a little ingenuity and a consumer level DSLR camera, a crew of four can emerge from the editing suite - itself little more than a laptop - not with a crudely shot amateur production, but a professional, mainstream film that can take the kind of chances denied those operating under budgets a thousand times larger.

The third development is a familiar one to over 200 million of us: the on-demand revolution. Just as cost has proven an obstacle to their even getting as far as the soundstage, so too has it prevented many smaller movies from finding nationwide distribution; a key driver in the word-of-mouth sales so crucial to the viability of independent film. Yet the growing success of LoveFilm, Netflix and iTunes is proving that cinema - and the major studios' stranglehold over it - isn't the gatekeeper to success it once was.

This spring, Sebastián Gutiérrez became the first director to release a film direct to YouTube, for free, to an audience of over half a million people. Kevin Smith, once the darling of the independent movement, was shunned - his behaviour likened to that of a 'meltdown' by some commentators - when he announced an unprecedented move towards self-distribution. Just a year later, his film Red State - with the help of neither traditional cinema nor home video - had more than made its money back with a roadshow that took the film directly to his fans. If that was possible on a budget of $4,000,000, imagine what you could achieve starting just $9,000 in the red...."

Transmedia vs Multi-screen Distractions = 'brand enhancement' by Michael Matthews - The Mobile Culture - Forbes

...In a recent IPG Media Lab and YuMe study, it was stated that smart phones present a real threat to attention and is considered distraction media. The results concluded that smartphones accounted for 60 percent of TV distractions. The reason is mainly that marketers have been slow to embrace the opportunity of phones, among other devices, being used as a tool for supplemental or enhanced consumer engagement. When they do, these devices move from being a distraction to an opportunity....

How Harry Potter Became the Boy Who Lived Forever -Immortalized in Fan Fiction- via TIME

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Excerpt:

"...Right now fan fiction is still the cultural equivalent of dark matter: it's largely invisible to the mainstream, but at the same time, it's unbelievably massive. Fan fiction predates the Internet, but the Web has made it exponentially easier to talk and be heard, and it holds hundreds of millions of words of fan fiction. There's fan fiction based on books, movies, TV shows, video games, plays, musicals, rock bands and board games. There's fan fiction based on the Bible. In most cases, the quantity of fan fiction generated by a given work is volumetrically larger than the work itself; in some cases, the quality is higher than that of the original too. FanFiction.net, the largest archive on the Web (though only one of many), hosts over 2 million pieces of fan fiction, ranging in length from short-short stories to full-length novels. The Harry Potter section alone contained, at press time, 526,085 entries.
(See the top 10 movies based on kids' books.)
Nobody makes money from fan fiction, but whether anybody loses money on fan fiction is a separate question. The people who create the works that fan fiction borrows from are sharply divided on it. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer have given Harry Potter and Twilight fan fiction their blessing; if anything, fan fiction has acted as a viral marketing agent for their work. Other writers consider it a violation of their copyrights, and more, of their emotional claim to their own creations. They feel as if their characters had been kidnapped by strangers...."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2081784,00.html#ixzz1Rc6bodnl