Cross Media NYC - Melting the Silos. A cross media integration and partnership conference - March 10, 2010
Just looking at the Cross Media NYC event & as Liz Lemon says 'I want to go there'
Just looking at the Cross Media NYC event & as Liz Lemon says 'I want to go there'
you seem to be interested in the idea of games that stir emotions – are we seeing that at the moment, and if not why not?
I think that even my own thoughts on that are evolving. Emotion is a practical word because everyone understands it. But I think what we really mean by that is making sure we have content that touches people and by doing that we may want to explore the specific ways that the videogame has as a medium. I think we can touch people through cinematic content in a game, pretty much as movies do. But I really think we can touch people more deeply when interactivity is involved. I think that when you make sure that the player's actions lead to emotional impact, then it is felt in a bigger way, and I think that this is key to our creative process. It's difficult to master but if you make sure that your game design philosophy is centred around that, you will have more profound impact on gamers on all sides of things and definitely this is what we are aiming for.
Part 2 of the Guardian UK interview with Yannis Mallat CEO of Ubisoft Montreal. Orig. published Oct. 1 & 2, 2009.
Nice to see a discussion of the emotional potential of interactivity in a game context...would love to hear more!
we have identified that the movie industry and the videogame industry are due to converge at some point, it's just a matter of time. What we're doing right now is anticipating that fact, and then working on all the bridges that connect the two. There are several kinds of convergence – there's corporate convergence, there's technological convergence , there's content convergence. Technological convergence is really important; we're talking to Hollywood people, famous tech-orientated directors like James Cameron...
Thanks Jacqu! Guardian UK interview with Yannis Mallat of Ubisoft Montreal on the convergence of the movie & game industries
Launched fall 2009, The Vetala could be the best Canadian webisode of 2009
In the aftermath of seeing Avatar, plenty has been bugging me too. Further, point by point, almost everything you say strikes me as pretty valid. And yet, I disagree. I think it is a good movie. Not sure I can piece it all together as elegantly as do you -- but here’s a small stack of stones which I think you’ve left unturned, or at least could be flipped over a bit further...... 1.) FIRST -- THE BIG MYSTERY. Where you describe the environmental strand as lacking any self reflection, I saw it as a diversionary tactic. Murky, yes. Sloppy even. Worse still, it was accompanied by appalling ‘noble savage’ and ‘colonial’ implications, especially in the cheesy denoument. BUT, I think these predictable and sappy elements were deliberate and worked as cover for the shocker..... 2.) If this level of actual political critique were to show up in the next gen of 3-D tentpole movies I think it would be amazingly interesting. But I would be surprised. In fact, I am just as despondent about where this leads as you are, Siobahn, though I suppose it is for different reasons. I think is has to get worse before it gets better because.... 3.) If permitted to update TSElliot?: 4.) Might McLuhan move in with Sontag thus?: 5.) Finally , in response to the critic pimping the Ozu festival in the Guardian on the coat-tails of Avatar.... I ltreasure Ozu. I know at least 8 of his films quite well and have seen many more. But comparing him to Cameron is like condemning Beethoven’s 9th or Wagner’s Parsifal on the basis of chamber music. I am not equating Cameron to Beethoven by any means -- but I strongly protest film-making comparisons with no sense of scale. IF, perchance, you wanted to stick with old Japanese masters but compare efforts to work at a great scale and be vocal about political meaning, I would propose Imamura’s ‘Black Rain’, or Mizoguchi’s ‘Ugetsu monogatari’. (Neither one made a billion dollars.)
Did you see how thoroughly and completely this movie CONDEMNED the military industrial complex of the American Corporate capitalist model of the first decade of the 21st century as STUPID, DESTRUCTIVE, AND NEEDING TO BE FOUGHT OFF... even if you have to do it with sticks, rocks, and pterodactyls? I could hear Eisenhower cheering from his grave! Deeply mysterious to me how a guy working on Rupert Murdoch’s dime got away with that? What other POWERFUL voices on the planet (hello Obama) will actually speak such critique clearly and loudy in the mass media during this decade??? Do you realize that in recent years while Blair/Brown and Harper and Obama and Berlusconi continued screeching at the top of their lungs that Corporate capitalism is the only way and must not be questioned, that the military is always right, War must be pursued, Black Prisons must be kept locked and hidden, Blackwater must funded and immune and all the documentation must be secret (exactly Col. Quaritch would say) -- that James Cameron was looking over the should of 1000 people digitizing the doom of such a plan! That, it seems to me, is ‘thinking about the political implications’. WOW! That, in my opinion, is a mark Tarantino has NEVER hit. Sure there are some big (kitsch and melodramatic of course) movies in recent decades that poke the eye of ‘the man’. But this one was EXPLICIT.
[] Explicit in the design -- military craft all unfamiliar vehicles, but would anyone even look twice if they landed at Bagram Air Field?
[] Explicit in the portrayal of hierarchy -- note that Jake clings to / accepts the patterns of hierarchy laid out by Col. Quaritch for so long that it makes Jake seem stupid. Interesting point.
[] Explicit in the storytelling -- note how Quaritch factors in the smart scientific female into his plan...by running roughshod around her if she is an irrelevant nuisance. He knows that she will be made redundant, passively, accidentally, or by his command. The important thing is that Cameron wasn't doing this under the cloak of indie filmmaking and salivating for Indie spirit prizes -- he was delivering kitsch for the mall!!!
“good poets borrow, great poets steal; working movie directors borrow, good movie directors steal BUT RECITE IN THEIR OWN VOICE.” Movies cost too much. Big palette movies cost way, way, way too much. Big Special Effects movie rarely achieve a coherence of vision ( let alone any meaning) because the directors can’t juggle the complexity of the filmmaking ( no matter how many smarty-pants types work for them) while negotiating the money realities of corporate production. I am not personally dazzled by the mere technical delivery of Avatar (though it is impressive.) I am dazzled by the fact that this technical proficiency is marshaled with superb coherence to itself AND to its subject matter. The completeness of the vision, the mastery of precise visual detail to aid the story telling, the fact that the greatest tech trick of the show precisely matches the key tech trick of the plot, the rendering of spectacle as palpable..... That is auteur filmmaking. A purely James Cameron recitation.
“MOVIES OF SCALE INEVITABLY reaffirm rather than challenge the collective norm, AND FUNCTION as a source of sheer entertainment ALLEVIATING THE VAST PAYING PUBLIC FROM THE BURDENS of elevated perception generated by high art.” There are myriad examples of film-making which do blatantly challenge the collective norm -- but are therefore invisible. ( For example the prison guard sequence in Rithy Panh’s “S-21 The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine”..... as brilliant as the highest of high art, but I would wager no one reading this has ever even heard of it. ) Continuing with pseudo Susan: “ BIg MOVIES cannot be conceived as distinct from the dynamics of power in a given society IN THAT THE EXPENDTIRUE OF $300,000,000 will always describe both objects and a way of life brought on by the urbanization and mass-production of the INFORMATION revolution” Really, what could anyone expect from Twentieth Century Fox Studios and the director of Titanic other than kitsch!!! The miracle is when kitsch sells and critiques simultaneously.
Done the week and now catching up on these…Sounds like avatar has been on your mind as much as mine Siobhan!
It seems like Cameron intentionally picked a predictable, played narrative in an attempt, (a successful one I think) to break new ground in how immersive you can get with 3D.
I think that no; we don’t ultimately want the 3D experiences to be driven by “played” narratives. There can be more and it’s very exciting to think of how to apply these findings to a smaller scale, more subtle character study. But then it brings up the question; Do I really want to see Black Robe:IMAX 3D? Not until I trust that the deeper immersion the technology provides won’t jar me out of a more complex narrative—and that the creator of the narrative understands how to make the story resonate with what's emerging as a new version of the medium.
Emotional depth from complex characters over a layered and relevant narrative…in 3D? It’s difficult to reconcile at this point. However, Avatar is certainly a more complex narrative than when I saw Michael Jackson in Captain EO at Disneyland in the 90’s, so I can see progress. ;)
The entire world was scrupulously drawn, I really felt transported and I found myself forgetting that it was CGI. That’s not a trivial accomplishment in the world of story telling. To be able to focus on the technology, Cameron seems to have intentionally (unobtainium?) isolated on the script side of the narrative equation, leveraging the redemption that’s historically included in this narrative tradition of the white colonizer’s dream of going native.
I heard Sigourney Weaver on Letterman saying that every frame of the Navi characters was representative of 40 man-hours of work from the Digital Domain effects house. In terms of attention allocated, it’s an immense amount. Every 24th of a second of film is an average working week. Was it a waste of time? Or did he make a world?
Say he did make the pieces of a new virtual world. The interesting question that comes up for me now, is what to do with that world. On the less budget intensive side of film, say independent documentary, the trend of re-purposing footage into new and creative packages to be re-released over the film’s life cycle, is expanding. At it's best, this trend is starting to yield more sustainable projects and richer themes as people interact with recreated pieces over time. What could be done to re-purpose and recreate the pieces of this film toward that ongoing interaction?
Not so much to make them any more money, (they’ve grossed over a billion dollars) but to take all that work, and to open the doors to Pandora, and let people interact with it. The idea is getting a little out there, but I’m imagining a new, alternative film-going experience where the movie was just a “trailer”/”describer”/”tuning fork” to what the values, beliefs, tone of that world is in a very (very) broad strokes kind of way. What’s oversimplified in the film experience could be increased in complexity via massive multiperson interaction. (One major difference is the independent documentary example is that there is a ongoing analog component screenings, meetups that co-mingles with what’s going on in the digital space.)
The ongoing attention to re-purposed pieces could iterate into something beyond the constraints of the original narrative—potentially into narrative lines on race, imperialism, and the environment that are less saccharine and violent.
…or you could end up playing gin rummy in a tree with a bunch of huge blue cat people just because it was awesome and you were between meetings..
very cool video - 2007
Transmedia storytelling is future of biz
Studios create mythologies, multimedia worlds
A June 2009 Variety article on transmedia storytelling with comments from Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner on the transmedia development of Avatar.
"The company's work "goes beyond your typical bible," Gomez says. Starlight Runner creates "megabibles and mythologies" contained in oversized binders full of images, chronologies, storylines, character profiles and descriptions of such details as geography, vehicles and weapons. "We teach the studio, other divisions of its parent company and its licensors how to bring these characters to life in a way that's true to the original platform."
For example, Starlight's mythology document for "Avatar" facilitated the extension of that property to the vidgame arena via publisher Ubisoft, which plans to release an Avatar game that, like the movie, will be available in stereoscopic 3-D.
Starlight began its relationship with "Avatar" via an introduction made by a senior studio exec with considerable franchise familiarity just as production on the film was getting under way.
"We always try to extend a property to other experiences," says the exec. To do that, he adds, it's important to "look at what the essence of the property is, what people are responding to, and re-create that in other ways."
"People are realizing that this kind of concerted implementation is one of the most powerful ways to convey messages," says Gomez, who worked with Disney on "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Tron," and with Fox on James Cameron's "Avatar." "For them, as for most of our clients, we make sure the universe of the film maintains its integrity as it's expanded and implemented across multiple platforms."
I love that Jeff Gomez emphasizes the integrity of a project. How many adaptations/transmedia developments have flopped because they have betrayed something essential that the core fans love?
Abrams revisits the importance of mystery, here looking at his own experience of the spoiler (we all know we've done it)
After watching J.J. Abrams' Mystery TED talk, jump to the WIRED May 2009 issue, guest edited by Abrams & full of intriguing articles