There's nothing Passive about 'traditional media'

Have a look at this image… 

I defy you to passively look at this image. In spite of its simplicity, your brain has just begun a very active narrative process…

It’s one of the great myths of 21st century screen media - that video games, online experiences and much of what constitutes ‘transmedia’ is Active media - where as traditional film an TV is Passive. This idea annoys the shit out of me. Let’s change the focus of this idea a little and shift it to being audience-centric rather than medium-centric.

In medium-centric thinking (which seems to dominate the popular discourse) we define the technological platform itself as active or not - the apparatus is the active element in its reactions and adaptations to the audience. This might be useful for defining the nature of the medium and specific mechanics of interaction, but it does place the emphasis on what the Apparatus does rather than what the Audience does. 

If we think in audience-centric terms we can change the question to frame what an audience is being asked to do on a range of levels - defining what  makes the audience active, rather than what makes the technology active. This active request to the audience is as tangible in traditional film or TV as it is in a video game and it is the right question for any filmmaker to ask (though, alas it is all to often neglected).

Every image you present on screen is a device for eliciting proactivity from your audience; 

What questions does the image cause the audience to ask?

What speculations does the image prompt the audience to formulate?

What suspicions does the image force the audience to conjure?

What assumptions does the image compel the audience make?

What ideas are you asking the audience to resist or reject? 

Question, Conjure, Formulate, Speculate, Suspect, Assume, Resist, Reject… These are all active verbs, all instigators of pro-active tasks for your audience to perform.

When a film feels sluggish, slow, distant or disengaged it is most often because it is catering to passive delivery of Plot rather than active engagement in Participation. Plot is not Story. Plot is simply an order of events. Story is the experience the audience derives from the way the plot is told - the narration of plot results in a story experience.

This idea is crucial because the Audience is an active part of that narration in constructing the story for themselves based on the information and ideas they are presented. As such, if you are not giving your audience images that demand they question, speculate or resist you are robbing them of the ability for them to construct the Story experience. Its like asking them to play a game without a joystick.

This is certainly not a new idea and goes right to the heart of classic Montage theory and the seminal writings of Sergi Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov.  The “Kuleshov effect” points very effectively to the idea that the Audience write the ‘story’ for themselves based on the information they are presented and thus are very much Active participants in the experience. Kuleshov’s experiments themselves were a rather dry and decidedly Russian affair involving bowels of soup and girls in coffins.

But Alfred Hitchock jazzed it up a bit with a self-deprecating humour which illustrates the point with aplomb.

The roots of this idea of the audience as actively involved in the construction of a story go beyond editing and montage sequences and speak to the core challenge of screen media artists - to engage with audience-centric thinking. How do the images you present, and the ideas they embody, motivate your audience to be active in the construction of ‘story’ for themselves..? 

What questions does the image cause the audience to ask?

What speculations does the image prompt the audience to formulate?

What suspicions does the image force the audience to conjure?

What assumptions does the image compel the audience make?

What ideas are you asking the audience to resist or reject?

This was the major attractor for me when I first encountered the Wastelander Panda project. It was Not just a cool post-apocalyptic action plot vehicle - rather it was a project full of image-ideas that demanded I ask questions, speculate on possibilities, make assumptions and reject, resist or accept ideas. The online prologue for Wastelander Panda is microcosm of storytelling that is very audience-centric and it almost impossible to come away from watching it without a complex entanglement of assumptions, questions, suspicions and very active speculations about what might be. At a very simple level, it’s a project that invites the audience to be part of the narration without ever giving them a game-control pad. And whilst Wastelander Panda may not be everyone’s cup of tea, these ideas of motivating the audience to be active, serve to make any screen-story better.