Interactive Storytelling at the Sydney Film Festival

Interactive narrative. Multi-stranded narrative. Non-linear narrative. Parallel narrative. Immersive narrative. Trans, Cross and Multi-platform narrative. There’s a whole shit load of narrative buzzwords going around right now and much discussion about their relative uses and abuses. Moreover, when such descriptive terms acquire ‘buzzword’ status they are too readily associated with ‘newness’ and something conjured into being by new technologies. The truth is most all of these terms above have a much longer history, generally predating any digital technologies we might otherwise associate them with. The contemporary nomenclature is most often just a new badge to unify long standing ideas or adapt those ideas to new mechanics. 

In discussing interactive and non-linear narrative in the past I have often been contemptuous of the buzzword laden hyperbole that too often surrounds the discussion and the baby-out-with-the-bathwater thinking around new-media narrative forms. Indeed the verbose assertions of ‘all new’, ‘totally different’ and the subtextual idea that such story experiences are ‘nothing like anything that has gone before’ are not only bogus, but distinctly unhelpful to either the artform or artists seeking to engage with these artforms.

What is required in this brave new world is some clear air with a better signal-to-noise ratio, Less obsession with the ‘shiny newness’ of interactivity and a more considered understanding of dramatic principles, role-play, motivations, obstacles and reward. 

It’s in this light that I’ll be chairing a discussion panel at the Sydney Film Festival on the topic of Interactive Storytelling: the challenge of things to come. With a diverse panel of guests that includes major broadcasters, independent producers, writers, critics, funding bodies and documentary filmmakers we’ll explore some of the challenges, opportunities and underlying principles of interactive narrative.

The official program for the event, which is part of the Expert Talks series staged at the Sydney Film Festival Hub, reads like this…

New digital technologies are transforming the way content producers are writing, producing and delivering new work, opening up exciting opportunities for interactive storytelling. Discover how Australian artists, documentary makers and producers are harnessing these new possibilities to create innovative transmedia stories and interactive web documentaries. Get the lowdown on the latest trends and sneak a peek at some truly groundbreaking work. 

The panel is chaired by Mike Jones, AFTRS screen studies lecturer and Head of Story at Portal Entertainment.

Panelists include:

Julia Scott-Stevenson, writer, documentary programmer and filmmaker

Justin Wight, 2012 Rasmussen Award winner for Double Happy vs. The Infinite Sadness

Nick Doherty, Managing Editor, SBS Online

Anna Grieve, producer (Croker Island Exodus, screening in SFF’s 2012 FOXTEL Australian Documentary Prize competition;  Big Stories Small Town, )

Mike Cowap, Investment Manager, Screen Australia

FREE

Friday 15 June, 7-8.30pm

Sydney Film Festival Hub @ Lower Town Hall

483 George Street (enter on Druitt Street)

The event will also see a presentation from Ruth Harley of Screen Australia as they announce the successful recipients of development money fro  the new All Media Fund for interactive and multi-platform screen media.

This Sydney Film Festival Hub event is just one of a series of public appearance i’ll be making over the coming few months discussing such topics as Immersion, Interactivity, Episodic Narrative, WebSeries and Transmedia. I’ll be blogging soon about these appearances I’m making in Australia and overseas in case you happen to be in the neighbourhood.

Below are some of the wide ranging ramblings Ive had in recent years on intercative and transmedia.

Lessons from the Immersive Writing Lab

The Immersive Writing Lab was a week-long intensive seminar and workshop series staged last year at Ravensbourne, London. This development program for immersive and interactive storytelling and transmedia experiences was a partnership between Portal Entertainment, leading practitioners, writers and producers as well as technology companies and institutions such as Varytale the BBC Writers Room. 

Coming out of the IWL program, Portal Entertainment (where I’m serving as head of story development) instituted an international Storyworld writing competition for writers keen to engage with the possibilities and potential of multi-platform transmedia. The challenge was to construct a dramatically sustainable Storyworld with broad and rich potential across platforms; a Storyworld that offered dynamic contexts for compelling characters and dramatic events as well as opening up roles for the viewer to take on within that Storyworld in an immersive experience.

Certainly it was no easy task. We received hundreds of entries and the challenges, pitfalls and problems of rendering such writing was clear and apparent amid the rich and fantastic ideas submitted. In some ways the short-comings of many entries were really no different than those of traditional writing and I found myself at times penning much the same feedback on the Storyworld proposals as I would on a feature film screenplay. At other times the weaknesses of the proposals were much more specific to the demands of interaction and transmedia.

Having read through all the entries in the competition and written hundreds of pages of coverage and feedback on them, I feel somewhat like I’ve obtained a glimpse of the Transmedia writer zeitgeist - a macro-level snapshot of where the worlds writers are at right now in attempting to embrace and exploit the opportunities of a Transmedia world.

But to be more pragmatic and specific I’ve compiled my list of the top 6 tips that emerged from judging the IWL Storyworld Competition for practitioners and future proposals in this field. Some a glaringly obvious but evidently need to be said, some are more intricate and speak to the complexity of writing in this arena.

So the top 6 are…

1) Put a NAME on it..! 

I was staggered as to how many entries failed to have either a Title on the project or Name of the author present on the actual proposal (let alone contact details). And just because you’re uploading through an online submission system doesn’t mean you can assume that the reader will know your title and name. Put it on the Page…! Better yet, put it in a footer on every page. 

2) Loglines should be Short.

Your Logline is your first shot to get the assessors attention and prompt their curiosity. Assume whomever is assessing your proposal is also reading 100’s of others. In fact it’s safe to assume they are probably looking for any excuse to put as many projects on the reject pile as quickly as possible so they can spend more time on the good ones. So it is crucial your Logline gets to the exciting/intriguing/interesting central idea as efficiently as posisble. If your logline is 4 paragraphs lines long, you’ve probably missed the point of a logline. A Logline is a distillation, a concentrated expression of the central idea that compells the reader to read more. Its not about detail, its about clarity!

3) Be Relevant.

If the competition is specifically for multi-platform and immersive transmedia experiences run by a company with an obvious focus is on new technologies and interactive entertainment, please think twice about submitting your proposal for a Storyworld consisting only of Novels, TV shows and Feature Films.

4) Succinct and Focused. 

Your Storyworld shouldn’t be a bucket for every idea you’ve ever had. Complexity of itself wont make your Storyworld stronger. A strong Storyworld should have a single compelling, driving, motivating, binding central idea from which any other layers of complexity hang together. Without that central idea being clear and apparent from the Logline and Synopsis, your project can easily become impenetrable to read and comprehend.

5) Motivated Interaction and Role-Play. 

Please DO NOT write “the audience can interact with the characters online” unless you can clearly state;

a) What the Interaction is? 

and 

b) Why the audience would Want to or Need interact? 

Audiences need good reasons to become interactive in a meaningful way, they need to be motivated to interact and be rewarded when they do. Interaction is not an abstract, its the undertaking of specific actions, so define what those actions are and why the audience wants to perform them? Interaction in a narrative is effectively Role-Playing, so by allowing your audience to interact you are giving them a Role to Play. Define that role, be specific about it, what is the viewer’s job… to Solve? to Find? to Fight? to Choose? to Strategise? to Moderate? to Contribute…?

6) Multi-Plot Potential

A Storyworld built around a singular discreet plot rather than the dramatical potential for numerous plots wont work over long-form or across platforms. Design your Storyworld to be a pressure-cooker of opposing forces, ready to boil over so that when an assessor reads it they will immediately begin imagining possible plot-lines and scenarios rather see the dead-end of a single resolution.

The opportunities of narrative writing in the Transmedia, Interactive and Immersive space are matched only by the challenges and difficulties. This shit aint easy. Thankfully for any writer wanting to jump in, the good old interweb coughs up all sorts of great resources to ensure you don’t have to be reinventing the wheel and can stand on the shoulders of giants. In particular a refined online seminar video series has been produced directly from the original Immersive Writing Lab presentations and the entire set is available as an online course from Imaginox. At just £30 its a bit of bargain and offers a depth of insight you’ll rarely find elsewhere.

The overview to the IWL seminar series reads:

“It’s an exciting time to be a writer. Not only are the audiences’ attention changing around how you tell a story to them, you now have a much wider palette than ever before in which to draw them into the worlds you create; from new digital platforms (social networks, tablet computers) to reinventions of old forms (such as e-books).

This event is about helping you understand that wider palette to tell a story. Inspirational talks, demos which will help you develop stories that push the boundaries of what is possible for a protagonist, drama and audience involvement in the digital age. 

Watch the Immersive Writing Lab if you are interested in:

- Writing & Technology

- Interactive Fiction

- Storytelling that is told on more than one platform at a time

- Linear vs. Non-Linear Narrative Drama

- Character Development

Words, the Mind and Metaphor

The mind works in extraordinary ways. With or without our conscious remit it forges connections between things, demands associations, linkages and analogies in order to make meaning. Processes of mental interrogation that construct complex arrangements of understanding in the blink of an eye.

I’ve written a lot lately about Metaphor; metaphor and prologue in a TV series such as The Wire, the taxonomy of Cinematic metaphor expressed visually, cognitively and experientially and drawn upon James Geary’s TED talk to emphasis how important metaphor is to the way human beings make sense of our world.

And so this might explain why I am so taken with the short film WORDS by Daniel Mercadante & Will Hoffman. A seemingly simple montage film that connects words to actions, ideas to images, through the power of metaphor and mental cognition.

Visual Style in The Wire & David Bordwell's Dellusion

David bordwell has been the dominant name in screen studies and film theory for a good many years and his co-authored book ‘Film Art’ as been the seminal text for film scholars and film school students alike.
 
Yet, whilst articulate and useful, Bordwell’s perspective on screen aesthetics, film form and style is decidedly problematic. Bordwell is entirely, and openly, feature film centric. And for Bordwell this exclusivity for the theatrical-release feature film is not merely a kind of speciality in his thinking and theories but rather has manifested as a rather arrogant and ignorant view that only feature films can offer a canvas for artistic visual style. As such Bordwell is openly dismissive of television or any other form of cinematic medium.
 
This, it appears, is this issue that has promoted the very interesting video essay below examining visual style in David Simon’s THE WIRE - a show that Bordwell describes as little more than a “sturdy policeman’s-lot procedural” and in specific terms of its visual style “fragmented and uninspiringly shot.”

What a sad, deluded, outdated little man Mr Bordwell has become. And whilst I want to cry BULLSHIT on Mr Bordwell’s assertion its probably best I let the more elloquent Erlend Lavik illustrate…

For further reading on The Wire and visual style, I sometime ago wrote a post entitled the Wire, metaphor and prologue. In this post, which includes videos of each of the season opening prologues, I breakdown David Simon’s use of Metaphor to establish cognitive and conceptual prefaces for the themes the season is posing. Whilst i focus on the metaphor in writing and concept, what cannot be overlooked is the acute visual expression of those metaphors. In frame, in light, in staging… there is nothing dull or uninspiring about The Wire. Its just not austentacious, showy or overdone - like so much contemporary cinema. The Wire is visually deft, sophisticated, sublte and artistically rich.

Hitchock's 'Rear Window' as Spatial Timelapse

Cinematic Space has long been a pre-occupation of mine and the flotsam and jetsom of 5 years on an in-complete PhD thesis tells the story of this saturation. 

By Cinematic Space I don’t mean science fiction depictions of the stars, but rather the construction of spatial environments on screen - the process by which they are articulated, assembled and perceived. Matte-painting, forced perspective, deep-focus, widescreen, stereo and surround sound all had profound impact on how we compose space for the screen. And further, in the digital age, virtual cameras and multi-layer compositing took such perceptions, and conceptions, of space to a whole new level.  

I’ve written and presented on these ideas all around the world - in Italy, Germany, the Uk and US - several long articles are here on mikejones.tv (Montage, Collage and Decoupage and Vanishing Point) as well as podcast recordings of these lectures and produced video essays exploring the idea of how space is manipulated and built by filmmakers. Yet, nothing I have written or said is near so profound an illustration of cinematic spatial manipulation and construction as this video from Jeff Desom. www.jeffdesom.com

In Jeff’s own words…

“I dissected all of Hitchcock’s Rear Window and stitched it back together in After Effects. I stabilized all the shots with camera movement in them. Since everything was filmed from pretty much the same angle I was able to match them into a single panoramic view of the entire backyard without any greater distortions. The order of events stays true to the movie’s plot.”

You can read an interview with Jeff Descom on One Small Window.

BlackMagic Restores my faith in Humanity and Camera Technology

When the National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB) rolls around each year in Las Vegas I find my self torn… On one hand the nerd-fest in new gear, tech and software taps some deep primal desires within. On the other hand, recent years have too often seen the triumph or marketing and hype over rational technological advances.  
 
The first few days of this years NAB sadly promised to out do previous years for ludicrousness.  
 
Last years bold and emphatic assertions by the major tech developers of the future being 3D were this year proved to be what anyone with half a brain already knew to be true - failed marketing hype. So this year those two letters ‘3D’ were all but entirely absent; erased from conscious memory as if they never existed -  dealt with by Winston at the Ministry of Truth.  
 
Instead they were quickly replaced with two other letters with lofty ambitions of buzzword status - ‘4k’. Sony, Canon, Panasonic, JVC all spruking the 4K headtrip. RED somewhat predictably never content to be only as absurd as the next guy, opted for something more ridiculous and spouted an incoherent stream of dribble about 6k…  and was largely ignored by all and sundry…
 
And so there I was, my nerdy genes deadened by irrational marketing hype silliness, on the verge of disspair that my techno-creative brothers and sisters had all LOST THEIR FUCKING MINDS…!  
 
But wait… What was that small but confident voice from across the room…? Blackmagic Design had created a camera…?  
 
It wasn’t 4k. It wasn’t 3D. It wasnt a Super35 size sensor. It wasnt a new proprietary format. It wasnt a Prototype? It wasn’t a Kickstarter campaign. It wasnt a public beta (a la RED).

It was…

Wait for it…

A Camera…  A real working, soon to ship, Camera…
- professional cinema camera
- small, compact, light weight camera
- 2k and HD res camera
- under $3000

And in a single move BMD put all the major camera players to Shame!
- no lossy compression
- shooting direct to open universal formats (DNG raw, DNxHD, ProRes)
- Standard, out of the box, EF and ZF lens mounts  
- bundled with arguably the worlds best colour grading and management software - DiVinci
 
But more than all that, more than the fact that BMD have seemingly delivered  what the loud mouth lunatics at RED have promised but failed to deliver for years - they have created a camera that puts Workflow at the Centre of production process. BMD have made the camera a Part of the workflow solution rather than making yet another camera that Needed a workflow solution.  
 
Hal-lei-fucking-lu-ya…!
 
I might have still been a touch skeptical at the press release until I saw who BMD had approached to test the camera - Australian Cinematographer John Brawley. Now let’s be clear about what John is; he is working professional cinematographer. Major cable and network TV drama series, feature films and award-winning shorts are his credits.  
- tangle
- offspring
- lake mungo
- lowdown
- twentysomething
- 100 bloody acres
- puberty blues
- the perfect host

John Brawley IMDB
 
This is the consistent work of an in-demand professional. NOT a blogger, not some ignoramus with a Vimeo account and a twitter feed, NOT a professional ‘camera tester’ or DSLR workshop tutor, or camera brand ‘guru’. BMD did something truly out-of-the-norm whacky and asked a Real Working Professional Cinematographer to test their camera.
 
John provides a clear headed appraisal of what the camera can do from a body of knowledge deeper and wider than the majority of online voices.  Read and see his thoughts on the BMD camera at his superb blog here…
 
This combination of a rational technology, free of hyperbolic marketing horseshit and a genuinely professional appraisal has restored my faith in creative technology developers. Even more so the response from users across the Internet has also restored my faith in humanity’s ability to Not be sheep. Despite  all the 4K hype and numerous announcements and product releases, the most talked about and tweeted product of NAB was NOT 3D, not 4K, not a huge sensor… It was the BMD. 2k RAW camera for three grand.
 
Now dont get me wrong. I havn’t used it and nor do i think its going to be the grad poo-bah of cameras. But that’s not the point. Whether the BMD camera proves to be amazing or mediocre is not so significant right now as the fact that finally a company has sought to deliver a useful, rational, working product that is competitive, functional, balanced and focused. No bullshit. No marketing team interfering with the truth. No bloated specs in a ridiculous pixel-count arms race. Just good thinking and good design.

Amen…!

The Thriller Storyworld

The Thriller, as a film genre, is an enduring one with broad audience appeal and equally consistent with critical acclaim and mass audience. Yet it is also a genre of cinematic narrative that lacks the hard specificity of tangible edges and conventions of other genres such as SciFi, Horror and RomCom. It’s a genre that can be all too easily misunderstood and mis-construed particularly in the context of transmedia and multi-platform experiences. 

What is it to be Thrilled…? What narrative concepts do we need to deploy to satisfy that contract with the audience?

Certainly there is much written about the nature of Suspense which is at the heart of generating Thrills beyond the raw kinetics of the action sequence.

Noel Carroll cuts to core with the notion that…

“We experience suspense by entertaining uncertainty regarding an unfolding event which has two logically opposed possible outcomes one moral the other immoral of which the moral outcome appears improbable and the immoral outcome appears probable.”

And A. R. Duckworth contests and expands on Carrol in a lengthy series called The paradox of Suspense 

However such compelling and conceptual understandings of Suspense and the Thriller need also to be grounded in hard narrative, scripting and creative development choices. And this is where I see two core principles of The Thriller that stem from the generation of rich Thriller Storyworlds. 

1. FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE

At the heart of the Suspense Storyworld is Forbidden knowledge. Such knowledge is secret, protected and has the power to do great damage. It is knowledge characters are Not allowed to know. So, invariably, storylines and plots will happen when that secret, dangerous, protected knowledge leaks out, when it becomes known by people who shouldn’t be allowed to know, often people who don’t want to know and may, ultimately, wish they never knew..!

This observation of Forbidden Knowledge in a suspense story is obvious in all manner of Suspense films; notably, of course, in those of Hitchcock. Most often it’s a singular event - a crime, a murder, a corruption - which is witnessed by someone who cannot be allowed to know. At other times characters are compelled to pursue the Knowledge to discover what it is, unaware at first of its Forbidden nature. A third archetypal variation sees a character encounter the forbidden knowledge but be unaware what the knowledge is or what it means and must unravel the mystery to escape. A film like North by North West plays out in this way where the mistaken identity of the protagonist brings him into contact with the Forbidden knowledge yet the character himself does not know what that knowledge is.

In any of these variations it is the value of the Forbidden Knowledge that compels the character forward and into dramatic action. In the case of the much bigger canvas of the Storyworld which may underpin multi-platform and long-form thriller narratives, the articulation of exactly what the forbidden knowledge is, along with its value and power, is what will serve as a prime motivating force that is sustainable.

What the Storyworld writer must carefully map out is the scale, scope and ramifications of the forbidden knowledge - how big is it, how far does it spread and how much fall-out could come from the Knowledge being unleashed. (corruption, murder, conspiracy, secrets, lies) This forbidden knowledge is a central, unshakable truth of the Storyworld. Any character (or indeed audience-member participant) who comes in contract with the Forbidden Knowledge will be changed and compelled into action - they will no longer see themselves or their world the same way.

Think of your Forbidden Knowledge as Secrets and Lies - very big and important Secrets and Lies. The secret needs to have dire ramifications if it gets out, and the lies are what are told to keep the secret a secret. If you can articulate a big set of secrets and lies at the heart of your suspense Storyworld, then you will have the fuel to make that suspense propel stories, characters and audiences across episodes and platforms.

2. TWO WORLDS

The second crucial element in the Suspense Storyworld is the concept of ‘Two Worlds’. The effect of having a clearly articulated and compelling Forbidden Knowledge at the centre of your storyworld design is that you effectively create Two Worlds. One is the world outside the Forbidden Knowledge, where the secret is maintained and the characters are ignorant of the secrets and lies. The other world is the world inside the Forbidden knowledge, this is the world the characters will encounter and move into once they have transgressed and come in contact with the forbidden knowledge.

This conceptual construct of the Two Worlds is vitally important for sustainable suspense drama - particularly in a transmedia, long-form or episodic environment. In a traditional feature film narrative structure this duality would simply be the shift for a character from their Status Quo into the inciting incident that casts them into adventure. So in the example of the North by North West, the first world is the status quo for Thornhill staying in the hotel. The shift into the ‘other’ world comes when he is mistaken for another man, George Kaplan, and becomes caught up in the spy world of stolen microfilm. 

But in a Storyworld with a much broader scope than a feature film, we need to be much more complex in designing our two worlds as potentially our world will see numerous characters and audiences take various paths between the two worlds. Each of the two worlds, inside and outside, the forbidden knowledge, will have different Storyworld rules. For a character outside of the forbidden knowledge, the world will have certain expectations, behaviours and rules of normalcy. However once a character crosses over into the other world by coming in contact with the forbidden knowledge, hierarchies, behaviours and what is ‘normal’ will change radically.

These two principles - Forbidden Knowledge and Two-Worlds - are part of an approach that importantly puts the development of World first before articulation of Plot. Design and develop a powerful and dangerous ‘Forbidden Knowledge’ and then shape ‘Two-Worlds’ that are bridged by that knowledge. The more radically separate the two worlds and the bigger and more powerful the secret knowledge, the more explosive potential your suspense Storyworld will be. Characters and plots, circumstances and events, will naturally flow from such pressurised Storyworld dynamics. But if you begin with character and plot you run the risk of such characters at play in Storyworld that is not sustainable; one that quickly runs out of fuel as it tries to support ongoing, multiple or interactive dramatic experiences. 

The Newsroom - HBO, Sorkin & Ken Finkleman

HBO. Arron Sorkin. Political Drama…. Do I really need to say anything more..?

More excited about this than any other in-production show right now.

 But it does make me wonder if Sorkin knows the other great TV series of the same title… 

Ken Finkleman’s CBC comedy series The Newsroom was Brilliantly funny and at times slipped into something sublimly poetic….

Five films to show to an Alien

Late last year the Australian Film TV and Radio School staged an intriguing public event that brought together a collection of Australia’s best known film critics to consider what 5 Films from all of cinema history would you show to an Alien come to visit from outer space…?

Much more interesting and important than the chosen films was the discussion justifying the choices. Julie Rigg, film critic for ABC Radio, was one the presenters on the night and she has compiled excerpts form the discussion to be broadcast on ABC radio in 2012. 

Julie writes:

“Which five films would you screen to an alien? Always supposing, that is, you met an alien who wanted to know about the history of cinema here on earth. This was the challenge Karen Pearlman, head of Screen Studies at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School set for a panel of film critics and lecturers late last year….

What sort of close encounter were we describing here?… What they (the Aliens) don’t understand is human emotion. Their emotions are, apparently, different; and kinda collective, but with sub specialties. So, in order to understand human emotions, and indeed why we even have cinema, I would have to explain to them that human understanding is a complex interaction of past individual experiences; of memories; and experiences real and imagined. Every individual has a different set of memories which inflect their emltions. But shared stories are the way we bind together at a deep deep level.

I would explain that  our cinema combines all art forms: music, sound ; image, performance.. and stories. Not always, but nine times out of ten, stories.

And that in these movies, they may see examples of some of the most profound emotions of humanity.

So I have chosen these five films, in an attempt to help them read human emotions.

It was hard, because our emotions are not limited to five…”

You can listen to the audio recording of the live event and read the full transcript here.

Hollywood's war on technology

There is nothing new about recent attempts by Hollywood to take control of the internet. It’s part of a long history of desperate resistance to change. And this infographic saids it all. Im particularly fond of the quote from Jack Valenti refering to the good old VCR… “I say to you that the VCR is to the American Film Producer and the American public what the Boston Strangler is to the woman at home alone…”

Infographic by Anne Rhodes