NY Times Magazine on Machinima

NY Times Magazine - The Xbox Auteurs (requires free subscripton)

Although the substance of the article may be old-news for we cutting-edgers, it's a fun read, maybe an insight or two, and definitely some sort of indicator of things to come.

Then one day he realized that the videos he was making were essentially computer-animated movies, almost like miniature emulations of ''Finding Nemo'' or ''The Incredibles.'' He was using the game to function like a personal Pixar studio. He wondered: Could he use it to create an actual movie or TV series?

Video games have not enjoyed good publicity lately. Hillary Clinton has been denouncing the violence in titles like Grand Theft Auto, which was yanked out of many stores last month amid news that players had unlocked sex scenes hidden inside. Yet when they're not bemoaning the virtual bloodshed, cultural pundits grudgingly admit that today's games have become impressively cinematic. It's not merely that the graphics are so good: the camera angles inside the games borrow literally from the visual language of film. When you're playing Halo and look up at the sun, you'll see a little ''lens flare,'' as if you were viewing the whole experience through the eyepiece of a 16-millimeter Arriflex.

Evolving Stories and Worldbuilding

Some interesting comments on writing (and rewriting) stories through a storyworld:

We all know that in the digital age, the news media are growing more fluid every day. If a print newspaper or magazine makes an error, they run a correction the next day or the next month -- but if a blogger makes an error, he or she can fix it immediately. The continual rebirth of the Star Wars films suggests that art is moving in the same direction. As the popular films, TV shows, and other narratives that function as cultural reference points for billions of people go digital, they are becoming far more than static artifacts -- they're living stories that can evolve in the telling and re-telling. It's almost reminiscent of the way oral epics like the Iliad evolved as they were transmitted from bard to bard. Add elements like fanfic and transmedia storytelling and you may get something even more potent: a society that continually creates and recreates its narratives in multiple media, with multiple storylines and multiple authors.

Which version of each Star Wars movie is the "real" one? It doesn't matter anymore. What matters is how the version you're watching at any given moment fits into the grander mythos that Lucas is still spinning.

Tech Coast - George Lucas: The New Bard

And a previous post by Henry Jenkins:

Many of our best authors, from William Faulkner to J.R.R. Tolkien, understood their art in terms of world-creation and developed rich environments which could, indeed, support a variety of different characters. For most of human history, it would be taken for granted that a great story would take many different forms, enshrined in stain glass windows or tapestries, told through printed words or sung by bards and poets, or enacted by traveling performers. Sequels aren't inherently bad-remember that Huckleberry Finn was a sequel to Tom Sawyer. But Twain understood what modern storytellers seem to have forgotten-a compelling sequel offers consumers a new perspective on the characters, rather than just more of the same.

ToonTime with THE RZA

In case you haven't noticed, THE RZA is slowly taking over the world. A founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan, he sent shock waves through the hip hop community with his production work on the band's debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36th Chamber). Since then, he has recorded and produced countless albums, he's scored films, he's acted in movies, and recently he published his first book. (He's even faced the daunting world of film festivals, serving as our Artist in Residence this year.) But now, THE RZA faces his greatest challenge... CARTOONS.

While some of the strangest, coolest cartoons you've ever seen screen behind him, THE RZA will layer together a soundtrack live, demonstrating his gift for using music to complement the action on screen and evoke moods with a few notes. From the earliest Wu-Tang albums to his soundtracks for Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino, THE RZA's distinctive style - all spare beats and minimal samples - has always resulted in lean, yet forceful soundscapes. THE RZA is a nimble MC, and the interplay between the live tracks he will be laying down and the cartoon mayhem unspooling on screen will be electrifying - a once-in-a-lifetime hip hop battle where the animated and the Wu will collide.

Wed, June 22 8:30 pm
The Ford Theatre

part of the 2005 Los Angeles Film Festival

thought thieves

Thought Thieves is about people stealing and profiting from your creation or innovation. Think about it: how would you feel if you saw your hard work being passed off as the property of someone else? What would you do?

We want to know!

Send us your short film on intellectual property theft by 1st July 2005 for your chance to win £2,000 worth of film and video equipment vouchers. And finalists will be invited to attend a special screening of their films and presentation ceremony in London.

website

poster

Website sells a script

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer set up a website called The Dionaea House last year and posted a series of correspondence between characters in his horror screenplay. After all, if the Internet is there, why not exploit it to create some buzz? The site got a ton of hits. Tomorrow's Hollywood Reporter says the website helped "build the mythology" of the project — and Warner Bros. Pictures picked it up for David Heyman to produce at Heyday Films.

http://www.dionaea-house.com/

via la observed

Go to the cinema and star in the film you're about to see

via wmmna

During the Expo 2005, spectator queueing to see a movie at Toshiba’s digital cinema are submitted to a futurecast, they place their faces into a hole in the wall for a few seconds. High-resolution digital cameras perform a quick scan from several angles, and everyone takes their seats.

The animated film, Grand Odyssey, begins as normal but the entire cast is made up of walking, talking digital replicas of people in the audience.

Each speactator gets a role — there are soldiers, doctors, scientists and politicians involved in the story — as a Toshiba supercomputer is processing the one-time-only film.

Elsewhere, Hitachi is inviting visitors to a virtual reality safari where they get handsets that contain a prototype of the mu-chip, a processor which, when brought close to particular transmitters, downloads any information on offer in that area and displays it on a small screen.

The safari ride employs a 3D projection system designed to work with a set of sensors strapped to the hands. In the virtual reality world, solid-seeming objects can be plucked from mid-air and examined more closely in the hands.

Elsewhere, NTT DoCoMo shows its object-recognition binoculars which recognise certain objects and displays details about them in the eyepiece.

Fix on a passing plane and the device will tell you the flight number and destination. Turn your attention to a flower, and it will tell you what variety it is.

DoCoMo hopes to use the technology in camera-equipped handsets. With particular databases of information installed, the phones could be pointed at objects of interest and used to collect information. Waved past an item in a shop, for example, it might inform users where the same thing could be bought more cheaply.

Blur+Sharpen Tuesday 3/22 @ 7:00PM

BLUR + SHARPEN presents TIME MACHINES
Tuesday, March 22, 7:00 PM
Ron Howard Screening Room
Robert Zemeckis Center for the Digital Arts

Blur + Sharpen returns this Tuesday night with a program devoted to experiments with time in a series of short films, music videos and commercials. Time has become an obsession for many filmmakers – why? In part, artists are responding to our culture’s accelerated pace and the ensuing emphasis on instantaneity and disposability. But they’re also visualizing a new temporal consciousness, with attempts to show the instant or frozen moment seen in bullet time effects, or the contradictory stasis and movement in the use of open flash, or the tension between forward and backwards time, extreme fast and slow motion, and spatio-temporal fragmentation.

The pieces collected for the “Time Machines” show express some of the transformations in the cultural conception of time. Works include the pinhole camera bullet time videos of Finnish artist Liisa Lounila, the Timetrack project of Chris Cunningham, and the temporal distortions of Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze. Also screening, Daniel Askill’s award-winning short We Have Decided Not to Die and Michiel van Bekel’s amazing 360 degree Muybridge update Equestrian.

www.iml.annenberg.edu/blursharpen

Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?

NY Times article

At the University of Southern California, whose School of Cinema-Television is the nation's oldest film school (established in 1929), fully half of the university's 16,500 undergraduate students take at least one cinema/television class. That is possible because Elizabeth Daley, the school's dean, opened its classes to the university at large in 1998, in keeping with a new philosophy that says, in effect, filmic skills are too valuable to be confined to movie world professionals. "The greatest digital divide is between those who can read and write with media, and those who can't," Ms. Daley said. "Our core knowledge needs to belong to everybody."

...

Still more, Ms. Daley, the U.S.C. Cinema-Television dean, argues that to generalize such skills has become integral to the film school's mission. More than 60 academic courses at U.S.C. now require students to create term papers and projects that use video, sound and Internet components - and for Ms. Daley, it's not enough. "If I had my way, our multimedia literacy honors program would be required of every student in the university," she said.

Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?

RICK HERBST, now attending Yale Law School, may yet turn out to be the current decade's archetypal film major. Twenty-three years old, he graduated last year from the University of Notre Dame, where he studied filmmaking with no intention of becoming a filmmaker. Rather, he saw his major as a way to learn about power structures and how individuals influence each other.

"People endowed with social power and prestige are able to use film and media images to reinforce their power - we need to look to film to grant power to those who are marginalized or currently not represented," said Mr. Herbst, who envisions a future in the public policy arena. The communal nature of film, he said, has a distinct power to affect large groups, and he expects to use his cinematic skills to do exactly that.

At a time when street gangs warn informers with DVD productions about the fate of "snitches" and both terrorists and their adversaries routinely communicate in elaborately staged videos, it is not altogether surprising that film school - promoted as a shot at an entertainment industry job - is beginning to attract those who believe that cinema isn't so much a profession as the professional language of the future.

Some 600 colleges and universities in the United States offer programs in film studies or related subjects, a number that has grown steadily over the years, even while professional employment opportunities in the film business remain minuscule. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are only about 15,050 jobs for film producers or directors, which means just a few hundred openings, at best, each year.

Given the gap between aspiration and opportunity, film education has often turned out to be little more than an expensive detour on the road to doing something else. Thus, Aaron Bell, who graduated as a film major from the University of Wisconsin in 1988, struggled through years of uninspiring nonunion work managing crews on commercials, television pilots and the occasional feature before landing his noncinematic job designing advertising for Modern Luxury Media LLC, a Chicago-based magazine publisher.

"You sort of have this illusion coming out of film school that you'll work into this small circle of creatives, but you're actually more pigeonholed as a technician," said Mr. Bell, who is now 39.

For some next-generation students, however, the shot at a Hollywood job is no longer the goal. They'd rather make cinematic technique - newly democratized by digital equipment that reduces the cost of a picture to a few thousand dollars and renders the very word "film" an anachronism - the bedrock of careers as far afield as law and the military.

At the University of Southern California, whose School of Cinema-Television is the nation's oldest film school (established in 1929), fully half of the university's 16,500 undergraduate students take at least one cinema/television class. That is possible because Elizabeth Daley, the school's dean, opened its classes to the university at large in 1998, in keeping with a new philosophy that says, in effect, filmic skills are too valuable to be confined to movie world professionals. "The greatest digital divide is between those who can read and write with media, and those who can't," Ms. Daley said. "Our core knowledge needs to belong to everybody."

In fact, even some who first enrolled in U.S.C.'s film school to take advantage of its widely acknowledged position as a prime portal to Hollywood have begun to view their cinematic skills as a new form of literacy. One such is David Hendrie, who came to U.S.C. in 1996 after a stint in the military intending to become a filmmaker, but - even after having had the producer/director Robert Zemeckis as a mentor - found himself drawn to the school's Institute for Creative Technologies, where he creates military training applications in a variety of virtual reality, gaming and filmic formats. One film he developed was privately screened for the directors John Milius and Steven Spielberg, who wanted to understand the military's vision of the future.

"That was like a film student's dream," said Mr. Hendrie, who nonetheless believes he has already outgrown anything he was likely to accomplish on the studio circuit. "I found myself increasingly demoralized by my experiences trying to pitch myself as a director for films like 'Dude, Where's My Car?' " Mr. Hendrie said. "What I'm doing here at I.C.T. speaks to the other interests I've always had, and in the end excited my passion more."

In recent weeks, members of a Baltimore street gang circulated a DVD that warned against betrayal, packaged in a cover that appeared to show three dead bodies. That and the series of gruesome execution videos that have surfaced in the Middle East are perhaps only the most extreme face of a complex sort of post-literacy in which cinematic visuals and filmic narrative have become commonplace.

Melding easily with the growing digital folk culture, some film majors have simply taken to creating art forms outside the boundaries of the established film business. In one such instance, Wes Pentz, a k a DJ Diplo - a 2003 graduate of Temple University, where film majors are encouraged to invent new career paths in museums, leisure businesses and elsewhere - broke through with his trademark Hollertronix, a style modeled on cinematic soundtracks. "I think of my songs as having a movement, like I would watch in a film, and there's a narrative feel to them," said Mr. Pentz, who said he had learned to frame music differently because of his film school experience.

In the public policy arena, meanwhile, students like Yale's Mr. Herbst hope to heighten political debate with productions far more pointed than the most political feature film. Even a picture like "Hotel Rwanda," with its unblinking look at African genocide, is "a soup kitchen approach," Mr. Herbst said: "You're offered something to eat, but there are no vitamins." Bringing film directly into politics, he expects to throw objectivity out the window and change minds - perhaps not an unrealistic aim at a time when, in a bit of what a headline in The Wall Street Journal characterized as "film noir," the Edward D. Jones & Company brokerage has entered the fray over the proposed Social Security overhaul with a highly produced video.

To some extent, such broadening vision is already helping to make economic sense of film education, which in the past was often a long path to nowhere. "Most find their way, and the skills they learn from us are applicable to other careers and pursuits," Dale Pollock, dean of the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts, said of his students. "So we're not wasting their time or money."

Still more, Ms. Daley, the U.S.C. Cinema-Television dean, argues that to generalize such skills has become integral to the film school's mission. More than 60 academic courses at U.S.C. now require students to create term papers and projects that use video, sound and Internet components - and for Ms. Daley, it's not enough. "If I had my way, our multimedia literacy honors program would be required of every student in the university," she said.

Blur+Sharpen Feb. 22 at 7:00PM

This month's Blur + Sharpen showcases an international mix of short films and music videos that return to the physical world via low-tech aesthetics and garage video remixing.

Screenings include classic music videos by Michel Gondry for the Chemical Brothers and Steriogram, Olivier "Twist" Gondry's latest video Bricoleur for the French jazz group Les Fils de Teuhpu, Tsujikawa Koichiro's Drop (do it again) for the Japanese electronica group Cornelius, LA design firm Logan's Information Contraband for DJ Money Mark, Austrian filmmaker Virgil Widrich's award-winning Fast Film, Peter Tscherkassky's digital analogue horror film Outer Space, Mike Nourse's satirical State of the Union remix Terror Iraq Weapons, and the notorious Grey Video by Ramon+Pedro. Plus a special bonus screening of Gary Beydler's Pasadena Freeway Stills, the film that started it all!

Blur + Sharpen is a theme-driven monthly screening series for recent digital media. All screenings are free and open to the public on Tuesdays at 7:00 PM in the Ron Howard Theater at USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for the Digital Arts. The series is sponsored by the Institute for Multimedia and co-curated by Steve Anderson, Peter Oleksik and Holly Willis.

Spring 2005 Blur+Sharpen schedule

Phone-based Virtual Drama

We Make Money Not Art reports on a Virtual Soap Opera for your Phone:

Produced by pervasive game developers It's Alive, Supafly is a location-based virtual soap opera in which players have to resort to intrigues and gossip to appear in the online newspaper "Hype" and become a virtual celebrity.
They have to beat competitors, find allies, belong to the right group, and follow the latest fashion trends in order to stay on top.
The game is played by using SMS and MMS. From the Website the player can read the latest gossip in the newspaper, get new clothes or accessories for the character, chat with other players (logged on to the website or connected from their mobile phone), keep track of friends, and check statistic.
The character stays in the mobile phone and - since the game is location-based - it follows the player everywhere, to help him/her find nearby friends or maybe find a date, till a command from the mobile phone orders the character to leave the phone and enters its home on the Web.

Timeplay

This company gave a presentation at ICT today looking for connections between their IP and ICT research, and I kept thinking: "Why aren't they presenting at the IMD???" I'm sure they're old news to some. Their chief creative officer, Jon Snoddy (of Imagineernig fame and linked with Randy Pausch) gave the presentation and was cool. (Did you know him Andrew?)

Their design is to have a gameboy like device in the back of each theater chair connected wirelessly to a main server. You slide your credit card on the side of the device to play $1-2 games before the movie, $5-8 for 20 minutes after the movie, and eventually long format theater game experiences. Lot’s of similarities with the gameboy DS interface. Mutlitudes of game possibilities were talked about, including some interesting cooperative play ideas, and allowing a winner in the audience 15 minutes of silver screen fame.

They're getting close to an alpha testing phase, and seemed interested in talking with us about content ideas. I was impressed, and think they'd be great presenters for our division.

http://www.timeplay.com/

Don't Look Now

brendandawes.com / sketches

The DVD of the 1973 classic Don't Look Now is sent through a piece of software written in processing. Every frame is rendered as a 1 x 300 pixel line making up 162 individual images for the entire film.

re-edit 'psycho'

online, in flash4, you can now reedit the shower scene from 'psycho' and then compare yours to the originals. certainly nothing completely new, but the technology and subject matter is interesting.

from boingboing

'the tulse luper suitcases'

peter greenaway is consistently one of my favorite filmmakers/artists. (do yourself a favor and read this old post/interview.) in talking to scott the other day, he mentioned he hadn't heard about greenaways most recent project - the tulse luper suitcases.

from here:
"The Tulse Luper Network concerns several larger productions in the whole scope of 'the Tulse Luper Suitcases'. At least five media are used in the project: feature films, DVD's, the Internet, book publications and television. Further, some parts of the project will be staged as theatrical plays and an online game is currently being developed. The Tulse Luper Suitcases project will culminate in a traveling exhibition, starting in February 2005 in Berlin. Marc Thelosen of Rotterdam based company ...Math... is coordinator of the different media projects.

This website is part of the major media project 'the Tulse Luper Suitcases'. The site will build up an archive in the next 3 years from which the life of the character Tulse Luper can be reconstructed out of the content of 92 suitcases that he has apparently travelled with and are found all over the world. It is our ambition to build it into a vast network. Not only the life of Tulse Luper can be reconstructed from this archive, but in addition some 60 years of 20th century history can be explored, starting in1928 when uranium was found in Utah till 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall when Tulse Luper was presumably last heard of..."

finally, from the greenaway mailing list yesterday:
"Greenaway will lay the Tulse Luper project to rest in typically grandiose style. Part III won't be ready for Cannes, but during the Venice Festival, in tandem with Instituto Luce, Greenaway and his team will co-ordinate "a big splash of the whole seven-hour cinematic product." The idea is to use satellites to beam down the HD material simultaneously in various European capitals: Venice, Rome, Paris, Berlin, and (possibly) London and Oslo."

in line with the above, this detail follows up with how one can enter their own creations as part of the project.

February 19, 2004
CONTEST - CALL FOR ENTRIES
CALL FOR ENTRIES FOR ONLINE DESIGN CONTEST!

The Tulse Luper Suitcases, a personal history of Uranium is a multi-media project by British filmmaker Peter Greenaway that involves feature films, a television series, DVD's, the World Wide Web, an online game in 92 puzzles, many books, theatre events and exhibitions. 92 suitcases [92 being the atomic number of Uranium] are found all over the world that somehow relate to the adventures of Tulse Luper. Most suitcases also contain 92 objects, some less. The suitcases will be exhibited in Compton Verney, UK from March 23 till end of September 2004

The Tulse Luper Network is part of the Tulse Luper Suitcases project. The aim of the Tulse Luper Network is to reconstruct the life and works of Tulse Luper set against the background of part of the 20th century history. Our ambition is to create a veritable network that will grow into a vast online collection of design skills, knowledge, history, and so on. To attain this goal we invite the public to participate in this project.

Entries We are looking for artists, animators, illustrators, writers and researchers to participate in filling the Tulse Luper Suitcases on the web. Anyone enthousiastic about this project and skilled to design/develop for the web is welcome to join the contest. Adopt one of the 92 suitcases, research for information, design and develop an interface to explore its content and send it to us as an url.. If your submission is accepted we will link it to http://www.tulselupernetwork.com and you will be credited for it.

To participate you need to send an e-mail to contest@tulselupernetwork.com mentioning name and profession and we will allocate you a suitcase and send you the details. You can view a list of suitcases and their contents as well as samples of filled suitcases in the Category section of www.tulselupernetwork.com.

Submissions Send us your submission as an url to contest@tulselupernetwork.com before April 30. 2004. Do not send us dvd's or cd-roms, only urls will be accepted. Admitted submissions will be notified.

Prizes three submissions will be selected as winners by a team of judges. All three will win original art work created by Peter Greenaway. One of the three will be invited to be present at the occasion of the opening of the 92th and last suitcase at the end of the Tulse Luper Suitcases Exhibition in Compton Verney (UK) in September 2004.

Rules Deadline April 30 , 2004.
The Tulse Luper Network will be unable to publish/exhibit any entry that does not provide full credits or adequate proof of rights clearance for reproduced materials by the participant.

Technical specifications all submissions must be ready for web publishing. Use of a typewriter font and white text on black background is the only graphical restriction, No use of Shockwave or Director plug-ins without proper plug-in check and download page. HTML is accepted, use of Flash MX technology is encouraged, max. dimensions for Flash swf: 800 x 450 pixels. If you want to make use of heavy bandwidth (e.g. video) please offer an alternative for low bandwidth.

"Layers of water" - an experimental collaborative art project

Eleven artists from different countries and with different backgrounds (media art, performance, installation, painting, music) gathered on the island of Vis to work on a collaborative art project. Each day participants individually shot some video footage which was afterwards inserted on the daily digital-video-editing-timeline.
The participants were free in their working styles, but connected to eachother with the theme of layers and transparencies in nature. In the evening of each day there was a round table with presentations and discussions and a copy of the layered version was made. At the end of the workshop, a superimposed version of all layers was made. Some layers are clearly recognizable and others less.
The DVD version of the 30 minutes long project was shown as a projection installation within the of the International Festival of New Film in Split.

Participants: Anna Anders (D), Alfred Banze (D), Ana Bilankov (HR), Daniela Butsch (D), Heiko Daxl (D/HR), Ingeborg Fülepp (D/HR), Thorsten Nass (NL/D), Katrin Nölle, Tanja Ravlic (HR), Thorsten Streichardt (D), Clea T. Waite (USA)

Concept und Organization: Alfred Banze (D), Heiko Daxl (D/HR), Ingeborg Fülepp (HR/CRO) in collaboration with International Festival of New Film, Split 2003

15. - 21. September 2003, workshop - island Vis, Croatia
22. - 28. September 2003, presentation - International Festival of New Film, Split, Croatia

Videoprojection and postersession with the artists
in the Embassy of the Republic of Croatia in Berlin, Germany
November, 6th 2003, 18:00-20:00 hrs

Botschaft der Republik Kroatien, Ahornstraße 4, 10787 Berlin
(U1, U6 Nollendorfplatz)

www.kroatische-botschaft.de

Interactive Cinema at MLE

Interesting "interactive cinema" project by Michael Lew at Media Lab Europe (will be shown at SIGGRAPH'03.) Similar projects in their Story Networks Reseach Group:

Office Voodoo is an interactive film installation for two people. It tells the story of Frank and Nancy, two bored Irish officemates, condemned to spend their lives in an office. This infinite film is an algorithmic sitcom inspired from Sartre's play "Huis clos", crossbred with an office life simulator.
Two physical voodoo dolls, that represent the protagonists, can be manipulated in order to change the emotions of the characters in the film. It is a social laboratory where the viewers can experiment on the influence of emotions as initial conditions in any social interaction. As viewers get skilled manipulating the dolls, they can control the emotions of Frank and Nancy, and see what happens when : Frank is cranky and Nancy is hyperactive ? Frank is horny and Nancy is depressed ?
The interactive film is made exclusively of real lens-based footage shot with real actors, but it runs on a real-time editing engine that fluidly assembles the film shot by shot as one watches it, while respecting the conventions of continuity editing.
The installation is built as a little immersive wooden house for two people - a cross between a confessional, an arcade game booth and a kinetoscope parlour.

"Cinema Stale, Passive, Needs Reinventing" - Greenaway

"Most cinema today is an illustration of 19th century novels. A lot of it is disastrous, formulaic and predictable. The sense of pluralism has been curtailed,'' Greenaway said."

``We are discovering the multifariousness of telling stories. The subjectivity of narration should be high on the agenda. Any self-respecting filmmaker should acknowledge the audience.''

from the NY TIMES