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October 27, 2003
panoramic cinematography
After the workshop on Friday, trying to think through what we can do with the panoramic camera...
It's certainly possible to treat the camera as a passive disembodied viewpoint and just record what goes on around it. But without interactivity, this isn't in any way the kind of viewpoint that we can associate with a human being - it doesn't 'face' anything.
This was made painfully clear in the first music video we watched, where you have these insanely cheery japanese pop girls dancing around. Obviously you're supposed to feel that they're singing TO you, but instead they're singing AT you, whichever way you happen to be facing at any given moment. The test video shot at USC (where everyone pretty much ignored the camera) worked much better.
In other words, it's more effective to treat the camera as a kind of 'fly-on-the-wall' (except that in this case it's a 'fly-in-the-middle-of-the-room') viewpoint then to think of it as representing any kind of character or avatar.
It could therefore be argued that the panoramic viewpoint is inherently passive or anti-interactive. If it corresponds to anything, it would be the omniscient camera of much Hollywood cinema, which often (usually) represents a disembodied POV.
So unless we augment this viewpoint with some fairly robust interactivity it will be difficult to treat the panorama as representing any narrative POV whatsoever. At a minimum, we'd have to know which way the user is looking, and we'd have to be able to respond to this information.
Posted by Perry at October 27, 2003 09:49 AM
Comments
yes, i think so too: knowing which way the user is looking seems to be inherently necessary for panoramic narrative; better put perhaps, the ability to influence the user to look at specific areas of the panorama at specific times, is necessary.
Tatsu and i just submitted a proposal for the Tania Trepanier Award competition and it involves panoramic narrative. feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Posted by: susana at November 3, 2003 11:27 PM
Perry - I've been having a similar process in creating hypertext. I, too, was weirded out by the video of the Japanese girls, because we weren't actually interacting with them in any way. I felt no different than if four different cameras had taken shots of each of the girls and I could just switch to each camera.
Why 360?
However, in Peggy's class, I'm working on a piece in which the reader can choose who's personal story to follow through the narrative. The reader can switch stories when characters come into contact with one another. However, what the reader doesn't know (but hopefully figures out) is that when you switch to another character, their situation improves, and everyone else's gets worse.
Maybe we could incorporate this into panoramic story-telling that isn't fly-on-the-wall?
Posted by: kellee at February 16, 2004 11:14 AM
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