I just had to throw up a quick post on the inclusion of the “Super 8″ film trailer as a playable level in the new game “Portal 2″. You can check out the game player trailer here. You can then compare that to the actual film trailer here. Having the trailer as an interactive, playable level is an interesting twist on moving a story between mediums. I can only think that J.J. Abrams and crew thought that getting the trailer is a heavily marketed game is going to increase the profile of their brand. It seems to be a typical approach of transplanting the strengths of film into a game engine, but I’m not seeing something different that is playing to the actual strengths of the game media itself. I’ll have to see how this plays out, perhaps there is more coming that is going to make this an interesting approach to interactivity and storytelling.
Fictional Narratives
thoughts on narrative and where technology is taking it
Filed under Film …
Merging+Media 2011 Transmedia Lab
So, it looks like I got into the Merging+Media lab being held in Vancouver on April 28th and 29th, 2011. I’m pretty excited about it, only 24 people from across Canada have gotten into the lab which is going to be lead by Anita Ondine. She’s got a lot of experience in developing transmedia properties for film and is currently producing “Pandemic” for Lance Weiler’s next film “HiM”. He’s currently one of my favourite independent film producers as he’s got the business savvy that has allowed him produce his own films, distribute them and make money without ever having to deal with a distribution company. This has been the largest roadblock I’ve encountered to getting transmedia properties up and running in Canada so I’m looking forward to the feedback and expertise in the room.
It sounds like I’m the only one in Alberta who got into the lab, everyone else is from Toronto and Vancouver. Given the increasing interest in taking storytelling out of traditional media, I’m expecting to hear about a lot of new and creative approaches. It will also be interesting to see how the changing hardware market is going to influence how media is going to be produced and consumed as well. It always comes down a great story but it is becoming a very interesting time to be a storyteller.
How-to play the comic book option game
Recently a buddy of mine, Riley Rossmo, the artist for Cowboy Ninja Viking, had the option rights for the comic purchased by Disney First of all, congrats, Riley works really hard at his craft. I met him at a regular meet-up of local artists at the Kensington Pub here in Calgary when his main project was Proof. He always had a number of creative properties on the go and had a keen sense that Hollywood was always looking around for something new. He was in talks with a number of studios that were all trying to find the next big hit for the film industry. Proof was the first experience but Cowboy Ninja Viking eventually made the deal. This isn’t anything new, in the past few years, comics have increasingly become a place for the film industry to look for creative properties. Next to the stack of scripts on the desks of the entertainment industry is another, shinier pile of graphic novels and trades.
There are some good reasons that comics and graphic novels are there on that pile. They all have a fully formed stories, lots of characters to fill up the story landscape and, more importantly, they’ve already been seen by thousands of people. One of the biggest challenges to the film industry is trying to figure out if the movie they are making is going to be a hit or a miss. If a story already has a fan base and a ton of positive reviews, chances are they’re onto something good. Most of the people making decisions about funding really don’t know anything about their prospective audience. With a large fan base they’ve got a lot of feedback that the audience loved the comic and they are hungry for more. The funders don’t have to rely on a single opinion that may or may not be informed. So basically, if you’ve got a story that works in a visual format you’re lowering their risk that they’re going to fund a bomb at the box office.
There are some other elements you should consider as well. Comics, as a medium, give you a lot of room. You can vary a lot of things in the narrative such as story structure, art style and characters. You can do it in a lot of unconventional ways and play around with narrative because the cost of your comic bombing at the store aren’t that high. If things don’t work out you just start up another concept. The cost of failure in movies is much higher and as a result they tend to play it safe. This means you follow a standard three-act structure that can follow the conventions of a film script. This can be a bit challenging with a long running series as they don’t really have a structured start and ending. In Riley’s case, they brought in the script writers from Zombieland to put it into a standard format that can actually be filmed. It is something that you need to think about if you are looking at your story moving into a different media. Have you built it so that it can move into film? Or is is something that is going to take a lot of work to fit into a standard format that runs for 80 minutes? The easier it is for a producer to see the transition, the easier it will be to get their interest.
Now comes the next steps, someone finally offers you an option on that comic title you’ve poured your soul into for the past year. An option isn’t an outright purchase, they are basically buying the exclusive right to buy the rights to your creative property in the future. It is a producer’s way of buying some time while they try to get writers involved to polish up a script, line up some name actors and get the financing in place to actually film the movie. It is usually 12-18 months, if they haven’t been able to pull all of that together in that time period, they probably never will. At this point you’re not going to get the big Hollywood windfall, options will only pay out a few thousand dollars. The option agreement will usually define how much you’re going to actually make if the film moves forward. If all of that comes together and the producer moves the film into production you can look forward to the big pay-off. This might be in the form of a cash settlement or it might be a piece of the profits from the film, each option agreement can be different.
One last piece of advice, get someone you trust to review the option agreement. I’ve known a few naive writers who agreed to take back-end points on a film, thinking they were getting a share of the profits. What they didn’t realize is that they only get paid after all of the debts for the film are paid off. Just so you know, it is in the best interest of the owner of that film (often the film distributor) to make sure that film never makes any money on paper. The end result is that you will never make any money even though your film ran for 6 months at the theatres and sells out every Christmas at BestBuy. There are a lot of pitfalls and you need to be well educated to make sure you avoid them all. If you don’t have someone who knows all this stuff it is worth it to hire a lawyer who does. You’ll be happier with the results.
CBC News – Film – Budget fails to impress arts groups
The Canadian budget was presented today in Parliament. There was a lot of concern about what it was going to mean to arts groups within Canada. So far it seems that it isn’t going to significantly impact them, basically no cuts, there just isn’t going to be an increase in the amount of funding available.
Pixar, Up! and New Media
Up!
I’ve just finished a workshop at the Banff Centre with Rich McKain from Pixar. He did a great presentation on his work and the very interesting life he’s had in the world of computer animation so far. All that hard work paid off by finally getting a position as an animator with Pixar and working on the film Up!.
I know I’ve been talking about New Media, film, narrative, video games and all sorts of other things on this blog so I wondered what New Media means to a company like Pixar. There have been a lot of different campaigns out there for film, some of them were less than notable while there have been a few successes, James Cameron’s New Media campaign for Avatar comes to mind. I talked a bit about it with Rich as he is working on the new Cars 2 animated feature that is still at least a year away. Their strategy for keeping up interest in the franchise and building interest in the new film? Animated shorts. Pixar knows that shorts don’t make any money and that doing a series of animated shorts is going to cost quite a bit of money. To put things into perspective, Rich kicks out a staggering 3 and a half seconds of animation per week so these shorts are a serious investment. It has to do with the fact that Pixar cares more about a meaningful story than building the kind of New Media hype that might get a couple of extra butts in seats when the film comes out. I thought that they might just be following an old model of creating content rather than strategizing through the many different social media and New Media options that are available for their films. I know that Pixar has an excellent grasp of storytelling but were they ignoring some current trends?
I started to do some digging into the film Up! to see what had happened for that film. I read this Huffington Post blog on the film, “Pixar’s new movie panned by wall street“. It turned out that Wall Street thought that Pixar was not only ignoring current trends but traditional trends in blockbuster films. They thought the film was a bad idea and de-valued Disney’s stock after hearing about the film’s plot. They didn’t believe it was commercial enough and the movie-going demographic was never going to want to see a film about a 78-year old man. The movie was just missing too many required elements to be a blockbuster. The prevailing philosophy from those who are motivated simply by profit was that the film was going to miss the mark.
The film went on to resonate deeply with moviegoers. It made $293 million at the box office in North America and $430 million in foreign box office sales. This isn’t even including the DVD, toys and other spin-offs that would have been part of the returns on this film. It has also gotten Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Animated Feature, Best Original Score and Best Sound Editing. It has met a number of successful standards for commercial and artistic success.
Pixar 1, Greed 0
So what does this mean for New Media? Well, I’m starting to believe that filmmakers that are driven by Wall Street are going to make films that follow the right formula. They hopefully make a return for their investors and a mindless escape for us, the viewer. New Media campaigns aimed at promoting those kinds of films aren’t likely to engage us, after all, we’re not there to have a meaningful experience, we’re there to escape. Viewers who are attracted to that kind of film don’t want to be engaged in some kind of detailed, immersive experience, the last thing they want is more mental overhead in their already busy lives. A company like Pixar might have a different kind of audience, ones that are actually attracted to stories that might help give some perspective on their own lives. I find it interesting that given that kind of audience, Pixar doesn’t try to build interactive New Media campaigns to go with their films. Instead they just create more narratives, short films in the case of Cars 2. Perhaps they’re just doing what they do best, perhaps they don’t think New Media can really handle narrative effectively. What I really believe is that they know storytelling and the needs of the audience. When New Media is able to provide those kinds of storytelling experiences, Pixar might consider it an option. When, and if, Pixar does try something, I suspect they will have thought it through rather carefully, much more carefully than anyone in Wall street apparently.
The Witch of Portobello
Paulo Coelho is an internationally successful author who has written such books as The Alchemist and The Witch of Portobello. It is this last book that inspired The Experimental Witch Project. Coelho decided to explore what his readers saw in the book’s characters and the story he had created. He partnered with HP and created a contest to encourage filmmakers, musicians and artists:
People were encouraged to choose a character in the book and create a short film based on that character. The contest resulted in 6000 submissions and Coelho chose 15 winners. The total amount of footage created by those winners was 380 minutes. That footage is being edited into something that can be presented at a film festival, around 90 minutes, but Coelho intends to create a version of the film that will have all 380 minutes. He is aware that this would be a non-commercial property but believes it is the only way to properly explore all the work created by the various participants of the project.
Film contests aren’t new but what is interesting about this is Coelho’s willingness to embrace social media and New Media as a way of exploring the meaning of his story in the space between the reader and the author. Coelho has actively engaged that world by talking about his books and his life in a diverse number of virtual spaces such as YouTube and MySpace. He believes these are places where a worldwide audience can engage in conversation with an artist that has not been possible in the past. It is not about promotions or ego for Coelho as he is eager to have an opportunity to engage in the imaginative and creative ways that his audience will take his works and make them into something else. His goal as an artist has always been to share what he’s discovered inside his own soul. Using New Media he is now able to instantly gauge his success in the goal by the content and conversations created with his audiences in those online spaces.
IFC Short Film Challenge and UbiSoft’s Assassin’s Creed 2
“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed… If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that one does not fear revenge”
-Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527)
And that sets the tone for the world of Assassin’s Creed 2, based in late 15th century Italy. It was an amazing time when things were changing very quickly and new ideas were shaking up Europe.
The IFC and UbiSoft put together a filmmaking challenge to see what kind of short film their film-making community could create based on the game world and characters from the first-person shooter.
The winner, A Father Avenged, was a pretty impressive piece of short film that explored the theme of revenge and the toll it takes when you decide to embark down that road. It also gets at some of the truths of that time period, the Renaissance was as much about brutal measures to achieve security and unity in Italy as it was about enlightenment. The kinds of ruthless tactics needed to achieve that security are pretty well documented in Machiavelli’s how-to guide The Prince. This short film by Frank Thomas was an interpretation of a time period that would have had a heavy toll on many of the people who lived through it. It is still focused on those revenge fantasies that are typical in the first-person shooter genre but it tries to explore some of the humanity in actually being a character in that type of game. For that, I’d have to say it was a great step forward in adding depth to what is generally a pretty shallow game-play experience. I’m not sure it would have worked as a cut scene in the game, or even if anyone would have watched it between levels, but it was an appreciated piece of work from someone looking for games to be more than the usual twitchfest. I’m looking forward to more of these kind of ideas from Ubisoft, they definitely seem to be more creative about how their games live in the media world than many other game designers.
Ubisoft’s Convergence of Film and Video Game
UbiSoft has released a new short film, Assassin’s Creed: Lineage, in preparation for the release of their game Assassin’s Creed 2 on November 17. It is the first part of a three part trilogy.
The short film is part of an ongoing effort on the part of UbiSoft to bring creative properties to multiple platforms. The goal is to engage gamers in as many entertainment mediums as possible. They have been strategic in their approach, acquiring Canadian special effects firm Hybride in order to produce quality films. Hybride was the company responsible for green screen epics such as 300.
After watching the film I would have to say it is the first Italian Renaissance ninja film I’ve ever seen. I think Italian ninjas are better dressed than their Japanese counterparts but their acting range seems to be about the same. The film itself has beautiful cinematography but I think they missed an opportunity to really create a different kind of narrative for the game.
Ubisoft has stated that they are doing these films as part of a campaign to create a more immersive experience for the gamers who are playing Assassin’s Creed. Games, especially first person shooters, or in this case, first person stabbers, aren’t very good at narrative. The cut scenes are limited in the depth and scope and most are quickly skipped by the players so they can move onto the next challenge in the game. Here was a chance to build on the strengths of film and work on mood, atmosphere, exposition and character. Perhaps they were just creating an action genre film for the demographic they had identified for the game. I’m not really sure how much interest those kinds of hardcore gamers have in film, even this one. I had just hoped that when game and film started to converge, they would have let each approach the story from a completely different direction. Instead of playing to the strengths of each medium, Lineage becomes a great looking film that looks like gameplay. Everything I’ve seen in this first film could have been achieved by cut-scenes and voice-overs within the game itself. I’ll withhold final judgment until I see the final two installments of the trilogy, perhaps this is all going someplace even I don’t expect.
“Movies are doomed, there’s two more years left of them and they’re over”
A pretty bold prediction, the kind of statement that might come from someone who is trying to get our attention. In this case, it is Canadian artist and author Douglas Coupland and getting us to pay attention is one of his talents. He has a string of novels, starting from Generation X in 1991 and leading up to his most recent book, Generation A, that has just been published. The novel is a dystopian story of the near future when all bees are extinct until five unconnected individuals are stung one autumn. Their conditions gets them all abducted by an unknown organization and transported to an island together.
As part of his promotion of the book, Coupland just did an interesting interview on CBC radio where he talked about the book and his perspectives on the world. You can listen to it in the Podcast. The interview runs about 22 minutes and if you want to skip the story about his houses and bird feeders you can fast forward to about the 12 minute mark.
During the next 10 minutes of the conversation he discusses a central theme in his book about the future of storytelling and unending flood of information we’re experiencing in the world. Although I can’t agree that movies are doomed I do understand that movies, as they currently exist, are doomed. They aren’t going to disappear but they will continue to shrink in their current form as other media approaches to storytelling capture the attention and imagination of the public. In fact, that doom holds true for all forms of narrative. It shouldn’t surprise anyone, things are changing far too quickly in the technological world to believe that any form of storytelling is going to survive untouched.
Yet a lot of us resist the change. He makes a few good points about why we resist it. Most of us who are interested in storytelling had a youth immersed in reading books. It was a solitary activity where we would disappear for hours, alone, into a story. Those hours spent have given us deep belief in the value of our lives as a reflection of those book-bound stories. It wouldn’t be any different if you were raised on film, like the lead character, Toto, in Cinema Paradiso who’s youth became defined by film. We’ve invested a lot of time into those stories and our preferred medium.
So, what is going to happen to a generation who is raised in a world of technology that is focused on immediacy and short burst of information? It is a generation raised on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Coupland’s perspective is that they are still going to try to understand that massive confusion in terms of a story, it is just going to be something different. He believes that these new stories will be a serialization that doesn’t have an ending. They don’t need to be long, they just need to engage the audience for a short amount of time. Once they’ve done that, the audience will come back for an unending soap opera. His example was George Lucas, who hasn’t made a film in years and has said he is going to television because of its opportunity for endless serialization. I think serialization is a likely trend, I don’t agree that television is going to be the main distribution channel for those stories though. I think it is in as much trouble as film at the moment.
One of the key points that Coupland made is that all this new technology is flooding our lives and we don’t even have the vocabulary to talk about it. Each new wave of change puts us in a very different place. This is perhaps the most challenging element in discussing storytelling for research, filmmaking or television. Things are changing very quickly and we’re not keeping up with our vocabulary enough so that we can even have those conversations about what is happening in our disciplines, where things are going and even if our discipline will even exist in a few years.
My own research looks at another experience that has filled up the lives of a lot of young people out there, video games. I’ve taken a look at the kinds of meaning those hours of game playing have for the players and what they mean to their worldview. Whenever I talk to them about learning or worldview within those game environments, it is often a new perspective to that experience. The statement “I hadn’t thought of it that way” happens consistently throughout those conversations. It is becoming apparent that the meaning behind those technology experiences receives many different definitions depending on the individual. Will it form part of their own perspective on narrative and meaning in their life? Perhaps, but the meaning of those experiences is not something that is easy to generalize, to a culture yet alone an entire generation. Coupland talks about the only people who jump on that idea, the marketers and politicians who see a definable personality for a generation as something they can use to their own advantage. I think the answer is going to be a lot more complicated, I just hope I can figure out the vocabulary to talk about it before it changes again.
Screenwriting and cross-media
Writing a script for an ARG is very much like writing a script for a film. The narrative has to be engaging and cohesive and tell a story. The major difference is that you are not always thinking visually about how that script is going to be implemented. When the story development is written up in blogs, emails and text messages you need to think about the story from the perspective of the character themselves. You still need to be aware that whatever is created needs to be able to tell the story, not provide an explanation of the narrative. Whatever is written needs to speak for itself and allow the viewers to develop the narrative themselves.
In many ways the writing is more intimate and confessional in nature. Although many ARGs have video and audio segments, they also rely on original writing from the characters themselves. Rather than having the narrative interpreted and edited they are relying on the original source material for much of the story itself.
The script outline will need to be taken and broken into scenes that can be accommodated within the structure of the ARG. Once this basic breakdown occurs, the script can be written into a full 90-120 page script. The contents of the script will reflect the affordances of the media that will be used to cover that segment of the script. For example, a personal narrative of a character could be captured in a vlog or amateur video. The nature of that media would need to be reflective of the storytelling approach being taken by the ARG. If the project is meant to be told exclusively as a first person perspective of the story, there would be no professionally shot footage of those scenes.
