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Just found this online - multiple storylines, smart interaction design - will definitely spend some time here. The online interactive movie extends the Showcase series Crash and Burn.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Crash and Burn :: AutoTopsy - New Interactive movie from Jam 3
Just found this online - multiple storylines, smart interaction design - will definitely spend some time here.
Crash and Burn :: AutoTopsy - New Interactive movie from Jam 3
via autotopsy.ca
Jam3 have launched an interactive movie with multiple storylines - the interaction design is intriguing - there's lots to explore here in both content & beautiful design
ReBoot: Call for Submissions | DOC Toronto
DEADLINE EXTENDED TO FEBRUARY 4th! The Documentary Organization of Canada / l'Association des documentaristes du Canada (DOC) is pleased to announce a call for proposals for ReBoot, a week-long web conference incorporating skills-based training, mentorships and panel presentations from leading experts in cross-platform production.DOC aims to assist its members in transitioning to digital documentary and to successfully position documentary filmmakers and producers in the rapidly changing broadcast environment spurred by the Canada Media Fund.
DOC is seeking proposals for cross-platform documentaries that are conceived for two or more media. Preference will be given to projects in the development stage incorporating an interactive, participatory methodology in additional to a linear/broadcast version.Selected projects will receive one-on-one mentorship from industry professionals over a one week period, culminating in an online pitch session during DOC's ReBoot event in February. A jury of media professionals will select one project which will receive further mentorship for a three month period. The continued mentoring will be provided by the award winning team at EyeSteelFilm, as well as a group of industry professionals specializing in various aspects of new media production. Interested creators are invited to send proposals to info@docorg.ca.
Proposals should include:
1. Name(s)
2. Contact Information
3. Project Title
4. 250 Word Description of Project
5. Project Budget
6. Project Status
7. Short description of the new media ideas and platforms that will be explored Proposals should be for a multiplatform documentary and should describe the experience that a user would have on the website or digital platform, as well as a sense of the documentary that would be created in tandem. In writing the proposal, creators should address the following questions:
· Can your story be told in more than one way? Can it exist as a traditional documentary, as well as a non-linear story?
· Can your documentary have multiple versions? Can it be substantially different online, in theatres, and on television? How can you harness the strengths of each medium?
· Does your subject matter and approach lend itself to the opportunities of participatory / social media?
· Above all, how can your audience participate in the project? How is it an interactive experience that they can be an integral part of?
Submissions are only open to DOC members. Without exception, selected applicants must be available February 15th to February 21st in order to participate. Selected candidates should be comfortable sharing their creative process and work in progress with the public.
Submission deadline is February 4th. Please send proposals to info@docorg.ca
Event ContactSee map: Google MapsCanada
via doctoronto.ca
Hey all my documentary filmmaking friends! The deadline for proposals has now been extended to Feb. 4...worth considering
FITC - Big Spaceship : Digital Creative Agency | Adobe TV
via tv.adobe.com
Joshua Hirsch, Minister of Technology, is a great speaker on the kind of work environment Big Spaceship has evolved to support their ongoing production of amazing interactive projects and on the challenges & strengths of storytelling online.
FITC // Presentation - Storytelling: Absorbed, Obsessed & Immersed
via fitc.ca
I will definitely be catching this panel at FITC Toronto 2010 - what a stellar line-up of presenters
"Digital technologies and new forms of interactive storytelling are changing the way that we imagine, design and create experiences in the virtual and built environment. These new spaces of fiction re-imagine content creation, interfaces, interactions and physical environments. This multi-disciplinary panel explores the creative process, design opportunities, and cultural impact of the present and future of immersive design."
Presenter(s)
Tali Krakowsky • Ben Kreukniet • Alex McDowell • Jeremy Thorp
Tale of Tales » Interview with Alex Mayhew
This is a June 2007 interview with Alex Mayhew who has a long & stellar history of creating interactive works going way back to Peter Gabriel's Real World cd-rom, Ceremony of Innocence to more recent ARGs, The Hive with Xenophile Media.
will always take time for artists who are interested in:
I love Mayhew's approach to interactive design & there are lots of gems in here, including:
“Artists like Picasso embraced the notion of rendering images that captured space, time and movement in a way that was closer to the human experience; more realistic in an expressive way.”
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE STYLE INTERACTIVE TRAILER - THE WEATHERED UNDERGROUND -
via youtube.com
This interactive trailer launched Oct. 2009 for an upcoming series created by David Donihue. The deets are now that it will be released Mar. 2nd on DVD, iPhone, iPod. The production value is a lot higher than most of the interactive webisodes on youtube, which is great! I'm looking forward to seeing how inventive this series will be.
What I do find particularly interesting is that the most common reference for interactive narratives is still the Choose Your Own Adventure books and how pervasive the comic book/graphic novel aesthetic is becoming in both transmedia extensions & online interactive narratives that stand alone. The debt to Heroes' transmedia extension in its online graphic novel is pretty clear, especially with Brea Grant (Daphne in Heroes) as one of the leads.
Nick Cave - VBS Meets | VBS.TV
(Now Playing) Nick Cave - Episode 16 of 34
Feb 28, 2007
And Jim Sclavunos on the birth of Grinderman.
VBS interviews Nick Cave??? & this is episode 16 of 34? that can't be 34 episodes of Nick Cave can there? with performance clips? wow! heaven!
Loveland is Rebuilding Detroit Through the Internet, One ... | Motherboard
via motherboard.tv
Great interview with Jerry Paffendorf, the brains behind Loveland, a social media/real world project that is currently selling property in Detroit 1 inch at a time.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jerry/♥☑♥☑♥☑♥☑♥-1-million-inches-in-det
I have yet to buy in! must get a move on as the inches are counting down.
The Vice Guide to Liberia 1 of 8 - The Vice Guide to Travel | VBS.TV
(Now Playing) The Vice Guide to Liberia 1 of 8 - Episode 8 of 26
Jan 18, 2010
Welcome to The Vice Guide to Liberia. In this eight-part series, VBS travels to West Africa to rummage through the messy remains of a country ravaged by 14 years of civil war. Despite the United Nation’s eventual intervention, most of Liberia’s young people continue to live in abject poverty, surrounded by filth, drug addiction, and teenage prostitution. The former child soldiers who were forced into war have been left to fend for themselves, the murderous warlords who once led them in cannibalistic rampages have taken up as so-called community leaders, and new militias are lying in wait for the opportunity to reclaim their country from a government they rightly mistrust. America’s one and only foray into African colonialism is keeping a very uneasy peace indeed. In Part 1, Vice’s own Shane Smith provides a brief history lesson and some essential context for understanding what caused Liberia’s civil war and how things got so bad. Liberia was originally planned and founded as a homeland for former slaves back in 1821. But fast forward a bunch of years and a military coup and you find the First Liberian Civil War in 1989: yet another third-world regime change in which the US-backed opposition, led by Charles Taylor, overthrows a government unfriendly to US interests. Once in power, Taylor’s corrupt, dysfunctional government quickly finds itself under attack by local warlords, leading to the Second Liberian Civil War ten years later. From there things go from bad to total shit.
I just started looking at this web-tv site a few days ago - whacked! There are a number of documentaries running in episodes here and so far the Liberia doc is quite gripping. I've barely scratched the surface.. and I don't know how extreme the 'vice' tag takes the content - so be forewarned!
The Vice Guide To Liberia - Trailer - The Vice Guide to Travel | VBS.TV
via vbs.tv
I just started looking at this web-tv site a few days ago - whacked! There are a number of documentaries running in episodes here and so far the Liberia doc is quite gripping. I've barely scratched the surface.. and Idon't know how extreme the 'vice' tag takes the content - so be forewarned!
Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: Announcing Transmedia, Hollywood:S/Telling the Story
via henryjenkins.org
Henry Jenkins has posted this Conference Overview on his blog - must figure out cloning myself!:
Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today's entertainment industries. The event brings together top creators, producers, and executives from the entertainment industry and places their critical perspectives in dialogue with scholars pursuing the most current academic research on transmedia studies.
Co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and research centers in Los Angeles, Transmedia, Hollywood will take place on the eve of the annual Society of Cinema & Media Studies conference, the field's most distinguished gathering of film and media scholars and academics, which will be held this year in Los Angeles from March 17 to 21, 2010.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Gaza Sderot - Life in spite of everything
This is a beautifully designed interactive documentary - a great example of how to create spatial narratives - love it love it love it! And I haven't finished playing yet.
DAVID LYNCH'S INTERVIEW PROJECT - NEW EPISODE EVERY THREE DAYS
I love this project now on episode 081- this documentary archive is in style reminiscent of David Lynch's The Straight Story - the interviews are random encounters of people the filmmakers meet in their travels. Each interview is edited down to 3-5 minutes and gives a remarkable sense of the essence of each individual and the stories or life events they care about.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Between The Folds - a film by Vanessa Gould
For everyone still enamored with the tactile sensuous wonder of paper
"The Runaways": trailer
via blogs.wsj.com
The Runaways biopic is generating buzz at Slamdance, cast - Dakota Fanning & Kristen Stewart - ok sell it to an audience who have no idea who the Runaways are - written by Diablo Cody - promising - but Floria Sigismundi directing her first feature?!?!?!!!! this could be an amazing film
And for those fans who don't know (I had no idea) Cherie Currie is now an award winning chainsaw artist whose work can be found here:
Banksy Releases "Exit Through the Gift Shop," First Feature From the Graffiti Artist, at Sundance - Speakeasy - WSJ
via blogs.wsj.com
There are days when I would so like to clone myself - the Banksy film/event is a must see...
One Cubic Foot — National Geographic Magazine
The Feb. issue of National Geographic has a lovely interactive website/photo documentary. The project is described as follows:
How much life could you find in one cubic foot? That's a hunk of ecosystem small enough to fit in your lap. To answer the question, photographer David Liittschwager took a green metal frame, a 12-inch cube, to disparate environments—land and water, tropical and temperate. At each locale he set down the cube and started watching, counting, and photographing with the help of his assistant and many biologists. The goal: to represent the creatures that lived in or moved through that space. The team then sorted through their habitat cubes, coaxing out every inhabitant, down to a size of about a millimeter. Accomplishing that took an average of three weeks at each site. In all, more than a thousand individual organisms were photographed, their diversity represented in this gallery. "It was like finding little gems," Liittschwager says.
link to photo gallery for the interactive component
We're planning summer science doc projects already!
Project London video launched
Hey hey! Project London has launched their first clip!
"Project London is an independent, no-budget, feature-length, live action movie with vivid, intense, and marrow-vibrating visual effects and animations created with the open source software Blender (and other traditional software) and 250 (or so) worldwide volunteers. It’s led by The Triumvirate and set in Seattle, Washington. It will be available for worldwide viewing in its entirety very soon. In the meantime, check out an interview with the director: “Project London: The Most Ambitious No-Budget Effects Movie Ever”
SYNOPSIS
After WWII, the Nalardians, an alien race, have brought their technology to Earth. Peace reigns under the world government they helped create, the Joint Command.
Nebraska Higgins plunges into a world of intrigue and struggle when Joint Command kills his father, a hero known by his exosuit, Arizona...."
I started following Project London last year and am really excited to see this project launching content! It looks amazing!
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Nike - Destiny - Force Fate
via youtube.com
I kinda love this ad - maybe because I'm in the midst of teaching works that spin out questions of destiny vs. choice, and maybe because this ad communicates a message some writers take 100s of pages to spin - beautiful work
Q&A with Jeff Gomez (transmediaTracker)
Why do you think you have been so successful as a pioneer in this field?It’s a combination of being able to tap my limited reserves of courage and a bit of luck. For some years I ran around trying to get companies to tell stories this way by almost tricking them into it. Acclaim Entertainment didn’t care how I told all of those Magic: The Gathering stories, so long as the comics and videogames made money. So I connected the stories between platforms and used the Web in 1995 to help tell the story of the Magic world, because it made things fun for me—and apparently to the audience.
via sites.google.com
Roneil Reddy has a great short interview with Jeff Gomez just posted to his blog, Transmedia Tracker.
What I love about Jeff's thoughts above is the reminder that transmedia storytelling is fun!! Changing the rules in terms of how stories can be told is a challenge and a rush. And finding radically new ways to tell stories has rapidly become a feature of the best transmedia projects with ARGs leading the way in inventing new ways to tell stories.
42 Entertainment founder & ARG developer, Jordan Weisman has that great line:
"If we could make your toaster print something we would. Anything with an electric current running through it. A single story, a single gaming experience, with no boundaries. A game that is life itself."
And love the last paragraph of Reddy's interview - great teaser as to what Starlight Runner might realize next. Can't wait to see!
Trailer for Riese the Series
via youtube.com
Another high-production webseries coming out of Vancouver! The ARG The Sect is Here was launched end of September 2009 & season one launched Nov. 2 2009. Love the steampunk elements!
Must check in on & see if level 2 has opened...
Monday, January 25, 2010
Decode Exhibition Points Way to Data-Driven Art | Underwire
via wired.com
The Decode Exhibition looks like a must-experience in London. I LOVED Listening Post which grabs chat room texts with 'like' or 'love.' The full cycle of the piece provides a canvas of human emotion and desire that makes this one of the most emotionally rich and nuanced data viz works I've experienced.
Other works in the group show of twelve installations are Golan Levin's Opto-Isolater II and Wow Labs Light Rain Must figure out the time to get there!
Adidas Originals - Augmented Reality Shoes Teaser
via youtube.com
I think I first read about Adidas AR footwear in Wired Dec. 2009 and now the teaser video is out... very cool.
BBC Sport - 2010 Winter Olympics Inuit Animation
via youtube.com
Gorgeous animation in BBC winter Olympics promo video!
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Avant Game - Jane McGonigal launching new ARG Evoke
Jane McGonigal, leading ARG developer, is launching a new game & looking for collaborators. This call was posted Jan. 11, 2010, so there may still be opportunities to participate in the running of the game.
McGonigal's ARGs have turned increasingly to questions of how to find real world solutions through the power of collaborative thinking. The goal of Evoke is described as:
"The goal of the game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most pressing problems: hunger, poverty, disease, war and oppression, water access, education, climate change. "
You can follow the Twitter feed here:
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Slamdance announces distribution agreement with Microsoft
SLAMDANCE ANNOUNCES DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT WITH MICROSOFT
Four Slamdance Films to Launch New Video Rental and Download to Own Program on Zune and Xbox Platforms
LOS ANGELES – January 21, 2010 – Slamdance today announced a worldwide video content collaboration with Microsoft on both Zune and Xbox platforms. The initiative will launch during the Slamdance Film Festival (January 21-28, Park City, UT) on January 27, 2010 with a four film, 7-day program providing video rental throughout North America.Zune video Marketplace will make the selected films available on video-on-demand across North America on both Zune and Xbox platforms. During this 7-day period movie fans have the opportunity to rent some of the same films being screened at the Slamdance Film Festival on their computers or through Xbox LIVE. Price per film rentals during the festivals will range from 600 to 880 Microsoft Points
*.
via slamdance.com
Mass Photo Gathering - I'm a Photographer, not a Terrorist
Re. securitization of cities, this came through the Boing Boing feed this morning. Must send to Vancouver friends.
Boing Boing describes the event as:
The UK activist group "I'm a Photographer Not a Terrorist!" is planning a mass photo-shooting this Saturday in Trafalgar Square, London: "Following a series of high profile detentions under s44 of the terrorism act including 7 armed police detaining an award winning architectural photographer in the City of London, the arrest of a press photographer covering campaigning santas at City Airport and the stop and search of a BBC photographer at St Pauls Cathedral and many others. PHNAT feels now is the time for a mass turnout of Photographers, professional and amateur to defend our rights and stop the abuse of the terror laws."
source here: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/19/mass-photo-shoot-in.html
Collection Hepburn
I discovered Julia Hepburn's work last night at the Gladstone Come Up To My Room opening. Beautiful, whimsical reworkings of fairy tales and exquisite scenes that feel like fairy tales you've forgotten.
Each one is its own beautifully realized world waiting for a story to be told.
2010 Vancouver Olympics Coke Ad
via youtube.com
David Brisbin sent this to me this am with the following comment:
"It is a Coke ad for the Olympics displaying hockey and broadcasting the message " Let's make sure everyone knows whose game it is." There are a couple of pools of Canadian flags, and a good spattering of red and white -- so that the half attentive might think it is suggesting that hockey is 'Canada's game'. But when you look at the visuals, and particularly the cutting of the ending, the actual message is that the game is Coca Cola's. One sort of knows that the Olympics are primarily for the corps -- but this is open about it in a way I wouldn't have expected."
I too was really struck by the corporate/securitization underway in Vancouver when I was there in November. If you're not familiar with the branding & securitization of Vancouver that's happening for the Olympics, the legislation that has been passed in support of putting Canada's best (branded) face forward is really startling. An earlier post of the securitization billboards calling on citizens to report the suspicious is one example.
Another is the banning of any promotional images for competitors of Olympic corporate supporters - Coke is in, Pepsi is out - which ok I see the logic of. The legislation below however also opens up the right of police to remove anti-Olympic signage or signage that is deemed and in circumstances, to fine those who post said ads or images.
The following can be found under "Regulation of commercial activities in public spaces" and the specific heading re. "Freedom of Expression":
"the removal of illegal commercial signs from private property will be made by the city manager....based on the following criteria:
a) visibility of the illegal sign...
b) aesthetic impact of the sign on the city's image
c) potential risk to health or safety of anyone"
---------
While the first is measurable, the two following have a wide latitude in terms of how these criteria will be assessed - who decides aesthetic impact? and on what criteria?
Another measure that has generated a pushback from groups that support the homeless is the planned removal of the street people from the Lower East Side. Their relocation to 'other' shelters raises questions as to what measures will be taken when shelter accommodation can't be found for all of the street people.
http://vancouver.ca/mediaroom/news/pdf/2010WinterGamesBy-lawTechnicalBriefing-November2509.pdf
Friday, January 22, 2010
- The Late Night War
via youtube.com
This faux Ken Burns documentary on The Late Night War is really funny
Imagine’s “Transmedia Storytelling” Deal – Deadline.com
via deadline.com
The transmedia development vision here is really impressive:
"It's the only first-look deal Brian Grazer recalls giving out since he and Imagine Entertainment partner Ron Howard hooked up 28 years ago. And it's with a company that hasn’t yet made a film. But Blacklight Transmedia gives Imagine a foothoold in “transmedia storytelling,” an area Grazer feels will have an increasingly important place in how producers maximize franchises by simultaneously rolling them out in multiple platforms.
Post-Sundance, Blacklight Transmedia will begin shopping 20 intellectual property creations. But rather than limiting them to film, the company will have fully-fleshed storylines and designs that will also be shopped for videogames, TV, graphic novels and new media deals."
thanks Justin!
Inception online game
I found this website tie-in for Christopher Nolan's Inception a few weeks ago and played the first level. It's got a nifty 3D plug for the city-scape that is visually striking. There doesn't seem to be any further activity on the site though & there also doesn't seem to be any extended ARG components yet.... maybe they're too subtle or I'm not being enough of a diligent tracker...
Awesome Video Of The Day: Amon Tobin « BEAUTIFUL/DECAY MAGAZINE
Very trippy music video by Jan Schoenwiesner for an Amon Tobin remix. Reminds me of the Inception trailer.
thanks Adam!
Thursday, January 21, 2010
First Peoples: Guest Blogger: Daniel Heath Justice on Avatar
Amidst all the hype and excitement surrounding James Cameron’s new film, Avatar, many have critiqued its use of Indigenous imagery and innuendo and have charged that it is a thinly veiled colonialist fantasy that perpetuates damaging stereotypes. We asked First Peoples advisory board member, Daniel Heath Justice, to weigh in with his own thoughts on the film and its allusions to indigeneity, colonialism, and other pertinent issues.
Justice is a Colorado-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He is associate professor of Aboriginal literatures and Aboriginal Studies at the University of Toronto, and has written extensively on Indigenous North American literary expression. He also teaches a regular course in fantasy and horror literature and is the author of The Way of Thorn and Thunder, an Indigenous fantasy trilogy.
James Cameron’s Avatar: Missed Opportunities
By Daniel Heath JusticeApologies for spoilers! And thanks to Kent Dunn, Jim Cox, and Kirby Brown for their comments on early drafts of this blog.
In the past few weeks, I’ve chatted with a number of friends, colleagues, and students about the phenomenon that is Avatar. Certainly this particular community tends to be quite conversant about prominent themes in the film, such as Indigenous sovereignty and spirituality, colonization and decolonization, other-than-human kinship, traditional ecological knowledge and environmental destruction, so although we’re a diverse group we do have some values that align pretty closely across our differences. And given the fact that the film has already met with some pretty blistering critique online and in print from both the right and the left for its handling of many of these themes, I’d initially thought that the underlying perspective emerging from these conversations would be sweeping dismissal, or at least substantial indignation.
That’s not how it turned out, not even for me. Our responses ranged from guarded optimism (given that a huge international audience is clearly so engaged with a film that confronts the horrors of colonialism and resource exploitation) to thoughtful frustration (it’s powerful in so many ways, but why do we need yet another story about Indigenous struggle told through a non-Native’s voice and perspective?), but no one dismissed it. On the whole, the overwhelming sense was, “Well, it’s flawed, but at least it’s getting people talking.” That there’s so much commentary in the blogosphere on the film’s underlying current of “white guilt” indicates to me that something is happening with audiences and critics; it’s probably too early to tell yet what that is, but there’s probably a good opportunity here to engage an audience on Indigenous issues that might not otherwise have been interested or receptive.
To be honest, I went in expecting to hate the film. I’d already heard that it was pretty much Dances with Wolves in outer space, and the heavy-handed parallels to Pocahontas and Last of the Mohicans were readily apparent even in the first half-hour. The minute I saw Michelle Rodriguez as the tough-talking pilot Trudy Chacon, I knew that her character was going to die, die heroically but die nonetheless–this is the almost inevitable fate of most Latinas in science fiction films. For all the amazing 3D effects, the characters were simplistic caricatures, much of the dialogue was leaden and cliché, and the storyline was surprisingly predictable for a $300 million epic. To my surprise, there was enough in terms of world-building and interest around the Indigenous Na’vi to keep my interest; indeed, I would have liked to have seen much more of the Na’vi and their world and much less of the generally obnoxious and self-absorbed human invaders.
The film didn’t annoy me so much as make me sad, largely because it promised to be much more substantial than it actually was. That Cameron chose the least interesting and most consistently obtuse figure in the film (Jake Sully, a paraplegic ex-Marine, performed by Sam Worthington) to be the point-of-view character is, I think, symptomatic of the most significant failures of Avatar, namely, that for all its visual sophistication, the story suffers from low narrative expectations, and it regretfully fulfils them. Complexity and ambiguity are surrendered for expedient moralizing; the possibility of richly realized and multidimensional characters is tossed out in favor of stock heroes and villains. Cameron drives home the relevant political concerns with the subtlety of a sledgehammer; the good guys are very good, the bad guys are very, very bad, and there is little overlap between the categories. The Na’vi are exotic and intriguing, but their narrative function is to serve as the redemptive influence on a disillusioned white guy; they’re more interesting than the humans, but ultimately only to show what qualities the good humans will attain. It’s all part of the “white guy goes Native” Western film formula–the only real difference is that these whooping, warlike natives have blue skin and ride oddly limbed alien horses or fly giant bat-beasts.
This is, I think, where my primary disappointment lies: because the characters and their motivations are so clumsily handled, because the story is so formulaic, because the imaginary setting is so unimaginatively derivative of this world, the potential for actual critical commentary is diminished, and the audience is left with a self-congratulatory feeling of having grappled with major issues without having actually dealt with any of the real complexities of colonialism, militarism, reverence for the living world, or environmental destruction. (Nor does it deal much with dis/ability, in spite of Jake’s injuries and their effects on his sense of self–that he ends up not only ambulatory but immensely powerful in his Na’vi body at the end is another narrative cheat. Is it so hard to imagine in a science fiction film that a paraplegic can be adventurous and heroic and do so in a way that doesn’t ultimately require him to be something other than he is?) The film is a journey into a not-so-strange world that neither disorients nor dislocates viewer expectations; indeed, it asks very little of its audience aside from a willingness to be enraptured by its own spectacle. That’s good for entertainment, but that’s not asking for much these days.
For example, if Cameron had still decided for whatever reason that the viewpoint character couldn’t be one of the Indigenous Na’vi, Sigourney Weaver’s character, the scientist/teacher Dr. Grace Augustine, would have been an immeasurably more interesting (and inherently more complicated) choice than Jake, the pouting and resentful soldier/jock. (That Weaver’s fine performance is both multilayered and compelling in spite of the weak script demonstrates once again that she’s an extraordinary but sadly underappreciated talent.) While the film offers some muted critique of academic colonialism, the decidedly mixed blessings of Grace’s work as a teacher of human ways to the Na’vi are almost entirely obscured by the fact that she’s not a murderous military thug like Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang). Because she’s not a sneering, cardboard villain, and because in spite of her bristly personality she obviously has good intentions, the dangerous legacies of her interference in the world of the Na’vi are ultimately erased, and she remains a hero. Yet many of the devastations visited upon Indigenous cultures have come from well-meaning teachers, preachers, and scholars, many of whom have believed that their actions are for the good of the peoples whose cultures they’re working to undermine.
And such shallow attention to motivation doesn’t begin or end with Dr. Augustine. Colonel Quaritch is despicable, vindictive, and brutal almost entirely for the sake of efficient brutality. There’s nothing sophisticated about his evil, nor is there anything about him that would elicit audience empathy–he’s meant to be entirely a murderer, an ecosystem killer, and an all around monster. Yet how much more complicated a story might this have been had he been a good man of personal integrity who proudly did his duty in spite of the horror he felt at decimating a people and their world? How much of the evil in our contemporary world is created by people whose sole purpose is destruction and devastation? Not as much as is done by those who believe that what they’re doing is a good thing, or who know it’s wrong but feel that a higher duty compels them to act against their own moral qualms. Much more could have been done with this, and with the fact that, although Quaritch and his other fighters now work for a private corporation, their self-concept is still very much within the military honor code of fighting on behalf of God and country. Therein lies the makings of true tragedy.
Following that line, what if, instead of the hackneyed convention of a cruel white man assaulting Indigenous peoples on another world, he was instead a world-weary Native warrior grappling between empathy for the Na’vi and fulfilling his (or her) duties as a soldier? Having numerous family members (both Native and non-Native) who’ve served in the armed forces, and knowing something of their complicated relationships to service, I’m a little less willing than Cameron to simply dismiss them as brutes and bigots; given that American Indians have the highest rate of military service of any demographic in the U.S., and having seen the U.S. flag carried proudly by Native veterans at many powwows and community gatherings, I think it’s fair to say that all kinds of people join the military for all kinds of complex, sometimes problematic reasons, mostly because of a mixture of love for their people, nation, and country, the search for adventure in another land, and a hunger for opportunities that are otherwise limited or denied. None of these are neutral, and none are without their dangers or moral complications, but none are categorically evil, either–people can be sensitized to the beauty and humanity of other cultures through military service, just as they can be turned into xenophobic killers. This is the horror, and the tragedy, of war–and this is a much more poignant but ultimately less comfortable perspective, one that finds many degrees of good and harm in an entire range of characters, one that indicts the viewer as much as the character.
There are some impressive moments of depth and narrative brilliance in the film, as when Zoe Saldana’s warrior-woman Neytiri saves a stupidly unprepared Jake from being killed by feral hyena-panther creatures, then chastises him for his casual response to the destruction of life his rescue required; the soul-crushing horror of Hometree’s destruction and the survivors’ disorientation and exile; and the adoption ceremony that remakes Jake into a full Na’vi, with both the rights and responsibilities that such a ceremony necessitates, and his subsequent betrayal of the Na’vi and Neytiri’s anguished response. Yet for all its good intentions, for all its visual spectacle and effecting sentiment (yes, I got teary-eyed a couple of times), it’s still ultimately a story about “those bad guys who aren’t us.” Sadly, as we know from example after example in the past, distant and immediate, the bad guys, all too often, are us. It’s a comforting lie to believe that only those big bad guys with the superweapons or the white hoods and burning crosses are the only ones who do nasty racist things, but it’s a lie nonetheless.
In distancing the audience from any complicity with these evils on our world, the film actually fails to take seriously what would really be required of the audience to effect real and lasting change. The genocide perpetrated against the Na’vi is undeniably evil and despicable, yet genocide isn’t enacted only by wicked, bloodthirsty soldiers–mundane, ordinary people participate in all kinds of atrocities at home and abroad, knowingly and unknowingly, every day. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt might remind us, it’s usually the ordinary people whose actions are most responsible for such horrors, made all the worse because of its seeming banality.
Yet because no audience member is expected to take the side of Colonel Quaritch or of Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), the insipid and cowardly corporate sycophant, audiences can only claim the righteousness of the Na’vi for themselves. In so doing, we’re exempted from the hard work that actually accompanies the struggles for decolonization, social and environmental justice, and peace. There’s no real sense that good intentions can actually be far more destructive to a people (and have much more lasting impacts) than shooting napalm into the Hometree; there’s no acknowledgment that people can do terrible things out of a sense of misplaced obligation rather than simply because they’re sociopaths.
Ultimately, Cameron’s beautiful, evocative, and deeply flawed epic falls prey to the surprisingly limited ambitions of its characters: by exchanging complexity and narrative nuance for heavy-handed, simplistic political evangelism, Cameron misses the opportunity to make a real statement about injustice and more thoughtful relationships with one another and the natural world. He had the opportunity to be as profound in substance as in spectacle, to ask difficult and unsettling questions of his audience that might not have been as popular or lucrative but would have been more meaningful. Instead, he settled on feel-good, self-congratulatory pop progressivism, and wasted, or at least diminished, the chance to make a difference.
Tags: colonialism, critique, environment, film, sovereignty, stereotypes
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Guest Blogger, Popular Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
thank you, Zan! I think after this post though, I'm done with Avatar - on to other works!
The PATH -Tale of Tales retelling of Little Red Riding Hood
via vimeo.com
Belgium's Tale of Tales have a track-record of making gorgeous innovative narrative games and a great blog. And in the waiting to be approved category, they have just submitted an app, Vanitas, which they note was
"commissioned for The Art History of Games, a public symposium which is taking place February 4th-6th, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, at the High Museum of Art. Where we will be attending and speaking among good company. We are one of 3 developers selected to make something on occasion of the event. The other two being Jason Rohrer and Eric Zimmerman."
The Path can also be downloaded on their website:
source here: http://tale-of-tales.com/
"The Path is the latest offering by award-winning Belgium-based game developers Tale of Tales. A surreal twist on the classic fairytale Little Red Riding Hood, The Path is a Gothic horror tale that subverts traditional game mechanics in the same way that a dream subverts narrative. You are inevitably compelled to violate its only instruction—to go to grandmother’s house and stay on the path—and discover the rich and unexpected landscape of experience that awaits you. Each step you make in the unexplored territory of the woods contributes to constructing a different variation on grandmother’s house once you arrive at your destination."
source here: http://www.indiecade.com/index.php?/games/selected/the-path
iPhone Controlled Helicopter Offers Augmented Reality Views - PSFK
via psfk.com
This is fascinating
hmm... very cool... now what can we do with it...
"The AR.Drone by Parrot is a toy helicopter that’s controlled by an iPhone or iPod. It was officially announced at CES this week. The helicopter is controlled via wifi, and two cameras show the world from the helicopter’s point of view on your iPhone/Pod screen. Included are two augmented reality games, where you can destroy enemies by yourself or challenge others in multiplayer mode."
"New Media Resistance: Machinima and the Avant-Garde" by Elijah Horwatt
“Somewhere between the video game and the CD-ROM there could be another way of making films….” - Jean-Luc Godard1
It was Jean Cocteau who suggested that the cinema as a pluralistic and egalitarian medium could never come into fruition “until the materials are as cheap as pencil and paper.” The string of technological advances in digital video technology and editing software for the personal computer have steadily brought the cost of filmmaking closer to Cocteau’s utopian vision and no group has adopted these new technologies with the enthusiasm and resourcefulness as avant-garde filmmakers and video artists. It appeared that the avant-garde was continuing a trajectory towards the use of increasingly affordable tools and means of production during the single-channel video art revolution of the 1970s. Since then however, the possibilities of many new “expanded cinema” technologies has facilitated a movement away from the thrifty art-making tools Cocteau once championed. The latest developments in new media technology do not share the economy that video offered 20 years ago2 . Much of virtual reality, augmented reality and experimental screening spaces are raising the cost of new media works and narrowing the number of people who may use these new tools. These exciting new technologies surely hold promise for the future of experimental cinema, but they have also drawn attention away from cheaper apparatuses more readily available to financially strapped independent artists.
The success of video art, measured by four decades of innovative work, seems in part attributable to the possibility of camcorders getting into the hands of a diverse group of artists. However the focus of the new media movement has ceased to be the democratizing technological forces that were once central to the avant-garde. Was video, as a cheap apparatus for making folk art, abandoned for the more sophisticated, expensive and more intriguing tools of new media? Indeed, part of the fascination with video art as a medium stemmed from the ability of marginalized people to make art works which radically challenged hegemonic visual discourses in new ways3 . Though multi-channel installation works called for enormous allocations of money, single-channel works were an important stream of video art making which offered the most access to (frequently) insolvent artists. It would be fair to say that the video art movement as we know it is predicated in part on its accessibility to people who could not afford to obtain any other cinematic apparatus. The question is, what new technologies will further create spaces for the disenfranchised to be involved in cinematic discourse? I will posit that machinima has such democratizing properties. In this sense, I hope to draw parallels to a younger generation of outsider filmmakers, or folk artists, who are engaging with video game culture much the same way video artists once critiqued television. They have aligned themselves in some unusual ways with the video art/avant-garde film movement in their technological ingenuity and their appropriation of extant mass media images all within the expressly cheap confines of the PC or Video game consul.
The word machinima (ma-SHIN-i-ma) is a contraction of machine and cinema first coined by the “The Strange Company” film collective; a group of gamers devoted to their own unique version of détournement also known as emergent gameplay or metagaming. These terms refer to playing games in ways contrary to the designer’s original intentions. Traditional narrative machinima is created by scripting a story, recording game play within a real time 3D environment (either through the POV of an avatar or through a commonly offered in-game camera feature), using actors to create voice-overs and finally editing the game play and voices to reflect the script. Other techniques of machinima making include improvisation or reprogramming (also known as modding) which render scripting, and often voice over, unnecessary. When completed, machinima looks like 3D animation made through the use of a video game platform (either a consul or a PC) and an editing program, however machinima is unlike animation because the 3D engine that controls the images exists within the parameters of a video game. The algorithms of the game detail the behavior of avatars, weather, and environmental boundaries, even providing a sophisticated platform designed to emulate real world Newtonian physics.
Various features have been offered by a diversity of games to give machinimators a wide range of environments and avatars to choose from. Some games and demo programs like SimLife, The Movies, Unreal Tournament and now Machinimator allow for the construction of nearly any environment and avatar imaginable. In this sense, machinima does not need to exist in the confines of what would be described as a game—because there ceases to be objectives or goals to playing.
While machinima is often technically in breach of copyright law with its appropriation of video game images, many companies have turned a blind eye because of the free publicity it gives their games or have created regulations to allow for machinima production. Microsoft was so excited about the use of the Halo game in the hit machinima show Red Vs. Blue (produced by Rooster Teeth Productions) that they created a special machinima license4 and a new controller command in the sequel Halo 3 which allows players to lower their weapon, a feature “designed solely to make it easier for Rooster Teeth to do dialogue”5 as it has no other practical purpose for the game.
Early machinima was gamer oriented, giving practical advice about how to advance to new levels, discover secrets within the game or to reveal strategies and techniques for more successful game play. When films began to imitate the grammar and language of narrative cinema, the films produced were predictably violent, action oriented works exploiting chauvinistic representations and absurd caricatures of masculinity. It is a marvel that anything but the impetus to create a more cinematic spectacle of gratuitous violence has become a dominant facet of the technique, but as I will illustrate, machinima has evolved to become a multifarious technique with its own distinct genres and tendencies.
Machinima’s comic possibilities were exploited with the breakout machinima film Male Restroom Etiquette (Zarathustra Studios, 2006) which has received nearly 5 million hits on YouTube and is in the top 100 most viewed films on the site. The film is a sardonic poke at masculinity and gamer culture that has been widely attributed to a boom in the interest in making and watching machinima. Red Vs. Blue, a popular machinima show which ran 100 episodes and five seasons, uses absurdist humor to explore the lives of two groups of cynical soldiers engaged in a war without meaning or purpose. The characters pontificate in the appropriated style of Samuel Beckett about the pathos of their task and the triviality of their existence as soldiers. The show has subsequently been used by Microsoft to promote their game consul Xbox. Perhaps the most widely distributed machinima is the famous South Park Episode Make Love Not Warcraft which follows the South Park characters’ avatars in the Warcraft game.
An experimental machinima contingency began to develop with the creation of both The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences6 , an organization devoted to promoting the use of machinima and heading the Machinima film festival,and Machinima.com which provide forums, articles and a film archive for machinima lovers. Machinima is a nascent technological breakthrough which, like video art and avant-garde films before it, radically redefines the means of production associated with traditional narrative filmmaking. The techniques employed to create many machinima films resemble avant-garde film practices; the films have a collage aesthetic, they appropriate both the images of another medium as well as the discursive and narrative strategies of video game culture, they are acts of détournement or media resistance often entrenched in radical politics and they are made on a shoe-string budget. For all these reasons, the process of machinima captured the attention of avant-garde artists and a number of open minded outsiders to begin exploring machinima’s abstract and non-narrative potential.
While machinima resembles found-footage filmmaking in its appropriation of extant images and sounds, there are some notable differences. Instead of full fledged cinematic appropriations, machinima employs digitally appropriated environments, avatars, background stories and even pre-rendered sequences. Unlike traditional found footage films, the content within the 3D environment is highly malleable and needs to be created. While the films are often engaged in a critique of video games the same way video art was engaged with television, this critique is not a necessary attribute of machinima. Though there is a bifurcation between machinima art as a critique of video games and as a cheap platform for cinematic expression, the avant-garde community has employed the technique to serve both ends. This is not necessarily the case with mainstream machinima, evinced in the words of machinima pioneer Hugh Hancock7 when he said “Machinima seems to be the only way that someone like me is going to get to produce stories on the scale I want without having to spend 35 years working my way up in the TV or film industry.”8
Despite a strong community of experimental and avant-garde filmmakers, Hancock’s sentiment seems to ring true for most mainstream machinima. Though the technique and technology help artists work outside of Hollywood modes of production, those involved are often attempting to work within the aesthetic and narrative constructions of contemporary Hollywood cinema. Critic Leo Berkeley reiterates these issues when he writes “In an era where the narrative possibilities of interactive, hypertextual and virtual environments are opening up but have only been tentatively explored, machinima most commonly makes use of the increasingly sophisticated interactive features of recent 3D computer games to produce texts that are predominantly traditional linear narratives. It is a strangely hybrid form, looking both forwards and backwards, cutting edge and conservative at the same time.”9 However Berkeley also cites critics Bolter and Grusin, who suggest that new media forms do not simply emerge and replace old forms—they often borrow the discursive techniques of contemporary and old media forms before innovation can occur10 . Right now a tug-of-war over the future of machinima is playing out across the internet with some, like Experimental Game Lab at Georgia Tech member Michael Nitsche proposing that machinima explore non-narrative possibilities11 . Most machinima theorists and pioneers are ambivalent about the move toward experimental machinima. Though many are fascinated with new possibilities they are still keen publicists and know that machinima has a brighter (and more profitable) future in its narrative form. The three most well known books on machinima, Machinima (Morris, Kelland, and Lloyd 2005) 3-D Game Based Filmmaking: The Art of Machinima (Marino 2004) and Machinima for Dummies (Hancock and Ingram, 2007) all focus on the narrative aspects of machinima filmmaking with little or no discussion about potential non-narrative films.
When talking about new media, there is a tendency to romanticize burgeoning technologies which appear to democratize the medium as the savior du jour of avant-garde/experimental cinema. Critic David Ross invokes Bertolt Brecht’s seminal media essay “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication” and reminds us that we often herald new forms of media because of our own utopian expectations of what it will carry. In Brecht’s words, “these people who have a high opinion of radio have it because they see in it something for which ‘something’ can be invented. They would see themselves justified.”12 So rather than simply herald the many possibilities of machinima, I will cite examples of why machinima is worthy of study.
The numerous machinima films which détourn video games may seem like a specialized if not superfluous form of media resistance. However the preponderance of personal video game consuls has become so widespread that it has begun to have a ubiquity in the lives of many people, approaching that of television fifty years ago. Over 117 million Americans are counted as “active gamers” by the Nielsen Active Gamer Study of 2005 which surveyed American gamers who played more than one hour per week. Among its findings it was discovered that “although teenagers continue to comprise the largest percentage (40%) of Active Gamers, more than 15 million of these gamers (almost 8%) are now 45 years or older, with the average age of a gamer at 30 years-old. While women make up nearly two-thirds of all online gamers, men still outnumber women in the overall video game universe by more than two-to-one.”13 In 2003, the industry made 28 billion in revenues and has had a growth rate of 20% since 2002. While machinima appears at first glance to be an example of fan fiction, many works produced with the technique are radical critiques of video games, attempting to redefine the politics and ideology of video game culture rather than praise it. In this way, machinima appears to be a striking example of a grass-roots media resistance movement engaging critically with culture and production. Gamers love to cite statistics comparing the Halo series, which made 170 million dollars on the day of release to blockbuster films like Spider-Man 2 which only made 40 million on its first day.14 The preponderance of these comparisons, (especially in machinima films about machinima filmmaking) solidifies the machinimators desire to link gaming as a cultural artifact worthy of academic study on equal footing with cinema.
One way of situating machinima in relationship to new media is to consider its privileged position in the critique of video game culture with the tools of the medium and the insights of those closest to it. Critic and theorist McKenzie Wark has devoted a number of theoretical tracts to gaming culture15 and has become an important figure among the machinima intelligentsia as evinced by his interview on the machinima talk show This Spartan Life. The show, which nods ironically in its title to the national public radio show This American Life, has become the Johnny Carson Show of machinimators all the world over. The show follows a host who interviews significant media theoreticians, avant-garde artists and open source programmers inside the violent Halo 3 game. The game has attracted Criterion Collection creator and Voyager Company founder Bob Stein and avant-garde found footage filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh to come onto the show and discuss issues surrounding new media, the future of digital information and the process of machinima itself. The dramatic tension of the show is centered around the fact that interviews are suddenly over if the guest’s avatar is killed by another player. The creators have had to enlist professional gamers to act as bodyguards to prevent the rising number of individuals bent on disrupting the show by killing all of the guests. The show subverts the Halo 3 game by turning it into a place where people who are separated geographically can come together in a digital world to hold talks and even debate serious issues as opposed to using it as a playground for gratuitous violence.
Machinima and the Avant-GardeThe most surprising development in the machinima world so far was the use of the technique by avant-garde filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh and Phil Solomon. Ahwesh’s She Puppet (2001) destabilizes the programmed expectations of how one is “supposed” to play the game Tomb Raider; chipping away at the violent and sexist representation of “Lara Croft” the sexually idealized protagonist of the game. Ahwesh describes Croft as “a collection of cones and cylinders -- not a human at all-- most worthy as a repository for our post-feminist fantasies of adventure, sex and violence without consequence. The limited inventory of her gestures and the militaristic rigor of the game strategies created for her by the programmers is a repetition compulsion of sorts, offering some kind of cyberagency and cyberprowess for the player.”16
In She Puppet, Lara Croft shoots at non-existent enemies and is subject to numerous moments of what Ahwesh calls “ecstatic death.”’ In some sense, Ahwesh is giving Croft the radical subjectivity imbued by feminism—allowing the character to act in ways, we perceive, she has not been designed to. Awesh’s construction of Croft doesn’t adhere to the oppressive regulations of the game, even though she works within the programmed algorithms. Jonanthan Miller called this use of the avatar an “image of liberation that points the way to a wholly human ideal.”17 Ahwesh also forces the viewer to consider the male dominated world of gaming in which men use an idealized female body as their avatar—creating a kind of transsexual space for game play.While Ahwesh is clearly engaged in a critique of video games in her machinima, Phil Solomon’s work in the medium has an entirely different purpose. This purpose relates to machinima’s prospects as a democratizing and economically viable form of new media. Solomon’s machinima films Untitled (for David Gatten) made with Mark LaPore in 2005 and Rehearsals for Retirement (2007) take place in the controversial Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas game. In Untitled (for David Gatten) Solomon and LaPore use glitching, a process of finding program errors (freezing, data corruption, physical impossibilities within the algorithms of the game) and exposing them. The avatar in their machinima repeatedly attempts to cross the physical barrier in the game creating colorful trails of the game’s landscape. As these films are difficult to find, I rely on critic Michael Sicinski, who describes the images produced as an “unglued forest landscape, sending dripping, elongated textures and blotches of green hurtling towards the screen. But these blades of grass, even as they become mere paint-pixels, are shifted and rotated, sometimes becoming the shafts of trees, other times mere planar forms which intersect with one another and the figure himself. We are in a dense thicket of interpenetrating fields and illegible perspectives.”18 Rehearsals for Retirement utilizes more traditional cinematic techniques while continuing to use glitching. Sicinski again writes “In the opening sequence, we find ourselves reverse-tracking away from a wood-rail fence in a forest clearing. Patches of the ground beneath us fall away into fractal-like black holes; patchy blue-green mists form rotating, 3-D volumes of gas. The trunk of a tree becomes a waterfall in the distance. Like the middle section of Untitled, this is a space of indeterminate legibility, comprised of planes upon planes, yet the tracking shot also hints at a certain level of spatial control, a touchstone of the cinema of old.”19 While the images play with the barriers of game space, they are focused on the aesthetic results of glitching rather than its relationship to game play. Solomon sees the beautiful possibilities inherent in playing the game in different ways and forcing the program to produce images that aren’t ordinarily part of the game.
Avant-garde machinimator Eddo Stern has compiled what must be the largest and most sophisticated body of political machinima to date. His films, installations and performances grapple with torture, simulation, military games as well as a host of geopolitical disputes with machinima produced images. A prolific video artist, member of the now defunct downtown LA media collective C-Level and a former faculty member of USC’s Interactive Media Division, Stern has approached gaming culture in some fascinating ways. His work in the Hammer Museum’s “Fair Use: Appropriation in Recent Film and Video” exhibit explored the preponderance of video games dealing with terrorism after the September 11th Attacks. In Stern’s own words “After 9/11, there was an initial knee-jerk reaction to step away from reality in gaming…people didn’t want to belittle the situation. But that shock only lasted a short time. Then it was just, ‘Fuck it, let’s go kill them.’ ”20 Stern uses these images to explore the political and ideological messages of video games and how history and cultural experience are formed through game play.
Stern’s gaming “interventions” are as interested in shaping video game culture as they are in exploring it. His work amplifies the strange relationship between reality and simulation available to video game modifiers or modders in a variety of ways. The economic advantages of machinima are secondary to Stern; he is more interested in using the inherent language of video games as material to explore through machinima. The ideologies and politics of video games make up most of his work, which augment the subtexts of games until they are either absurd or monstrous. In the Tekken Torture Tournament (2001)performance, “32 willing participants received bracing but non-lethal electrical shocks in correspondence to the injuries sustained by their onscreen avatars. Players wore shocking arm straps wired through a hardware/software hack of the world’s most popular fighting Playstation game TEKKEN 3.”21 In Waco Resurrection the player’s avatar is a revivified David Koresh who walks through Waco surrounded by ethereal hellfire fighting the FBI and ATF. His film Deathstar which played at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2004 is an assemblage of digitally rendered homicidal fantasies concerning Osama bin Laden from online video games set to the music of The Passion of the Christ. The music, according to one critic “subverts the programmers' intent, insisting we view bin Laden as a Christ-like figure amidst all the maiming.”22 Vietnam Romance recreates scenes from iconic Vietnam War films using video game generated images and MIDI sound files that correspond to the songs which played over the cinematic scenes. He uses Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City to recreate scenes of Vietnamese prostitution in Full Metal Jacket (1987) with a MIDI version of Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots are Made for Walkin’. Stern goes on to recreate the cinematic memory of Vietnam from the Huey attack scene from Apocalyse Now (1979) featuring Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries to the introduction scenes of M*A*S*H (1970) with the song Suicide is Painless.
More recently, Stern has turned his eye towards Los Angeles with Landlord Vigilante (2006) where a cynical landlady who believes tenants are “defective human beings,” instigates an urban war on criminal elements in East LA. The story is based on Stern and collaborator Jessica Hutchins’ own exploitative landlady in Los Angeles. Stern, like Phil Solomon uses Grand Theft Auto and plays with the documentary properties of the game platform—which explores gang culture in a simulated Los Angeles. Eddo’s game is ostensibly a revenge scenario allowing afflicted tenants to sublimate their violent desires towards their landlords into the gaming sphere.
“Outsider” Experimental Machinima
Many artists have attempted to make experimental machinima outside of the highly contested grouping of artists we call the “avant-garde.” Referring to these individuals as “outsiders” seems ironic because they tend to be more invested in the form than their avant-garde counterparts, however they tend to be gamers, programmers, glitchers and modders who’ve developed an interest in non-narrative possibilities for machinima. Though this tendency is late breaking in the machinima community, it has developed a significant following. Digital curator Carl Goodman of the American Museum of Moving Images commented on machinimators in 2002 saying “What enables them to do all this is also what limits them in the end. At one extreme you have action movies and at the other you have the story that all young boys tell when they play with action figures.”23 Much has changed in the last six years. While the earliest entries into the machinima cannon betray just the kind of narrative and aesthetic preferences one might ascribe to the average gamer, machinimators have increasingly employed non-narrative strategies to films which reflect some prototypical avant-garde practices. Though this group is a fringe of the machinima movement, these experimental machinima films are often touted by pioneers and machinima communities as examples that lend a new kind of legitimacy to the technique.24Ozymandias (2001), a characteristically avant-garde machinima film was made by Strange Films and is based on the Percy Shelly poem of the same name. The film features a single poetic image which takes on the narrative exposition of Shelly’s text with a presentation of the poem at the end of the film. The work captured the attention of New York Times arts columnist Matthew Mirapaul and critic Roger Ebert, both of whom remarked on the incredible new possibilities the medium had to offer. Friedrich Kirschner, a filmmaker with Moppi Productins works with creatively elastic demo engines to make some of the most respected works of experimental machinima, The Journey, Halla, Person 2184 and IX. The films have oblique narratives which have startlingly original images and metaphoric properties. Using abstract humanoid figures, Kirschner creates cold multi-layered landscapes with overlapping images and a nightmarish futuristic perspective where advertising bombards the individual. His films obliquely grapple with the pervasive commercial images of the Society of the Spectacle and the increasing difficulty of individuality in a world that seeks to instate conformity.
Political Machinima
Most works of political machinima are left wing in nature save some pro-military war reenactments which recreate military operations in various historical theaters of war. A number of clans (social groups that play together via the internet) have developed around mutual political or personal affiliations. A notable example is the preponderance of gay gamer clans, also known as Gaymers25 .Left wing political machinima films have become more frequent and grabbed the attention of many new media scholars. Many critics were captivated by The French Democracy (2005)26 which detailed the events and situations which led up to the French suburb riots of October 2005. The film itself was made from the perspective of a young Parisian on the events that precipitated the riots in France—with recreations of the deaths which sparked the riots themselves. The filmmaker Alex Chan, a first generation French Buddhist, made the film "to correct what was being said in the media, especially in the United States, who linked what was happening, the riots, to terrorism and put the blame on the Muslim community.”27 The film detailed the violent response of three black youths to the many acts of harassment and bias faced by young immigrants around Paris. The film was discussed by a slew of reporters after receiving a million hits in a month.28 Though Chan was an inexperienced machinima maker and the film itself has little merit stylistically or technically, the film is emblematic of the instant exposure machinima can offer those without a traditional filmmaking apparatus.
This kind of political pseudo-documentary style was copied by Joshua Garrison in his rendering of the Virginia Tech Massacre with the Halo 3 game engine. This controversial work is a thoughtful political invective against violence, using the engine to recreate the events of the massacre punctuated by title cards explaining details of the massacre and the systemic failings that contributed to the killer’s success.
An Unfair War (2006) made by Thuyen Nguyen is an austere five minute short exploring the personal effects of war. A Middle-Eastern man is sitting at his computer in an empty house with the sound of gunfire blasts in the background. He’s writing a letter (the words he types appear at the bottom of the screen) about how his family has fled the country and the peril they face on their journey. He has stayed behind to document the events that occur. Though never explicit, the man is clearly an Iraqi citizen living among a rival sect. His ambivalence about the war is iterated in lines like “I do not care if I am ‘defended’ or ‘liberated.’ I just want my life back” and “whoever wins this war will claim a once-beautiful country which has been reduced to nothing.” The gunfire crescendos until it is deafening. The man pauses and the screen fades to black with the sound of a blast. The film ends with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?” The pathos of the subject seems to communicate the ambivalent attitudes towards “liberation” articulated by many Iraqis—what good is freedom if survival is impossible? This work seems to echo The French Democracy with a filmmaker attempting to speak for those who cannot. In this way machinima allows people to bear witness to events with tools they otherwise couldn’t afford.
The Tyrant (2006), a machinima mash-up film made by Mike Munson with the Half-Life 2 game engine utilizes a special “skin builder” which allows players to design the faces of their avatars. Munson designed a George W. Bush avatar and employs the same techniques many political mash-up filmmakers have—re-editing speeches by political figures so that there is coalescence between what they say and what they actually do. The speech made by the avatar is a cut up version of Bush speeches constructed into a single cohesive monologue. This process has been referred to by the artist and writer Jonathan McIntosh as “identity correction.”
The Machinima “Documentary”Some machinima filmmakers have taken to documenting the world within a game by incorporating an outsider perspective and looking at the video game world through the eyes of an anthropologist. These films have a mockumentary quality to them, incorporating humor and absurdity though remaining loyal to the spirit of the games they investigate. In Jim Munroe’s machinima film My Trip to Liberty City (2004), we are taken on a tour of the landscape of the Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City (GTA: LC ) world. Munroe describes the city over clips of his avatar’s exploration. After his avatar is called upon to carry out an illicit job by a crime lord, Munroe decides instead to explore the city. His running monologue over the film is more befitting of a family slide show of vacation photos that the absurd violence of the game’s narrative, which clashes with his own curiosity about the world of the city. Realizing that his thuggish character may be misleading those around him, Munroe decides to “change skins” and be the Canadian tourist he feels more adequately represents himself. After changing into a heavy set balding man with a camera around his neck, Munroe explores the city on foot because, in his words, “ I never feel like getting into a car is the best way to see a city. The best way is to walk around and get to know it. For instance here if found this little nook in an alley and sure enough there’s a stairwell there that leads up to this beautiful rooftop; something I never would have found in a car.” Munroe’s exploration of the digital space of GTA: LC has the same outsider perspective and proposed audience as other machinima “documentaries.” It does not use the lingua franca of gamer-made machinima films, nor does it have the insider humor of shows like Red Vs Blue. Instead, My Trip to Liberty City has some elements in common with the work of video artist Mike Hoolboom, who refers to his work in the 1990s as “‘documentaries of the imaginary.’”29 In this sense, the imaginary space of a game is explored with the appropriated discourses of a documentary.
Machinimator Douglas Gayeton purports to have “found” the video diaries of Molotov Alva, a man who supposedly evaporated from real life and reappeared in the popular computer world Second Life. These films claim to be “dispatches” from the Second Life world, from a man who has left reality and entered simulation forever. The film has become the object of much discussion after its purchase by HBO for broadcast in 2008 and has been entered into the Academy Award’s short film competition for 2007.
Machinima and New Media Resistance
The most striking aspect of machinima may come from its origins and development outside of the formal avant-garde community. It has developed through the ingenuity of hackers, modders, gamers and cinephiles. Not all new media is employed as a means of a bottom-up media critique—it is most often the province of artworks rooted in the visual discourse of the medium being critiqued. However machinima is unique because of the origins of the technique, developed by individuals who wanted to engage with hegemonic visual discourses of video games because it was the visual language they were most familiar with and they had important things to say about the culture as a whole.The term media resistance has been most closely allied with activist documentary, video and avant-garde art, however it is increasingly the domain of amateur content creators on the Internet. I would attribute this development not only to a steady reduction in the cost of recording equipment and editing software, but also to the proliferation of extant media materials on the Internet whether they be in the form of digital video files or images produced from game engines. A critical analysis often appears at the root of appropriated and reconfigured images—observable by how the artist relates to the source material and the various modifications they execute. Many found footage filmmakers and video artists describe the process of appropriating materials and manipulating them as a form of retribution or resistance. Nam June Paik once said that “Television has been attacking us all our lives, now we can attack it back.”30 Now millions of gamers are going to have their turn.
Notes
1 Jean Luc-Godard and Yousseff Ishaghpour, “Part I Interview,” Cinema, (Berg 2005, 3-112.): 38-392 For an in depth explanation of how video became more economical for artists during the late 1970s please see Catherine Elwes. Video Art, A Guided Tour. (I.B. Tauris & Co: London, 2005): 19.
3 These critiques are evinced in the work of Sadie Benning, Dara Birnbaum, and Candice Breitz.
4 The license stipulates that derivative works may be made from Microsoft’s Xbox consul if they are for personal and non-commercial use. For details of the license visit http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/developer/rules.htm
5 Thompson, Clive. “The X-Box Auteurs” New York Times Magazine August 7th, 2005. (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/magazine/07MACHINI.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&oref=slogin)
6 The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences should also be understood as an example of machinimators attempting to identify themselves with the Hollywood film organization The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Visit www.machinima.org
7 Hancock is also the man responsible for coining the word “machinima” and actually misspelling the contraction which should be “machinema.” He is currently on the board of directors of The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.
8 Mirapaul, Matthew. “Arts Online: Computer Games as the Tools for Digital Filmmakers.” New York Times, July 22nd, 2002.
9 Berkeley, Leo. “Situation Machinima in the New Mediascape.” Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society. Vol. 4, No. 2, 2006, pp: 65-80
10 Bolter, J.D. & Grusin, R. Remediation: Understanding New Media. (The MIT Press, Cambridge MA & London, 1999). Op. Cit. Berely, Leo. “Situation Machinima in the New Mediascape.”
11 Michael Nitsche explores these issues often in his Free Pixel blog, specifically in the post “What Makes Machinima Good?” @ http://gtmachinimablog.lcc.gatech.edu/?p=56#more-56
12 Ross, David. “Truth or Consequences: American Television and Video Art.” Video Culture: A Critical Investigation. Ed. John Hanhardt. (Peregrine Smith Books: Layton, 1986): 172.
13 Takahashi, Dean. “Nielson Entertainment Releases Study on Gamers.” San Francisco Mercury News, October 5th, 2006. (http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/2006/10/nielsen_enterta.html)
14 Flew, Terry. New Media: An Introduction. (Oxford University Press, New York: 2005): 101
15 His most famous work in this area is Gamer Theory.
16 Ahwesh, Peggy. “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” Film Comment 37.4, p. 77.
17 Miller, Jonathan. “Peggy Awesh” on Eight Forty Eight heard on Chicago Public Radio. (http://chicagopublicradio.org/content.aspx?audioID=10354)
18 Sicinski, Michael. “Phil Solomon Visits San Andreas and Escapes, Not Unscathed: Notes on Two Recent Works” CinemaScope Magazine Issue 30, 2007.
19 Ibid.
20 Willis, Holly. The Military Games People Play. LA Weekly. March 30th, 2005. (http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/art/the-military-games-people-play/798/)
22 Temple, Kevin. “Sensational Stern: Installations Show How Violence Amuses” Now Magazine. Vol. 23, #43, 2004. (http://www.eddostern.com/texts/toronto%20NOW/art_reviews.php.html)
23 Mirapaul, Matthew. “Arts Online: Computer Games as the Tools for Digital Filmmakers.”
24 Machinima.com, the distribution portal of the “Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences” names three experimental / non-narrative machinima films in their “best machinima” category. Any comprehensive search for the top 10 machinima films tends to name several iconic experimental machinima films, most frequently those by Friedrich Kirschner.
25 See the blog made exclusively for Gaymers: http://gaygamer.net
26 This film may be viewed at http://www.machinima.com/film/view&id=1407.
27 Diderich, Joelle. “French film about riots draws applause.” Associated Press. Dec. 14th, 2005. (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2005-12-15-french-riots-film_x.htm)
28 Business Week, “France: Thousands of Young Spielbergs.” December 19th, 2005.
29 Elwes, Catherine. Video Art, A Guided Tour. ( I.B. Tauris & Co: London, 2005.): 187
30 Ibid: 5
via cineaction.ca
Elijah Horwatt gives an excellent overview of avant-garde machinima works (films, often short, made within games such as Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Warcraft...
machinima.com is THE hub of the online community and Paul Marino's blog is also essential reading
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