NESTA suggestions:
"How and why will your idea improve on the function i.e. what makes it better than existing techniques, services or products and what scale of improvement can your idea bring about?
How and why is this improvement important to the potential user? For example will it bring about a saving in terms of cost or time, does it offer improved reliability or enable them to comply with new legislation?"
My idea is an improved approach to interactive media because it is a simple concept which, over time, should be easier to implement given the way the Internet technology and online communities are evolving.
Like the open source movement, which has grown steadily over the last 20 years, the short term cost and time benefits are less apparent than the long term implications of adopting this idea. Most media is produced with short term objectives in mind. There is little consideration of late-adopters, backwards-compatibility and future-proofing. While this sounds like boring clinical hard work, the benefit of factoring in such things into interactive media is that the resulting work is immediately more accessible (when referenced online) and thus is capable of making stronger connections to its audience. To give an example, it is trivial to locate specialist subject material on the Internet when it has been classified correctly using best practice techniques because sophisticated 3rd party services like Google now exist to measure "relevance" and allow anyone to use them.
My idea is to align film-making with the open source movement, not superficially (as in the film Nothing So Strange) but rather at the core of each film. Saying that the final product (and/or token clips) are open source is not particularly exciting. What is exciting is the idea that I can collaborate with a far wider pool of contributors to my films if people, in turn, are producing film material (in whatever format) that I can then re-use and re-interpret legally without having to re-make it purely to satisfy archaic copyright laws.
Interactive film-making is a concept that has not managed to die despite considerable failures to-date. I believe that there is an opportunity to capture the imagination of a vast audience with a film project that tries extra hard to be accessible (in a fun way of course!)
The idea is an improvement on interactive films that were made with branching narratives. When presented with interactive possibilities in terms of pre-written narrativel, audiences often find them limiting or else they do not interact at all.
As someone who has been commissioned to write interactive narrative, I have been exposed to the stark usability issues this notion presents. My idea is to keep things really simple and rely on as many existing community dynamics and technologies as possible. I believe this approach has more chance of suceeding then second-guessing what audiences want from an interactive film. Today it is apparent that a meritocracy approach (as used to develop the Internet) works in relation to network ideas. I want to pioneer a model through which individuals can introduce their own elements, through an uncontrolled process, into a pre-existing film, enjoying building their own mixes in the process. This form of media can be enjoyed in smaller doses and be used to make cost-effective new films by sharing assets (e.g. rather than create and shoot a new explosion for each film, re-use the same one viewed from different angles, in different environments, at different speeds, with different effects, etc.).
FILM RE-RELEASES
It will be possible to re-release a re-mixable film by applying the software industry notion of a "patch". Rather than incurring the physical and environmental costs of dispatching additional physical media, the distributor could make new material available online for download into the previously bought product. While this proposal concentrates on selling the idea that the customers themselves can re-mix a film, clearly it will be possible for producers, distributors, and advertisers to so as well and charge for access to commercial MODs.
SHORT FILM RETAIL
Films exist to be seen. Since many short films are being distributed online without P2P technologies, there is an opportunity to do so and showcase how the P2P network (for legal content) is more efficient in terms of finding the best download sites and also to be able to resume downloading in the event of disconnection.
The re-mixable film concept will be easy to adapt to other films and would be a way to make work more distinguishable and applicable to more people, now that so much more media is being produced.
This will be new media that evolves form the film format to leverage online community strengths and make new connections with an audience. This is an interactive art idea that is simple and fun without huge investment. Investment in this new idea will pay off with the capability to release multiple films using a similar technology approach.
OPEN SOURCE FILM
My idea is aligned with the open source movement. I propose to use key Semantic Web technologies (XML and RDF) to publish and distribute the cinema experience ("the mix") and individual assets ("the flics") in a way that is machine-readible. This idea has been prototyped by the World-Wide Web Consortium (for personal photo collections) but never for a 35mm film. This process will make it easier for people to license and share individual bits of a film. If the film is good, it will be possible to earn money from the strength of its individual assets (e.g. the panoramic shots, the background music, the lead cartoon character's hat). The trick will be making them re-usable in practice. This is where web standards can help.
Clearly there will be a finite limit to how far the pilot film can push this idea but given the zeal with which the first Creative Commons licenced video was received (the film "Nothing So Strange") there is every reason to suggest that a high quality action sci-fi film will be received favourably.
360 degree panaroma, digitised 35mm film, audio clip and real-time 3D animation assets will be separable and re-mixable using a sample game on the DVD. Each asset will have an XML label describing its technical and creative function; machine-readible semantic information including its usage license. It is common for software products to now use XML for asset management. It is unheard of to give this open flexibility to a film audience.
The idea improves on customer relation management because it doesn't treat people as stupid.
HOLLYWOOD
Hollywood can take advantage of this idea in many ways and will do so as soon as it is proven viable. The clearest improvements over traditional processes are wide ranging. Studios could use re-mixable film processes to streamline the way in which they localise films (e.g. add dubs and subtitles). Studios could license old movies to re-mixable film developers (like this company) to re-release any film in which there was thought to be sufficient interest in sampling.
A few stand-out productions (e.g. The Lord of the Rings) are already re-using assets between the films and games. An estimate 220,000 art assets were passed from Weta Digital to Stormfront Studios, the game developer. This wealth of high quality artwork (distributed to the audience on DVD) is not readibly usable for any other purpose than conventional gameplay at present. The re-mixable film framework would support more open-ended use and have a broader appeal as a result.
TELEVISION
Now that the BBC has aligned itself with my idea, through the announcement that the entire BBC archive will be available online, TV producers and advertisers could use re-mixable film technology for asset management, ratings research, and audience participation. TV shows have already begun exploring the potential of user-contributions, particularly through web sites and tie-in games. However no show has ever been released on DVD in such a way that the audience could re-mix it.
CONSOLE PRODUCTS
An exposed technical framework for film delivery will appeal to artists who constantly seek new ways of deliver their work to an audience. Game technology is not aimed at individual artists (or indeed individuals). It is aimed at large corporations. This idea is one way in which artists unfamiliar with interactive entertainment can finally engage with it, by fiddling with an existing film and proposing new projects based on the idea.
The idea can improve diversity in popular entertainment by greatly reducing the risk of developing games. A film that goes to great lengths to allow game-play to be added later (once it is provably successful) means that game development studios can concentrate on designing gameplay without at least half their budgets being spent on art speculatively.
Game developers who have fantastic ideas for game-play but cannot afford £50-100K to spend on developing the idea have little chance of success in the current marketplace. Established companies spend millions developing game demos over several years. This is not a sustainable way to bring clean new ideas to market. It is also the opposite way to how the game industry began. People (notably programmers and musicians) learn by fiddling with existing work and rebuilding things in new ways. There is every reason to suggest that an uncluttered re-mixable framework, clean and simple enough to be widely understood, could become widely adopted, not only for education, but for game prototyping, demos, and for retro-fitting gameplay to previously released art.
The idea can lead to more diverse interactive products being developed for upcoming devices like the Sony PSX and PSP.
This is a social idea as much as a technical idea and so its success could be judged in many ways such as press coverage. However, the real improvement wil be measurable by its influence in the following areas where grassroots creativity by individuals is more applicable.
MODS
The sub-culture of people who MOD games do it for the creativity and competition, not just because they love the original games. Games that are creative tools attract people who want to express their personal creativity, often subverting the original intentions of the game. My idea goes with the flow. It works with this extremely creative energy, instead of fighting it, like certain IP owners. People who MOD games love the idea that they could MOD films. More material to play with.
New MODs, especially ones that contain new art, will improve the audience's capability for re-interpreting digitially distributed content. This improves their connection to the material, as re-interpretation always does. It makes the experience personal. The idea improves the opportunity for personal and artistic expression. This is a bonus for consumers facing a one-way barrage of increasingly cheap-to-produce media.
MACHINIMA
The idea is tailor-made for the even smaller Machinima community (who MOD games to tell stories). Machinima people struggle at present with the legality of re-using computer game art. They get an improved story-telling architecture less restricted to the 3D aesthetic of First Person Shooter games like Quake.
MOD support will be better in SANCTUARY then in a typical game. Unlike most game productions, where MOD capability is a by-product or side-though, SANCTUARY is designed specifically for this purpose. Improved efforts will be made to support this type of activity through appealing multi-faceted art assets and a story-line which hints at this kind of freedom within media (the hero has created her own virtual side-kick). It will be easy to change a few elements of the film for a laugh (as the hero has).
The idea improves the visibility of various MOD-savvy communities (Game MOD, Machinima, DJ, VJ) by promoting their work; re-mixes available from the release date. The potential of this creative medium will be clearer to non-gamers. The production brings Machinima concepts to the mainstream and makes the activity of those producing stories from game technology far more accessible.
MMORPGS
The relevence of the subject matter to a persistent online world will be an improvement over current titles like Star Wars (set in a galaxy far far away).
My feature length re-mixable film idea "ten weeks in the head bin" is a deep body of work, ideal material on which to construct a persistent world (Cityscape) in the future. Unlike the Star Wars Galaxies project, which recreates the Star Wars story universe, my films will lend themselves to be directly re-used over time through the up-front effort to build them with more future-proof technology and more accessible licensing.
Another improvement on the Star Wars Galaxies project will be consultation with non-gamer communities during design and development of the DVD. With Galaxies, the influence of hard-core gamers in online community dynamics led the publishers to overlook the needs of uninitiated users to some degree. In my idea, the large passive audience for MODs will have a better experience of interactive entertainment.
VJ/VIDEO ART
VJ confidence re. working with sampled "found footage" will improve. VJs will appreciate an interactive film format which promotes a wider availability of quality visuals legally re-usable in performance. The appeal of a re-mixable film is that this is (apart from the detail) nothing new. Users/artists/performers have always transformed and subverted existing work into new contexts. The re-mixable film idea simply increases the likelihood that digital artists will base work on top of existing work.
E.g. Salvidor Dali's scribbles over Francisco Goya's "Los Caprichos" series of prints are displayed in London alongside his "original" work.
Arguably the excesses of intellectual property law over the last decade mean that this is an ideal time to be bold and try to improve on video art in a fun and thoughtful manner.
FILM-MAKING SOFTWARE
The idea introduces a new degress of future-proofing by leveraging new open standard technology (e.g. RDF descriptions of assets embedded within the art files themselves). This binds the project to the next phase of the evolution of the Web, the Semantic Web, as described by its inventor Tim Berners-Lee.
In practical terms it means that any off-the-shelf software that can read/write XML (e.g. Final Cut Pro) could be used to re-mix the film. The chances of succeeding in trying to make an open-ended interactive experience are greatly improved. Rather than trying to re-create the world of a film inside a game as entertainment, you open the film up to the world and let entertainers in.
Posted by .M. at October 17, 2003 10:39 AM