April 01, 2006
GDC case study on LucasArts and ILM convergence
ZENO, the proprietary unified asset management pipeline put in place for LucasArts and ILM is proving a success despite the cultural gaps, according to a lecture given at GDC this year.
IGN: GDC 06: LucasArts and ILM: A Case Study in the Convergence of Games and Film
March 27, 2006
We Media Global Forum
I've been offered and accepted a Fellowship place at the We Media Global Forum, at the BBC and Reuters in London, May 3-4,2006.
It will bring together about 250 trailblazers of the connected society - the thinkers, innovators, investors, executives and activists seeking to tap the potential of digital networks connecting people everywhere - for the purpose of uncovering, exploring and generating new ideas, products, services, policies or relationships that uncover and harness the power of mass collaboration.
http://www.mediacenterblog.org/we_media_global_forum/
No doubt I'll be posting updates from what looks to be an interesting network.
Morph-The Media Center conversation has already started.
February 10, 2006
Jeff Veen talk
Jeff Veen gave a good talk on Web 2.0 at the Digital Futures conference. Here are his slides.
He talked about how boom and bust cycles have been going on for centures. E.g. tulips, steam trains and Tokyo land speculation, akong with dotcom bubbles all fall into a similar pattern.
He spoke of the Web 2.0 hype essentially as a promising sign that we now have more of an Internet platform we can build on.
His user interface approach was all about:
* Usability
* Typography
* Wireframing (making a skeleton)
* Structure (information architecture)
* Scope (what we do)
* Strategy (what organisations do)
He spoke of conversations opposed to broadcasting.
It's all about TRUST. Users as peers. Users in control of data. People owning data.
First impressions are EVERYTHING. First 1/20th of a second impression formed is the important one.
* Visual appeal
* Cognition & Emotion
* The Halo Effect
Persuasive Technology - a tool for deception?
Emotional Design.
The Hype Machine - audio blog aggregator
He gave some signs of trust
* tag clouds
* colour (yellowing of W3C pages)
* vouching clusters (Technorati)
* attribution (academic peer review)
October 16, 2005
The Director's Half-Cut
A new monthly movie-themed club night opens in Kennington in London Oct 27 "dedicated to bringing the essence of the movies into a 3-D environment. Promising short films, live music, soundtracks, theatre, djs, comedies and prizes. Excuse them the horribly inaccessible website which is the essence of bad web design (all key info in a flash movie) but looks intriguing otherwise.
October 05, 2005
Open Congress
The Tate Britain, London is hosting an event this weekend on how open-source inspired methods can transform art and its institutions.
November 22, 2004
CUT/Film as Found Object
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), North Miami currently has an exhibition, CUT/Film as Found Object, in which artists re-work film and television.
"In this innovative installation of large-scale video projections artists manipulate film and television in ways that make the familiar unfamiliar, and provide the viewer the opportunity to experience a new reality."
May 09, 2004
Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy
I was recently given a copy of this booklet which summarised the positions of various speakers at a Cambridge conference produced by the UK Arts Council in 2001.
http://www.acadeuro.org/downloads/CODE_book.pdf
E.g. Richard Stallman proposes re-categorisation of work into three to determine what is modifiable.
- Functional works to get a job done (recipes, computer programs (FREELY MODIFIABLE)
- Works of personal expression that state someone's views (memoirs, scientific papers) (MODIFYING IS FALSIFYING AND WRONG)
- Works that are aesthetic and entertaining in themselves. (COMPLEX, NO FIRM VIEWS).
Having focused on the third camp for the last few years I think it is fascinating how little this view takes into account the blending of forms. What about entertaining memoirs? Film adaptions? Packages of technical documentation and a reader that displays them?
No having any firmer views on the "right" way to mandate modification laws, I do know what I WANT to do. I want the right to give things away and still earn a living as an artist. I want to be able to produce functional works, works of personal expression and purely aesthetic/entertaining works without controversy. I do not want to be prevented from doing this by stifling bureaucracy and corporate muscle purely because our tastes, values and experience differ.
The last line of Richard's blurb is the easiest of his sentiments to agree with - "Let's try common-sense." Yet even there I feel compelled to qualify it. Common-sense is not universally accessible. We are human beings after all.
February 24, 2004
Neuro
"From February 26th to 29th young artists, filmmakers, musicians, theorists and activists from all over Europe and many other parts of the world will meet at the Muffathalle in Munich for a number of events, speeches, discussions, presentations, performances, concerts and actions reflecting the pulse of the age."
January 23, 2004
BAFTA Interactive Festival events
The BAFTA Interactive Festival includes three full days of events (17 - 19 February) culminating in the BAFTA Interactive Awards on the 19th Feb and the BAFTA Game Awards on the 25th Feb.
November 09, 2003
October 21, 2003
iTV over IP seminar
"Following a very successful conference on the theme last June, the National Computing Centre plan to run a series of events which respond to people's interests in ICT and regeneration. The first of these will be in November on the use of local TV (interactive digital TV and video streamed over the internet) in regeneration. We expect this to be relevant to people working in regeneration whether on the ground or at a strategic level, whether technical or community focussed, whether in the public, private or voluntary sector . The attached link should provide full information."
October 06, 2003
THE SHORT CRAP FILM FESTIVAL
Here's for indie distribution. Even the web site is crap...
"A CALL FOR ENTRIES
… For the past two years we have held the festival at ‘The Zoo’ in Fortitude Valley Queensland, in 2004 though, we shall be taking the festival to many other towns around Australia in a Short Crap National Competition.
The festival will start in Brisbane and then travel for about 3 weeks. Each town will vote on a winner, the winner for that evening will then be announced and awarded many goodies. On the final evening we shall award the national winner simply by adding up all of the votes taken from each town. Wow!
The festival is looking for films of a comedic nature, so if your film has made people, or even a person laugh, then please feel free to send it along.
This is not a festival about mocking short works, but rather to provide a further life for them and to recognize potential talent working underground within the Australian & International community. Plus to have fun!
Some Short Crap Statistics:
Length - Under 10 minutes, films must be no more then 3 years old
Genre: - Laughable
Format - Please send only VHS PAL for previewing.
Entry Fee - Between AU $9 - $12.50, you decide!
Deadline - July 15th, 2004
Address - Fully Flared Films
ATTN: Kelly West
The Chocolate Factory
144 Cleveland St. Chippendale, NSW 2008, Australia
For further details and an entry form please contact Fully Flared Films on
shortcrap@fullyflared.com – as we become more in-touch with this modern world,
entry forms shall be available from our website www.fullyflared.com – under
construction.
*Crap - defined - there are many definitions of what crap is; vulgar slang -
something which is of poor quality, nonsense, rubbish or excrement.
The definition of Crap for this festival is the following: What could be one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure; what might not meet the standards of some meets the standards of others; What might not work in some ways works in others; Australian humour, not funny to some, hilarious to others!"
September 17, 2003
Ars Electronica
Julie Freeman sends in this write-up on this year's Ars Electronica.
"I've just returned from Ars Electronica in Linz. It was very good - met some interesting people and once the networking b*llox was out of the way some really nice people.
On the whole it was pretty inspiring - a lot of work was kinda yeah, yeah, seen it, done it, but some really stood out. Also it was good to see that a lot of work is being developed in Max which bodes well for my project.
These guys: http://www.maywadenki.com were one of the stars of the show - very funny, very clever, very nonsensical. This work was a stunner - Protrude, Flow (Ars review) a liquid sculpture, always changing and reacting to the sound around and about the exhibit. I'd have loved to see the original dining table piece. the liquid looked like black oil, it was some mad iron powder dissolved in water or oil or something. amazingly nice. otherwise - lots of projected stuff, lots of video analysis. and an _excellent_ interactive performance called Messa di Voce by Tmema which i think you would love.
Also found out about this - kind of a Max look-alike... it's not Mac based, it's a beta, it's a bit buggy but interesting nonetheless. They seem to be addressing some Max weaknesses - real time issues etc.
It also started me thinking about the acceptability levels of using technology in conferences - Linz was chock full of early adopters and yet still phones rang in presentations (and yes even vibrations are audible on a wooden floor). The laptop posse were surfing the wireless network (checking references as soon as they were spoken, take heed presenters - check your facts) or coding their projects while speakers were talking. Keeping your audience engaged is hard enough at the end of a day of pontificating but with the added competition of the Internet and personal email boxes it just got harder."
June 09, 2003
Webby Awards 2003 winners
The Webbys Awards will never win any prizes for unbiased judging, this is a US event covering the US web (with a sprinkling of UK sites) but what it does it does well. The Webby Awards: 2003 winners and nominations is a worthwhile snapshot of the web. MovableType, the engine behind thequality.com blogs won the Best Practice category.
March 10, 2003
Stelarc: The Prosthetic Head
Three more days to catch Stelarc: The Prosthetic Head at the ICA in London. The head is a 3D avatar, featuring a brain by alicebot, IBM text-to-speech, and text-to-animation by eyematic.
Free : with day membership
November 22, 2002
The Rosetta Project
Another milestone for open source software? The ZOPE powered Rosetta language archive (1445 languages and counting at ) goes into space Jan 8. The project is manufacturing analogue content that may just last the test of time.
Jim Mason, Project Director, of the Rosetta Projct writes:
the european space agency has asked long now to contribute a rosetta
language archive disk for their next mission to the comet p/wirtanen. this
is a 9 year research mission to go land on a comet way out in the boonies of
the solar system to take "soil" samples to study early solar system
formation. they want the rosetta disk as an icon of the societies that sent
the craft and also a sort of mythic frame for the elaboration of the
scientific genesis story that is the point of the mission. (remember, one
of the ten descriptive components of the rosetta disk is parallel
translations of genesis ch 1-3 in 1000 languages)
they are mounting the disk on the vehicle nov 18 at the esa launch facility
in french guiana and there is a big press hoo haa around this. it launches
on jan 8th. they've invited me to go for the press event, and i of course
did not argue too much. so this thursday i'm leaving on a 10 day trip to
french guiana. i leave on the 14th and return on the 23rd.
i admit to this being a little exciting for me. the invitation literally
fell out of the sky, unexpectedly. who would have guessed?
November 11, 2002
Synthesising Reality
This London event, on 26 November, focuses on VR and real-time 3D applications.
Synthesising Reality showcases a rich and varied mix of artistic, commercial and academic projects which have been developed with real time 3d applications and visual simulation software.
August 21, 2002
Ars Electronica
New Activism in Plugged and Unplugged worlds looks to be an interesting component of this year's Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.
August 03, 2002
SIGGRAPH report
SIGGRAPH 2002 was held in San Antonio, Texas, last week. The numbers were far smaller than previous years and there didn't seem to be a huge amount of innovation in the trade show. Once again, photo-realism seemed to be the goal of most products on display. What you do with all this was less talked about but there were some good exceptions.
SIGGRAPH in Texas wasn't all about meat but it did feature heavily in advertising. *gulp*
Highlights of the week:
The course on interactive multimodel media systems design given by the Human-Computer Interaction group at the University of British Columbia. They talk about vision is constructed and how cognitive science is unravelling how we perceive things. Wait till Marketing get a load of this.
The Making of Spiderman session. OK I'm a sucker but I've seen that ending sequence almost fifty times I reckon now and I still think it's cool. Cool is not a word I usually feel comfortable about using around SIGGRAPH but the artistry that went into this high end production was fascinating to watch.
The U.S. army blew our minds with their beaming pride over America's Army. Educating the world as to what it's like to be in the army. Perform well in 32 man online squad combat and the recruiters will love you. You might just get yerself a placement. The course on this project, and scalable MMPGs in general, by the Moves Institute was illuminating to say the least.
Disney showed off their Digital Human Project and had a plastic looking actor alongside his identical digital double. Of course, they then had the real actor (we assume he was real) come in and meet his double, about twenty years younger.
A refreshingly not technical course on Imagery and Symbology was startlingly upgraded to a Cinematrix interactive cinema experiment one afternoon. You held a paddle with red and green panels on either side and saw yourself as a dot onscreen along with all the other audience dots. Flying a plane, mexican waves, the creative possibilities were endless.
Procedural modelling and animation is clearly the future of visualisation and was on everyone's lips. Procedural cities, sculptures, landscapes. SideEffects announced a free version of their procedural software Houdini while Ken Perlin demonstrated the online possibilities in his "Web as Procedural Sketchbook" course.
Interactive fiction was represented by the Facade project - a highly mathematical approach to plot and character via AI routes. The demo was more intellectual than emotional but compelling nonetheless. The system uses AI to recognise story arcs and sequence dramatic beats through a natural language interface. The team, including the man behind Catz and Dogz, will also be releasing ABL - a language for reactive planning interfaces and AI structures for crafting personality. One to look out for...
Will Wright, creator of The Sims, spoke at length about "possibility space" as the landscape of gaming, the idea of 'story recognition' (where the game identifies narrative elements driven by the user) and how successful games provide participants with a way to map their own experience onto the game itself.
A panel on the future of gaming was fascinating with a few speakers referring to an ecology of media in passing, though none thought to expand on their views. Game designers spoke of the need to start with the player experience, rather than with a notion of story or character sketch. Will Wright's "big three" for the future of gaming were METRICS, PLAYER CONTENT, and CONNECTIVITY. The notion was raised that The Matrix is purely a prequel to The Matrix MMPG. The notion of operating "under the cultural radar" was liberating.
Other mentions of note, PingID - a public domain identity management system, TextArc - a visualisation system for text, and the Virtual Terrain Project - free tools for procedural scene construction.
SPIDERMAN
Sometimes cool is not so cool, especially when it feels like you're at a rendering orgy for its own sake. As far as other entries to the special effects arena this year, this was one of the big ones and it was heartening to hear how the guys (perhaps a few women but they didn't get to speak) threw themselves into upping the ante with visual effects and managed to inject a sense of humour into their presentation of it. The "not allowed to tape" 2hr presentation focused on the building of a virtual New York from photographs, painstakeningly stitched together. You've really got to wonder what kind of detail they put into films these days for the benefit of the cast and crew. Not unlike, easter eggs in software, the artists showed considerable pride in showing how that window Spiderman zooms past for, ooh maybe half a second, looks into someone's living room with a Kenny Rodgers style framed photograph of the director. Oh, and they had to reverse every street sign and marking on the left side of the street because, after all, they filmed this in a one-way street in L.A. not Manhattan. The final sequence was shot post-Sept 11 with hired N.Y. cabs in downtown LA. The shot of Spiderman swinging low between two cars and then back up into the sky was achieved using a camera flying down a cable slung between two cabs.
Interesting stuff also with the thought processes going into creating the first spider-sense sequence in the school corridor. They used young mime artists in the scene to hold poses, as in a freeze frame, while the camera tracked around the space, overlaid with CG elements.
THE SIMS
Will Wright was the speaker I kept hearing at the conference. He expressed little enthusiasm for non-linear storytelling, describing a linear story as 'a ride on rails'. Will produced an incredible wealth of statistics about The Sims usage showing the success of a meta-game, where players expand out to other avenues uncontrolled by the game designer. He positioned film and game at opposite axis. He spoke of an appeal stretching from empathy (to a film) to agency (in a game) without seeking to muddy the waters.
He used The Truman Show as an analogy of how games can provide freedom of movement and a story, in hindsight.
He offered a blueprint for dynamic story representation:
STORY - INPUT - VISION.
He divided presentation management into
1) Parsing
2) Presentation
3) Influence
4) Replay
OTHER REPORTS
Why take my word for it? Also see Hyperfiction.org, the movie zone, and SIGGRAPH itself (including a mention of my little flic - HfC).
July 17, 2002
Incubation conference
Back from Incubation, an online writing conference in Nottingham. It was really worthwhile hearing from a range of published authors, academics, and even the odd developer (though not as odd as some of those at more technical conferences).
The most interesting presentation I saw was by Jeremy Diggle who discussed a new online novel - The Global Conservator (marked for September release), in which a goddess from Teutonic myth, airships and salmon fishing combined in particularily compelling fashion.
Kate Pullinger had some interesting things to say about interactive writing, from the perspective of an established print-based author. She has two weblogs.
Martin Rieser presented a selection of his Director multimedia work and his latest book, what seems to be a massively fascinating reference (with DVD included) - The New Screen Media.
Bonnie O'Neill, a screenwriter, spoke about Joseph Campbell and played a section of video interview in which Campbell identifies inherent symbolism within the skyline of New York, arguing for a 'society of the planet'.