I'm Here is a 30-minute love story about the relationship between two robots living in Los Angeles. The Film was written and directed by Spike Jonze ... another example of the corporate sponsorship / branded entertainment model at work. Curious to see how this one turns out. Watch the trailer below or check the site at imheremovie.com.
Admittedly, this looks kind of freaky (a horror movie controlled by someone in the audience), but because it calls the cell phone of an actual audience member, doesn't that mean the movie will always be steered by the sort of douche bag who leaves his/her phone on in the theater? Seems like this could be a fantastic idea in more solitary confines, maybe suited to Video on Demand or some sort of online streaming.
Last Call is the first interactive horror movie in the world where the audience is able to communicate with the protagonist. A film controlled by a member of the audience, thus blurring the boundaries between game and film. Language recognition software transforms the participant's answers via mobile phone into specific instructions. A specially developed software then processes these commands and launches an appropriate follow-up scene. The dialogue between the movie's main actress and an audience member leads to a different film - and outcome - every time: sometimes with a happy end, sometimes with a more gruesome one. To participate in the adventure, audience members submit their mobile phone numbers to a speed dial code when they buy their ticket. The moment the female protagonist takes out her phone to call someone who might be able to help her, the film's controlling software contacts one of the submitted mobile phone numbers. Once the viewer picks up, he hears the actress's voice - who tells him she would be lost without him. He has to help her escape by choosing a path through the old, rundown sanatorium. Furthermore, he also decides whether she should help other victims to flee the scene -and every single choice shapes her fate: it's a matter of life and death.
13th Street Last Call is made by Jung von Matt/Spree (Idea), Film Deluxe (Film), nhb (Sound), Telenet (IVR), AixVox and Powerflasher (Software).
"Nuit Blanche explores a fleeting moment between two strangers, revealing their brief connection in a hyper real fantasy. Directed by: Arev Manoukian. Cinematographer: Arev Manoukian" Beautiful.
Revolutionary gaming with infinite possibilities: Sophisticated video games with multiple plot lines, such as Heavy Rain, are pointing the way forward for film and TV
In Bully on the Bus, the decision is yours. It says so on almost every page. You’re a kid on a bus, obviously, and there’s this bully. What do you do? Fight? Talk to the bus driver? Ask your teacher? Ignore him? The Decision Is Yours, a series published in the late 1980s for primary-school children, included titles such as Finders, Keepers? and First Day Blues. Then there was the Fighting Fantasy series, launched in 1982 with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, a sub-Tolkien romp where a roll of the die determined whether you beat a monster and turned the page to the next one. These “interactive novels” usually read as badly as you would expect, but they were about the best thing publishing had in its arsenal to counter the new demand for interactivity in its teenage, computer-game-playing audience.
Almost 30 years on, television and film are having to face the same challenge. Those teens are now in their forties, and accustomed to thinking they decide how stories end. “There is a generation that is used to fragmented game narratives, where time is chopped and spun,” says the games journalist David McCarthy. “In fact, 1960s postmodern concepts of the carved-up narrative are part of their everyday story experience.”
In a recent series of lectures, Stephen Garrett, the new visiting professor of broadcast media at Oxford University, outlined just how radical he thought the response should be. “The best stories are changing shape,” he argued in his closing talk. “The assumption in the world of TV drama has been that a possible convergence between TV drama and games would simply entail an offering of choices along the lines of: should Life on Mars’s Sam Tyler turn out to have really travelled back in time? Should the Losties get off the island? But games potentially offer something far more interesting, something much more in keeping with the storytelling traditions of the novel, of theatre, of cinema, of TV drama itself ...
"In May 2007, 42 Entertainment began a viral marketing campaign utilizing the Dark Knight's "Why So Serious?" tagline. A transmedia experiment with over 10 million participants in over 75 countries that played across hundreds of web pages, interactive games, mobile phones, print, email, real world events, video and unique collectibles." (A few years ago now, but nice to see it crystallized.)
Alternate reality games and other kinds of distributed story/play projects place heavy demands on their creators’ abilities to manage and deploy content. To meet these demands, many commercial ARG developers have built proprietary software packages that streamline and automate the process of managing and delivering content (for more on this [and much else -- including many useful resources for independents] see Christy Dena’s post, “Cross-Media Management Technologies”).
A few years ago, these kinds of systems were out of reach for most DIY designers and artists. This is no longer the case. Thanks to freely-available social media, mobile technology, and web publishing tools, ARG producers with shoestring budgets can now roll their own custom ARG management and delivery systems. About this resource
For the purposes of this post, I’ve chosen to focus on providing examples of free technologies and services that can assist designers in managing/deploying content, architecting participation, and articulating game mechanics. To this end, I’ve organized things according to six key logistical requirements designers might encounter when running an ARG; these requirements are:
* The need to organize game assets and personnel * The need to create and manage player profiles and communities * The need to manage multiple web presences and social media profiles * The need to deploy content on mobile devices * The need to analyze participation and buzz * The need to create and distribute physical artifacts
Obviously, not all ARGs are going to have every one of these needs, and some will have others that aren’t listed here. If you can think of a significant category of content-oriented requirements that should be here, please let me know in the comments and I will expand this resource accordingly. Organize game assets and personnel
Keeping track of game assets such as websites, physical installations, performers, events, story flows, and the rest of it can quickly turn into a full-time job. For a really big ARG, production management presents challenges on the same order as the logistical operations seen in feature films — and often well beyond. Here are a few tips for how indie ARG designers can keep their games organized:
* Master the whiteboard Whiteboards are perfect for organizing the sprawl of media assets that characterize story- and interaction-heavy game designs like ARGs. If you don’t have a whiteboard, you can just paint one onto any wall. Don’t forget to take a photo backup of the board after you update it in case someone stumbles in and erases your game.
* Map game assets and story elements Mind-mapping software is an indispensible companion to the whiteboard, and can be the perfect tool for planning and tracking nonlinear distributed story-game activities like ARGs. My favorite instance of this kind of software is IHMC Cmap Tools, a free program (created with US tax dollars by the good folks at DARPA) that enables you to create semantic network maps like those described by Douglas Hofstadter in his book, Godel, Escher, Bach. Cmap Tools goes a long way toward automating making such mind maps, and it enables a bunch of other neat features, too, like embedded media, linked maps, parametric layouts, and more. These charts can reveal a lot about the interconnectivity of your story-world’s various components, and are great for visualizing the different ways that players will flow through the experience you are creating.
* Production management and collaboration tools Take your pick: Zoho, Google Wave, Campfire, and Ning are all great free online collaboration apps. For media-specific pre-production and production tools, try Celtx, “the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production system. It replaces ‘paper & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.”
Over the past year or so, there has been a small but growing swell of complaints about the quality of writing in video games. Commenting on the 2008 Writer's Guild Awards for best videogame writing, Paul Hyman posed, "Awards for the best video game writing? Isn't that an oxymoron?" Adam Volk insists that "most interactive titles are written by the kind of hacks you'd find penning Full House fan-fic and scripting color commentary for American Gladiators." The lamentations go on. I even find myself criticizing games writing on occasion.
The impreciseness of the "video games writing is bad" complaint makes it difficult to suggest a solution, however. What is it, exactly, that we think is lacking: is it prose quality, good characterization, character development, good dialog, interesting themes, depth and seriousness of subject matter, or some amalgamation of the above? Nathaniel Edwards complains of a glut of games that are "juvenile, violent, and stupid," by contrast to games that harbor "important narratives." Volk, in turn, focuses on the dearth of snappy dialog, immersive narrative, and non-linear storytelling.
All of these are legitimate criticisms. Many games suffer from dull characters and limp dialog, don't take full advantage of their interactivity in telling a story, and fail to explore interesting, sophisticated themes in anywhere near the depth that they deserve.
But just because many--even most--games have bad writing, does this mean that "video games writing" as a whole is bad? As some have pointed out, the majority of writing in any medium is bound to be underwhelming. Fiction is an obvious example. From the "penny dreadfuls" to dime novels and pulp magazines, fiction has long been dominated by bad writing. The state of fiction today is improved somewhat by virtue of the fact that consumers of fiction are a smaller, more self-selecting group than in past eras, but that still doesn't keep the borderline-illiterate Dan Browns and Stephanie Meyers of the industry from leaping effortlessly onto the rungs of the bestseller lists.
Live Holographic Drumkit and Turntables test based on Chris Cairns' short film, Neurosonics Audiomedial Labs Inc. Awesome. ...
I'm Here is a 30-minute love story about the relationship between two robots living in Los Angeles. The Film was written and directed by Spike Jonze . ...
Admittedly, this looks kind of freaky (a horror movie controlled by someone in the audience), but because it calls the cell phone of an actual audienc ...
"Nuit Blanche explores a fleeting moment between two strangers, revealing their brief connection in a hyper real fantasy. Directed by: Arev Manoukian. ...