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News Alert: Future Doc project update
Boron Mon Amour- The Chemistry of Contradictions
The Boron team have been grappling with what they are calling a Chemistry of Contradictions, after broadening their thinking it’s now time to knuckle down and concoct some experiments. The contradictions will fuel their creative energy as they look to make something playful but meaningful, unique but transferable, ambitious but achievable and combines linear flow with non-linear interactions. They are exploring how you might place the viewer in the centre of their experience alluding to what Sandra Gaudenzi brought up in the last workshop, how do you create a metaphor within the interface that fits for the purpose of the project itself.
Page to Stage- Building up steam
The story for the Page to Stage team is of snatching of possible triumph from possible disaster. They have teamed up for their first meetings with the orchestra of the age of enlightenment and talked through how this is a proof of concept app. The orchestra had preconceptions that this was the development of a final polished app and expectations on recording quality. Therefore the last couple of weeks have been all about building up trust and good relationships with the performers and the people that are contributing. Beethoven’s 8th symphony is a difficult piece and the orchestra are worried about the complexities of the piece themselves.
However, this has been a really vital process in finessing relationships with a view to selecting the potential characters who might appear in the app. It is also fundamental to the documentary film making process and these people will be ambassadors for the project moving forward. After overcoming this first hurdle, the team are now set to work on the interactive elements, bringing in Ruth Farrar to help develop the binaural sound recording, which will create the point of audio for each section of the musicians. They have also brought in their developers to look at the potential for all kinds of enhanced content and instant accessing of secondary content throughout the film.
Orion: Behind the Mask- Wrap Around Inspiration
Who is the audience for the Orion film and how do we connect with them? This has been the major question for Jeanie, Judith, Tom and Sally in the early stages of planning. Jeanie has been out on the road promoting her latest film the Great Hip Hop Hoax at Stranger than Fiction Fest, Dublin, at the Screen Machine (a cinema on a lorry) and the floating cinema in London, also importantly bringing on board her fans of the Orion: Behind the Mask project. They have been communicating through Pinterest and compiling some collective inspirations towards the design and now the team are referring to this as a wrap around for the feature film Orion and as a lens that you can access the film through.
They have also had a breakthrough with how the online portal might work for pulling in people’s contributions from social media. Jeanie came across Haus Van Alijn on her recent visit to Ghent, a museum that for their recent 80s exhibition http://www.tijdvoor80.be/ they crowd sourced the whole thing through social media. More on this soon after the team explore how this might impact upon their project.
Quipu- Brainstorming for Purpose
The Quipu team are back at large together after working hard together in London, Bristol and Peru. Matthew has been in Lima in Peru for a week talking about the project with as many people as he could find, people from previous projects in the world of human rights, lawyers, taxi drivers, people in queues at football stadiums and has found that talking about sterilization is a great conversation opener. Ros on the other hand has been in Huancabamba running the workshop where women travelled from all over the region sometimes for up to 24 hours just to come along and share their stories.
It’s the end of the first phase and it’s been a success, they have tested some of their assumptions about whether people would want to share their stories and now they have created new ones. The question now is how to maintain this energy now that they are back and they can only leave the phones in Peru for stories to be shared. The phone line is still a bit difficult for the users, needs to be changed slightly for them to use in the future.
They have also been revisiting the purpose for doing this after holding a session together with Sandra Gaudenzi, more on this at Sandra’s blog here.
The other major concern looking ahead is their desire to engage a wider audience with their content and they have started talking to composers and designers to build this other experience on the web. The question remains how to combine a powerful narrative that will attract wide attention, whilst maintaining the participation and agency of the Peruvian women who are contributing their testimonies as part of our story-telling project?
The image of the Quipu is also important as a multi-layered recording device produced from threads and knots remains central to the way that they want to present the testimonies being gathered. Is there a way to make phone lines their threads, mouse-clicks their knots?
JtR125 The Mary Kelly Project- On tour
The team have been on tour to London to experience a Jack the Ripper tour first hand. This was insightful to reflect back on impressions of the tour industry and thinking about the game experience vs the tour sensation experience. This was also useful for Dave from Auroch top discover the various spaces they can use for the gameplay and the dingy and dark gothic aesthetic. They were struck by the size of the space and how close together most this has happened. I also learned recently from the Objects Sandbox Ideas Lab in Cardiff that Anthony Mandel from the Jekyll 2.0 Books and Print project is working with them on bringing out the right kind of aesthetic for their 3D game environment.
This trip helped to solidify how a game might differentiate itself from the dynamics of the tour format and move away from distributing horrific images. In the gameplay, the central character will be Mary Kelly, the last official victim of Jack the Ripper and set on the last day she was alive. The team are playing with the idea of Mary Kelly as a ghost figure, her looking at the tours… travelling in time with her character. Their aim right now is to contextualise the events, how dangerous was it for a prostitute to be on the streets in that day? How difficult was it for the police to get information from people?
They are bringing in experts on the history of prostitution and history of violent crime, which will inform the characters interactions. Right now these are likely to be mini game goal challenges and potentially satirical black comic situations to lift the harsh content. It still remains a challenge to get the balance right to make a game that is both playable but will have some critical reflection too.
The Risk Takers Survival Guide- Staying calm as they move towards a build
Matt, James and co have been planning the structure and setting parameters for their interactive experience, it is likely to be 18 mins with 8-10 mins of interaction so 30mins in total. It will be a vignette story structure with 5 chapters exploring probability, risk psychology, news values, social values and neurobiology.
On the technical side, Matt has been in contact with vimeo who will host the film and they are building the interactivity in html 5 as an overlay to the standard narrative film content. The film will remain as the backdrop during the interactive parts, so when you take your hands off the wheel the film will continue. The ethos here being, that the audience are gonna hear interactive doc and hear doc and so they will expect a film. They want to weave in the interactivity so that it is intuitive to the audience presenting a timeline to up front so they know how long the experience is likely to take.
The objective of the project remains to make an audience reflect on their risk taking, and the decision-making that accompanies it, to understand risk taking as not only undertaken by atypical individuals in strange environments, but something that shapes their everyday encounters, and in ways they may not readily perceive. James has written a brilliant concise piece here on the objectives.
Posted by Matt Davenport