Tuning Up!

I've just sent a file to Henry, our Creative Technologist, (that's what we're asked to call him, but in this world of TransMedia it seems he could as well be called FishTailed Deity; every job seems both mysterious and amorphous, but I guess that's the fun of an infant industry).

It's an assembly of very beautiful, tight  shots of musical instruments being prepared, with a soundtrack of an orchestra tuning up. It's the loading screen for our prototype, and I'm thrilled because it's enticing and gorgeous, and looks like the entrance to a magical adventure.

Once you get beyond that screen, you're definitely in prototype territory, but that's okay; it was always central to our objective to make something that wasn't offputtingly polished and intimidating; no uncommunicative genii in penguin suits, but a bunch of talented and dedicated musicians letting us into their world. Dean, our Interaction Designer, (or possibly our Beardless Unicorn), has done a great job of suiting the interface and graphical style to the jeans and polo shirts of these protagonists. There aren't a lot of buttons or elements, because it's a very simple product: it's a performance film with additional layers of audio and video, timed to appear where something interesting or remarkable is going on. The extra layers allow the user into the musicians' ears, thoughts and world, not mediated by experts or narrators, but presented directly by them to you. That's it.

But that very simplicity is its strength. When I was at film school, I had to learn, with great pain and difficulty, to reduce my scripts to a page, then a paragraph, then a sentence. If you couldn't sum it up in a sentence, you didn't understand what its essence was.

Start again. Simpllfy.

Once you have that sentence, you can build any amount of plot complexity and snappy dialogue on it. But if you start with complexity and dialogue, the whole thing loses its way. The writer is like the engineer, making a blueprint for a palace somebody else will build, landscape, decorate and furnish (and get the credit for, which is probably why I gave up screenwriting). If the palace isn't structurally sound - etc.

So we approach our launch next week with something very small and simple, but absolutely clear, and original. And something which could be applied to any performance in any medium, pretty much. I have loads of ideas for how it might work - let's hope we get the chance to realise them.

The orchestra is tuning up...