A new idea for audience engagement
November 2, 2009 – 11:17 amIf you’ve got no time please skip down to my idea – I’d like to hear thoughts, reactions, and more ideas from you in this vein.
Hey...this film looks more like a twitter feed!
I read with interest Ted Hope’s keynote speech at Power to the Pixel in London (what Ted speech would I not read with interest?) He talks about the collapse of the institutions that once distributed independent film with optimism, and says that the revolution in film we are experiencing allows filmmakers to take control of the entire filmic process. Whether we call it film or not, this new entity we are creating does not involve a massive backstage effort to deliver a single product to eyeballs; rather, it is a collaboration with an audience that begins with the inception of an idea and does not end.
The most powerful statement: Film “is no longer is the most complete & representative art form for the world that we inhabit” and “no longer mirrors how we currently live in the world.” Remarkable and true; ten years ago, cinema was the art form to describe our world. Now, the experience of sitting in a theater feels so disconnected from everything around us.
But where does it leave us? I take the example of the Lumière Brothers’ train experiments - simple experiments in stumbling steps, which today seem painfully amateurish. They didn’t know where they were going so they had to experiment, and do so on a grand scale. It’s easier to understand that mindset now that we too don’t quite know what is at the end of this crossroads.
Ted discusses a change in our very concept of narrative – multiple endings, throughpoints, etc. – but I worry about the price of too much of this concession. There is a high value to the auteur aspect of cinema (or any art form.) I use the word more liberally than it is meant to be used – any film, even the most bland and seemingly uncreative one, is a product of thousands of hours of creative decisions. We pay for this art and direction, as well as the unique contribution of actors, sound designers, etc. If the future of film looks too much like a video game, I will stick with the old cinema. At the risk of sounding like a luddite in ten years, I ask: where would Fellini’s artistry be if we reduced his characters and sets to 3D models, slapped on some music, and allowed people to explore this world. Perhaps there is a language that can come out of video games that communicates things as powerfully, but I see them heading in the other direction.
And now to my first idea for this new cinema. It’s meant to inspire other such ideas and get people making these films; if I had access to the right technology I’d do it in a heartbeat. 3D films work because they send one image to the left eye and another to the right; with differently-made glasses (that would be quite cheap,) it would be possible to send two completely different images to different people in the audience at the same time.
What possibilities does this open up? The revelation of information is the driving force of any narrative, and another way to manipulate this flow adds another dimension to the experience. We could describe the differences between the two films and allow members to choose as they walk in. We could randomly assign glasses. The differences between the films could be as simple as angles or as complex as viewpoints. One version could be sympathetic to one character, another to a different character. One could be completely symbolic and another concrete and visual.
Imagine if we split the information necessary to understand the story fully, or completely solve a mystery, into the two views. Required an audience to talk to each other in order to understand the film, blending memory with their interpretation of events, provoking debate and discussion and making new friends. Here is one way to empower an audience without pandering
What else could we achieve with this model? What other models do we have? Let’s film some trains!
4 Trackbacks
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Would love to hear from the twitterati about my idea new kind of film exhibition, and ur ideas on same: http://bit.ly/IxpAL
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Would love to hear from the twitterati about my idea new kind of film exhibition, and ur ideas on same: http://bit.ly/IxpAL
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#futureofmovies: A new idea for audience engagement http://ow.ly/15ZJeJ
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#futureofmovies: A new idea for audience engagement http://ow.ly/15ZJeJ
