Earlier in the year I mentioned the potential of computer gaming and digital interaction in the future. Recently Channel 5’s The Gadget Show combined several state-of-the-art technologies to produce one particular vision of what this future might be. The build took 6 weeks, an unreleased copy of Battlefield 3 (a nice little PR coup there) and £500,000. The end result went on to be a bit of a prolific meme, and temporarily shot C5’s armchair-consumer review staple into the tech world’s periphery.
The package included:
A 9m wide 360° (X-Z plane) geodesic dome with 5 HD projectors
A roller-driven omni-directional treadmill (one of a kind, produced by MSE Weibull)
10 infra-red tracking cameras, synchronised with the players orientation by APS Events and Media
X-box kinect with infrared motion tracking, hacked by Running In The Halls for detecting player crouching and jumping
It looks like there might be some issue with looking and moving in the y-axis as the top of the geodesic dome is not projected onto. No doubt also there were many other issues that were deliberately overlooked, such as switching weapons, reloading, climbing ladders, etc. but it’s still a very convincing proof of concept model.
Last night I saw The Matrix Live at the Royal Albert Hall – a showing of the original 1999 motion picture, but with a live orchestra performing the score. It was phenomenal. The NDR Pops Orchestra perfectly captured the epic melodrama of Don Davis’ original soundtrack, with it’s relentless use of violins, and the big brass/ timpani crescendos. The venue was perfect for it and the film itself had aged quite well for such a stylised piece of science fiction.
The experience was similar to a treatment of 2001: A Space Odyssey by the Philharmonia Orchestra and Philharmonia Voices, which I caught last year at the Royal Festival Hall and was absolutely bowled over by. It was brilliant and haunting and an unparalleled sensory experience. Loads of other films (Star Wars in Concert for example) have received a similar treatment, and cinematic performances have diversified in many other ways too.
This brings to mind a number of questions about what makes the cinematic experience brilliant, as it is, and when it’s appropriate to toy with the format.
It might be helpful to analyse what the two film have in common to see why they were chosen:
To start with, 2001 and The Matrix are both excellent, popular movies with incredible scores.
They have a large replay value.
They are oscar winning classics and have endured long enough to remain relevant.
They are both unashamedly ostentatious and ambitious works of cinema.
I doubt this style of adaptation would work for films that do not obey theses criteria, as good as they still might be. Shrek (2001) for example, is a perfectly good film – funny, innovative and enduring, but it probably lacks the gravitas to warrant a full blown orchestra. Though new, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is, at the time of writing, a critically acclaimed release; but to build a proximate intervention between it and the audience would be a disservice: the movie-goer has not yet seen it as it was meant to be seen, so it shouldn’t be tampered with yet.
A rough logic is beginning to fall in to place.
Already Good
Going to the cinema is a fairly unique activity: it can only really be considered a semi-social event, seeing as talking is actively discouraged. Despite this, it’s one of the most popular public leisure activities of the last century. In a way, it’s incredible to think that though we can spend most of our working day looking at screens, and have the opportunity to go home and watch anything we want off more screens from the comfort of a sofa, we consider it a treat to instead occasionally leave the house and view another, bigger screen, at a relatively premium rate. There must be good reasons for this, surely?
Progress in delivering new experiences is important, but if the following assets of cinema are undermined too far then any intervention will be rendered distracting rather than immersive; a diminishment of the cinematic experience, not an augmentation.
What makes cinema great? –
First off, there is the complete, unavoidable immersion – the film stretches to the edge of the viewer’s peripheral vision and the audio overrides all other noise.
It’s romantic – the ritual of the popcorn, the trailers, the sense of shared experience and the analytical post-drinks.
It’s an easy, comfortable and passive activity to take part in, the viewer need only sit, look and listen – sometimes that’s all we want to do.
Finally, there’s the quality, of both narrative and production. Cinema is arguably the king of story-telling and continues to remain at the very frontier of our qualitative expectations in so many respects.
I mentioned cinema performances have diversified in other ways. One group that seem to consistently nail immersive, film-centric nights are Future Cinema. As their site reads:
Future Cinema is a live events company that specialise in creating living, breathing experiences of the cinema…Future Cinema aim to bring the concept of ‘experience’ back to the cinema-going world.
Specialising in bringing events to life through a unique fusion of film, improvised performances, detailed design and interactive multimedia, Future Cinema create wholly immersive worlds that stretch the audience’s imagination and challenge their expectations.
The activities they organised for Blade Runner, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Top Gun and Watchmen have become somewhat legendary in London. Future Cinema are currently the authority on cinematic experience.
What Else?
As well as use of theatre to blur the edges of the screen, there are further tools both upcoming and established, that are employed to affect our cinema experience. 3D glasses for example, faced their first seriously commercial acid test with Avatar (2009), but seem now to be well established. The super-wide IMAX screenings are arguably even more immersive than conventional cinema and showings are often very popular. New and unusual locations for temporary cinemas are always cropping up, which provide a break of style from the multiplexes we’re used to. Olfactory stimulation (“smell-o-vision”) is a gimmick occasionally used with films for kids (see Spy Kids 4 in 4-D Aroma-scope(2011)) and in a dozen or so theme parks internationally they go a little further with a show called Pirates 4-D, a slightly cheesy film (starring Eric Idle and the late Leslie Nielsen) with “4-D effects” involving water cannons, bursts of air, vibrating seats and wires which push against the viewers feet
A friend described once how he went to the cinema to see a preview of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007), a film set on a space ship heading towards the sun. He saw it in the middle of the 2007 summer heatwave, and the cinema’s air conditioning broke down. Sweating as he sat, he didn’t know if he was a victim of a PR stunt or was suffering an onset of psychosomosis caused by the film. In any case, the experience stayed with him.
Edit (I): London Dungeon have further strained the idea of extra-“dimensional” cinema by introducing a 5D ride – ‘Vengeance‘. This includes 3D vision, a number of techniques similar to Pirates 4-D (air blasts, water sprays, vibrations etc.), and laser-sighted pistols which allow the whole audience to play a cooperative, interactive game onscreen.
Edit (II): Another phenomenon that deserves looking at is audience-initiated or cinema-facilitated activity associated with certain cult films. The Room (2003), often cited as the “best, worst film ever made” serves as a really good example. A ritual has grown around the film – the audience join in with the dialogue, greet the characters as they appear, shout satirical comments and throw plastic spoons at the screen. The effect is that one of the worst films ever produced allows for one of the most energetic and entertaining cinematic experiences possible. In a similar vein, Grease, Rocky Horror and Sound of Music are often shown in independent cinemas on special sing-a-long nights, and tend to feature a degree of cosplay.
Yesterday I had the fortune of meeting David Hego, Adam Vincent and Paul Crocker; Art Director, Animator and Lead Narrative Designer respectively at London-based Rocksteady Studios. They commented on being a little dazed, stepping out into the daylight after having spent the last two years working on the new Batman: Arkham City game (and two years on Arkham Asylum before that).
The title looks set to be one of the industry highlights of the year. Set in the “Arkham verse” of the DC Batman world, the story arc revolves around arch-criminal activities set within a Gotham City ghetto – a district re-appropriated as an enormous open-air prison (à la Escape From New York (1981)).
It was refreshing to hear professionals at the top of their game (Arkham Asylum holds a Guinness World Record for critical acclaim) discuss their experiential considerations during development. Crocker explained the central tenet of both games:
“It was designed specifically to make you feel like Batman. We looked at what the character was; we looked for key game mechanics we could extrapolate from who Batman is, and built a game around that – having fighting, detective and predatorial modes.
…Batman should own the night. We wanted you to feel that you could jump off any building and glide and really feel like him… and we built a city to do it. That’s the purpose of the city, it’s not the other way round.”
Hego agreed. Adding:
Every square meter of the game needed to be injected with Batman’s DNA, so that was the idea – to expand the world we had created in Arkham Asylum.
Adam Vincent commented:
“From the animation point of view – we make sure that the characters feel like themselves – Batman’s gotta feel like Batman and move like him – if we don’t think that it’s as ‘Batman’ as it can get at any one point, then we won’t do it.
How would Batman take down 3 thugs? You have to think about it… Your first design as an animator might not always work – or there might be problems with the actual mechanics of what you’re doing (the coders can say “you can’t really do that”). You’re always speaking to different departments.”
That might be the measure of the game. Though the project was run across a team of over a hundred, across many different departments with their own commitments, and with obligations to the fans, to DC, marketers, investors and Paul Dini (the games writer), they still collectively managed to maintain a single idea as a focal point and drive it through consistently, and that idea was creating an immersive and engaging feeling within the player – that they really are Batman.
Ben and I went to Goldsmiths College yesterday (our old alma mater) to deliver a one-day workshop to the first years studying BA Design. Our objectives were to explain the value of a creative process, experimentation, prototyping, and to assist with their personal projects. We also did an overview on the importance of context. To get everyone started, we encouraged them to focus their critical analysis skills introspectively, get out of their comfort zone, and set out to change an element of themselves.
We only had six hours with the undergrads so we tried to fit in as much as possible. We managed a primer lecture on experiential design; a series of rapid-fire developmental sketches; prototype building; testing and presentations.
We also ran a midday experiment and debate on new experiences, and challenged everyone to try something over lunchtime they’d never had before. They were then asked them to bring some of their lunch back to the studio to discuss. We got a really nice response, with about seventy different foodstuffs being returned (and some good stories). We had plans for these, more info on which is soon to follow…
The day went really well. We were both really impressed with the standard of the work that was produced, as well as the quality with which it was discussed.
