Thursday 26 January 2012

THRESHOLD CONCEPTS - interactivity

 Task1:
Write down all the elements you as a viewer need to enjoy a film?

  1. I enjoy a sense of thrill and emersiveness very much. 
  2. Unlike many other viewers I don't enjoy open endings. Conclusion is crucial for a good film to be good. I can cope with it being slightly open so that you could guess the ending of some back-story. It is something like a conclusive ending but still giving you a bit to think about.
  3. A character that I can relate to, or a believable one who could make me fell his emotions as my own.
  4. Visuals are a very powerful tool so I expect a good movie having great visual style. Not the CGI or stunts, but the artistic style of it: distinctive colors, props, etc.
  5. A story with twists and turns. Its hard to enjoy a story without a getting a thrill of whats going to happen next.
 Task2:
 Devise a plot that tries to introduce these elements through a series of scenes. Come up with 
four scenes minimum
 What storytelling techniques would you need to employ to get the sense of enjoyment if you can't 
determine how the user experiences the scenes?
 How much control do you retain? How much do you give away? 

                   One of my old ideas. The film would be based in the first years of 2000's somewhere in Mid. or Eastern Europe when many lives have just been ruined and some just established by recessions and constant change of governments. People knew a lot about the worlds  newest technologies but not many had them in their homes, so eye to eye interactions were the main method of communication. Sorry for saying this as if these parts of the Western World were in the dark ages at those times, but I just want you to imagine the grey-ish, brown-ish colors of the indoors and the bright green, blue and gold of the outdoors. Yet not in this first scene.
          
           Scene one is a slow-motion scene of a young man falling. All you see is him and the sky. His face is pale and there is no emotion whatsoever. The voice-over, which is his voice, explains a situation as highly depressing and quite bad. He invites us to look onto some moments of his life to explain the whole falling situation.
          Scene two is a prequel to scene one and shows him arguing with his single mom on very high tones and what it tells us that he is being oppressed with no good reason. She blames him with everything there is to blame.
            Scene three is him explaining something to his friend very persuasively, but the lad will not listen. There might be a back-plot to this story because you can shift the last two scene and the following one around, maybe making it all interactive, putting some explanations that are presented in a form of the first scene.
         Scene four would be of him and his girlfriend talking, trying to figure things out but it obviously doesn't work out and she leaves. Again, this can be turned into an interactive experience because all these people could be presented as his last resort, the last ones he could trust. The main thing is that however you change their place, there is no way you can affect the main plot, which is...
          Scene five is him making a conclusion of everything that we saw and basically ending his own life by falling to his death... But thats what the viewer thinks. He is not actually a pushed around emo kid. The next image we see is the water and a body that drops in it. We can see someone swimming to the sunlight and then we see him on the surface smiling. All those people are around him, in appropriate places of course (like his Mom and his girlfriend both with him in the lake all wearing clothes is a bit less believable.)
           Scene six is when he explains his views on the world. He says that (depending on what happened in the prequels) he is being forgiving or the people are forgiving him... blah blah, he understood the meaning of life. Something like that... Sunshine, love and credits.
           I do love happy endings. 

 As of directors control, this would be a movie a person creates for himself (if its interactive) but there surely would be a central path to always refer to.

 Thank you for reading this far, have a great day,
Cheers.
Ed.

P.s. Sorry for the layout, Bloggers' been buggy lately.




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