Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Digital Media Commission

Text File | 1994-11-11 | 40KB | 721 lines

Written July 23, 1994 by <[e-mail]> in peg:gen.cyberculture

"Digital Media Commission: D.Cox, F.

Morphing the Oz Indie Film Scene Paradigm, or, Why we need the Digital Media
Commission First published in FILMNEWS, June 1994

The extraordinary increase in the development and availability of CD ROM drive
systems worldwide provide new avenues for the work of Australia's independent
film and video community.

Real work.

There is much hype about *interactivity* and *multimedia* but if carefully
examined, digital image and sound manipulation actually represents the bulk of
current media production in Australia.

As a film maker engaged also as a producer in the world of video games, I am
conscious of the fact that to date, the worlds of software publication and motion
picture/video production are still largely culturally mutually exclusive in the
eyes of most of those who work in either domain in Australia.

But this is changing, and fast.

KodakUs Cineon Effects system, developed largely in Australia demonstrates
AustraliaUs role in the convergence of technologies. Cineon is a commercially
available means to transfer film to data for manipulation, then back to film
again. Remove or add elements to a scene, touch up the colours, remove the
distant jumbo from your period film. Add the T-Rex.

Beam Software in South Melbourne are commercial producers of Sega and Nintendo
games for the US and European market. Many of the games are film tie-ins. These
include Star Wars, The Hunt for Red October and Back to the Future. Beam employs
65 people full time. Most of the software tools for game development are
engineered in-house. The company is 15 years old. We have been offered by Film
Victoria finance to develop our first CD ROM titles.

This fact is very, very significant. It is a recognition by government bodies
normally in the business of providing money to film and video makers that
multimedia is significant, is here, and requires active financial support. Not
instead of finance to film and video, but alongside and in concert with. This
latter point is crucial to understand and points the way for the evolution of
AustraliaUs next major cultural step into the information era.

AustraliaUs independent film scene has a long 100 year histoyear! Graduates this
year have had offers for work before the course has even begun!

This is a real industry. With real growth and promise. One which can benefit
directly from the contribution of AustraliaUs existing film and video community.

Yet no Multimedia courses are offered within the mainstream channels of
Australia's major Film and Television Schools, the VCA or the AFTRS.

Ponderous, isn't it?

Ne'er the Twain Shall Meet, Until Now.

Film is a linear media. Film organises sequential pictures as gelatin layers
strips of plastic photo-chemically. The photochemical-optical approach which
cinema uses has remained unchanged for around 100 years now. This is not an
inherently bad thing, on the contrary. New technologies are not inherently better
or worse than older relatives.

Digital media treat all in Knowing about ourselves, what we want, what we enjoy
about the ideas we have and those of others throughout history. These new media
have entered our lives almost without warning.

In terms of how the U.S. film and software worlds are converging, Jim Cameron and
Stan WinstonUs company Digital Domain represents the attempt by Hollywood to
integrate the benefits of digital technology into the actual film production
process instead of marginalising it to the special effects realm, a la Terminator
2 and Jurassic Park. The problems faced here apart from the obvious technical
ones though, again, are largely cultural.

The software industry is, in contrast to the film world, characterised by the
conventions of print/publishing and often, those of engineering an, the act of
creation is often seen to lie in the actual physical translation of a concept
into code. The screenplay and the RproductS in terms of process are the same
document.

The tools used to create the product (i.e. the computer) are often also the
medium used by the audience, or consumer.

As in Lumier's day, the camera and the projector are the same device.

Many of the earliest software houses began publishing books, in print. Those who
remember the early eighties home computer game era will remember having to type
in line by line the code which would eventually result in the final game. If you
made a mistake you had to go through the whole program and find the anomaly.

You almost had to be a programmer to play computer games on your own machine,
unless it was an Atari console, using cartridges. I used to convince myself that
a games machine was too limited: after all you could *only play games* on an
Atari. A simple 64K computer allowed you write and run simple programs in Basic.

The code was listed in the pages of magazines catering for the users of the
various machines: the Commodore 64, the Acorn Electron, the Micro Bee ( the
Australian pc). To save the code, one used a cassette player. To load a game
already stored as data on a cassette you would load it in the tape player, set
the volume dial to just the right setting, tell your computer to *load* and hit
*Play*. With luck, the game would load. More often than not, you would get three
thirds through, and the signal would break up and you would have to start again.

The fact was that as a game or computer enthusiast you had to know roughly about
the basic relationship between the hardware and the *idea* or *soft* ware which
was either printed for direct transcription, or stored on magnetic media. But the
results were moving pictures, with sound and interactivity.

In practical terms by analogy, this was the equivalent of having to know how to
print, process and prepare motion picture film for viewing, then how to thread a
projector and set up the screening room every time you wanted to watch a movie at
home.

Today computer storage media are more efficient. Disk, eprom chip (for game
console cartridges) and CD ROM. The computers are faster, cheaper and employ
increasingly standardised operating systems.

CD ROMs are very cheap to manufacture, (around 2 or 3 dollars U.S.) and with the
right compression algorithms, can store up to a feature filmUs duration of
full-motion video, games or any other digital data.

Today, computer games are bigger in commercial terms than motion pictures. They
made more money than all the Hollywood movies combined in 1992 and 1993.

Games are not movies. But they are media. With moving pictures, sound and, most
significantly, the element which constantly defies coherent description:
interactivity. Involvement. Game play.

Why should film makers and video makers in Australia even consider the digital
media? Because even in terms of the one-way linear structure film and video
employ, computers enable increasingly, cheap and efficient methods of post
production, editing , reuse and transmittable communication of material.

Low end multimedia authoring tools like Macro mind Director and HyperCard enable
the final audience to engage in some involvement in the pictures and sounds.
Commercial video games represent one extreme: simple graphics but high levels of
movement and interactivity (just watch Sonic the Hedgehog on the screens next
time you are at the Department store) or in new ways.

No one thinks twice about using word processing instead of typing for writing
screenplays and AFC applications. Why? Because cutting and pasting text makes
what you write semi interactive. You see new combinations in the ideas on the
screen and you can act on the combinations.

Drag. Click. Drag. Click.

Imagery and sound can be treated in the same way. Pick it up. Put it there.
Combine it with this. Let's hear it with that.

If you assume the final work is not to be a beginning to end linear film, you can
make the same digital information available as a game, a non linear book, or a
file for transmission to someone else you want to work with it.

Using 3D modelling programs like AutodeskUs *3D Studio* it is possible to build
otherwise incredibly expensive and elaborate sets and objects for use in films,
render them with realistic surfaces, then light them using tools which
deliberately employ film/theatre metaphors. Inserting actors into these
environments can be achieved by videotaping them acting against a blue screen In
post production. Electronic colour separation can enable the placing of the
actors in the *sets*. The composite is dubbed to tape. The resolution is
relatively low by Hollywood standards, but the results are great for the cost.
The PC CD ROM game *Return to Zork* was done in this way.

We have yet in Australia to even scratch the surface of this new territory.

Passive Audience: Not! on of RaudienceS. Broadcast itself is no longer a suitable
paradigm to describe the relationship of the network user to the material made
use of by someone with a computer and a modem.

Instead, the user is a wired online active participant. Like using the phone as
just a phone, a person feels a part of a shared space, a *cyber* (the word
derives from the Greek Kyber, to navigate) space where the notion of
participation over a network defines the circumstances of engagement with others
also online.

The actual definition of identity when online is problematic, to say the least.
*Where* and *who* you are on the net is a legal and personal twilight zone, not
yet really understood even by those who are regular network users. This is still
something of a frontier, where personal ethics govern a parallel society. One yet
to feel the full weight of the effect of railroads and telegraphs and lawmen
and... highway construction. Those who want something not yet broken to be
quickly fixed will not have to wait long, one feels.

The Death of Geography.

When the phone melts into the computer, you don't need to be anywhere specific
for the digital work to be made usable, except near the phone. The global network
of government and academic network servers known as the Internet allows film
script writers to share text over distances of thousands of miles. It also allows
editors and sound engineers to share files and work collaboratively when
separated by distance.

No wonder Kerry Packer just bought 40% of Optus! Telecommunications and media are
more or less the same entity now.

Games and Multimedia are Art Forms, like Film and Video.

They grow and change with the technology around them. When film makers learn of
the potential of digital media, it is most often to seek ways to consolidate
these advantages into the existing paradigm of film making as it has been proven
and understood until now. This attitude is understandable, but in many ways quite
limited.

The notion of exploring the possibilities of computer media for its own sake is
seldom a path seen appropriate to many working in linear media forms. These are
cultural barriers, borne from the sheer newness of the tools, technologies and
skills which accompany them.

The computer world too has its prejudices: how can the model of film making fit
into the often highly mythologised and specialised territory of the software
engineer? The meeting point lies along the path of what constitutes innovative
and original work, no matter what the technological apparatus used, and the
preconceptions of those who work within them.

Both make use of moving pictures, sound, storytelling but games and interactives
often involve the notion of difficulty and achievement. Often works explore the
textual complexities of digital production itself, and place these issues
literally in the hands of the audience.

The index of a multimedia titles success can sometimes be measured by the level
of engagement it offers the player/user/audience. Innovation and newness are the
bywords of a classic multimedia production. Great interactives are usually
inherently exploratory, invite the user to solve puzzles, overcome obstacles, and
generally actively engage in the process of experiencing the world on the screen.

Women are at the Forefront of Multimedia in Australia.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Australian innovators in the field currently are made up
largely of women. Linda Dement's 'Typhoid Mary' offers an on screen journey into
the tortured body and soul of a digitised female terrain. Made available for
playing at the recent MIMA event, Women and New Imaging Technologies, this
interactive attracted much attention. The cut and bruised digitised images of
Typhoid MaryUs body is intercut with witty and ironic and utterly devastating
text.

The work engages the participant in a vivid and confronting exploration of a mass
of cut up and stitched together bits of person. The use of interactivity drives
home without compromise the body as a site for discourse about technology,
gender, and politics. The audience, through pointing and clicking is implicated
in the political process of a corporeal uncovering of abuse. Unforgettable.

SydneyUs Cyberfeminist collectiveUs VNS Matrix's *All New Gen* demonstrates a
delicious inversion and subversion of standard video game premise of the player
as 1st person empowered lone avenger. Here the hero helps a cyberfeminist
heroine, Gen, who can mutate into different forms. Gen must hack the system of
patriarchal power in society, then confront *Big Daddy Mainframe* - a perfect
metaphor for the nexus of male technocracy and international commerce.

This work embeds a critique of technology within technology itself. An inversion
and renegotiation of startling cultural political insight. The potential for
vivid hybridisation and fusion of the political with the technological has few
parallels in linear media. With computers, the message is often very much the
medium, and the social conditions which serve to isolate computers from creative
people are automatically challenged when accepted boundaries are crossed, and the
work is released. Liberated from the unspoken but familiar cultural constraints
that define the commercial, orthodox, sexist daggy computer mainstream, works
like *All new Gen* seek to problematise the gendered male culture of the video
game. And succeed.

Ruth Luxford's *The Fridge* (Swinburne Centre for New Media 1993) uses Macro Mind
Director multimedia authoring to present the user with a refrigerator. By
clicking on the magnets on the door and then the contents of the fridge,
unexpected sequences unfold, with accompanying sounds. The sheer pleasure of
inhabiting a fridge with familiar products all right there to be interacted with
cannot be easily described. The joy comes from the engagement afforded by the
medium.

Discovery and play, very basic human needs are entertained in this deceptively
simple scene. Luxford is, significantly, a trained industrial engineer. She both
writes code and also devises compelling interactive scenarios. Like Jane
CampionUs RPassionless MomentsS the transcendent humour of the banal is
celebrated for its own sake in this interactive setting made significant by
familiarity.

3D graphics artists Moira Corby and Faye Maxwell create high end images using
high end workstations at places like RMITUs very high end Centre for Advanced
Computer Graphics. *Networld* by Fay Maxwell is a virtual space where organic
matter pulses convincingly amid other forms. The notion of interior and exterior
is explored for its own sake, with sensational soundtrack music making the whole
ensemble live in ways very digital, and very female.

Moira CorbyUs background in theatre and sculpture is evident in the Gothic
Archways of *My Memory, your Past* animation. Here the full extent of the medium
of 3D on Silicon Graphics machines is presented with a monumental celebration of
the means of production. Gaining access to the machines and securing Film
Commission finance for its production were as much a part of the story of the
film as the technical process. Corby is a significant force in new media
production and her work owes much to a long term dedication to an academic
concern with what it means to use hi tech to make high art. This automatic
association of *high end* with legitimate art I find somewhat problematic, but in
this case the tools reflect the modus operandi of the artistUs background where
megabuck systems are explored for their own sake. The act of doing forms the
philosophy of the artwork.

In an interview with Lisa Logan for MESH magazine, Corby explains:

'It's such an accelerated learning curve when you first tap into that space and
you're totally immersed in it. It is like a new world and you come into contact
with a lot of people from different disciplines and with different expertise. You
realise you can convey your ideas to technicians and computer programmers and
that they also get things from you. For me art is not just about product, its
about process.'

Kim Bounds *Autarky* (Swinburne Centre for New Media 1993) employs a Molotov
Cocktail of digital design and image/sound processing techniques to describe a
libertarian cyberfeminist state of mind and body. Autarky is a manifesto. It
advocates a streetwise attitude to technology and culture which empowers the
female holder. It is also something of a rallying call for women to seize the
means of communication.

BoundUs background is commercial design, film making and in-store presentation
displays.

*Autarky* itself is linear, that is you sit and watch it run from start to
finish. But it employs the use of a range of 3D and 2D computer graphics tools
for the imagery itself, much scanned in and reworked hi 8 and 16mm with typeset
fonts, and has been edited with non linear tools. The frame accuracy of non
linear editing enables a flashing, patterned treatment of imagery unique to the
medium, and exploited to the maximum in *Autarky*. As data, the work can be
uploaded to someone overseas over the Internet or to a Bulletin board system.

As data, digital films, videos, games and programmes can be sent anywhere, over
high speed modem or the Internet almost instantaneously.

Unsurprisingly, Kim Bounds next big work will emphasise online real time
juxtaposition of materials on the Net with live performance. This fuses 1990s
multimedia with the 1970s idea of multi-media which then described the
combination of performance art with other elements like music, tape, film, and
light shows: a la Laurie Anderson.

The great thing here is that the technologies of communications are finding
expression in film, theatre and performance. Time based arts when employing
modems *on stage* extend the performance space to include the global
communication matrix, where time zones and distance normally separate whole
populations.

By channelling pictures and sound over the net during live performances, the
geographic location of performances like Andrew GartonUs pivotal landmark
Brisbane Multimedia Opera *The Black Harlequin* are ushered into being. *The
Black Harlequin* due for Melbourne in 1995 uses onstage modem linked machines to
others elsewhere in the globe in different time zones. Text and simple imagery is
pumped to the onstage RHarlequinS audience, who in response can channel pictures
and sound back into cyberspace.

Troy InnocentUs RIdea>On!S is an interactive virtual point and click universe,
where the icons used to navigate through a surreal landscape of tin-toy and
plastic creatures form part of the terrain itself. The user interface, therefore,
is as much the hub of the work as the domains one enters by employing it. This
blurring of the distinction between the signs on the road and the road, buildings
and populations signified, makes Idea> On! a milestone work in the history of the
medium.

At the 1993 AFTRS and AFC *Multimedia and Film Maker* Conference, Innocent gave a
live tour of the worlds of Idea>On!, discussing the importance of game elements,
and notion of participation and play.

Worlds have names like Cybaroque, remains static with movement occurring in a
single figure gives Sintu the feel of an essay on movement and the interplay of
kinetics, digital imagery and sound. The piece is short, but highly memorable.

As can be seen, digital media can be handled by computers in an almost infinite
numbers of ways. Perhaps the most significant is the remarkable ability to copy
and transmit and receive information quickly and with little cost. This
communications dimension of digital media makes it historically truly unique. No
digital original is any different from its copy. In this way the circumstances of
the production of any digital media are always expressed by the work itself as
much as the *message* conveyed by the work.

Being so freely distributable makes digital media self-promoting machines for the
production of ideas.

A film maker using computers can be his/her own distributor, marketeer and sales
person if required. A production can sit on a bulletin board waiting for people
to *log on* and download it. A multiple choice RgateS can prevent unauthorised
copying, and the method of supply can also be the means to collect revenue: you
cannot gain access to work without agreeing to pay.

Unlike regular text and book publication, whose circumstances of production have
remained relatively unchanged for centuries, software publications conditions
change with the introduction of new hardware. The ideas change with them .
Storage and transmission are less interesting to me than the potential of digital
media to not only tell existing messages better, but come up with entirely new
messages, with examples found nowhere else, along with entirely new ways of
presenting them. The work of the artists I have already described is chiselling
this new ground out of the institutions that will support them, despite the
massive barriers that exist.

In film, literature and dance, a sea of historys contributors spans timeUs
horizon. The Classics are landmarks on this horizon. What the Classics have in
common is the thread of originality: weirdness, the unexpected, the rule
breakers, the ideas which stood out because they were unique. In software,
Classics seem so often to reside somewhere in the future. How do you study the
work of your predecessors in the games business for example, when the emphasis in
constantly on bigger, better ways of doing the task?

The fact that the new media are ostensibly about storage means they are great
tools for actively forgetting. This can be a very empowering thing, to not have
countless examples of other film makers, other writers, other musicians occupying
valuable shelf space with their product next to yours!!

Everybody gets to be a pioneer.

Living outside the laws of aesthetic *taste* is what makes a memorable work
conspicuous, and hence true to its time. Honest work is self confident and self
assured and has *attitude* written all over it. It takes little time however for
an original idea to become tired and dull, and this happens when the work is made
unoriginal by relentless conceptual duplication. Witness the endless
proliferation of examples of morphing in television commercials.

Experimentation, uncertainty, strangeness are the hallmarks of lasting
contributions to new media.

The new media will benefit from the contributions of those most able to grasp the
full sociological, economic and psychological implications of the technology and
what it does best: copy, transmit and make available.

Without necessarily meaning to, the new media promote decentralisation. In a
world of networks and file exchange, what does the notion of *broadcast* mean? It
means a central place from whence pictures and/or sound emerge, controlled
usually by a bureaucracy. Multi media on the other hand revolves around being
digital and transmittable, without centre. Where is the centre of the net? The
same place as the centre of the global phone system. Nowhere.

By contrasts, in film there is an established distribution system: festivals,
distributors. Very firmly rooted in physical, geographic and cultural space.

In radio and television a signal emanates from an earth or sea or space bound
central transmitter to relayers to receivers. The relationship of signal to user
is one-way.

Existing catalogues of stored motion picture and sound material are suddenly even
more extremely valuable resources. *Repurposing* (I hate that term) promises to
*liberate* older work for repackaging digitally for new products.

*Repurposing* alone is a linear approach to non linear media. It is costly, and
its advocates sometimes fail to grasp the full range of ditigal mediaUs
capabilities . The issue is not only RcontentS, (where are we going to get all
the material for the productions?!?!?!) but context. Context between forms, and
context within the infrastructures which make these forms genuinely digital and
as much a part of the landscape of the phone and satellite companies as the film
libraries and archives of parliamentary democratic governments. Governments feel
comfortable with central metaphors. Vast libraries. Archives. Fine. We need the
National Film and Sound Archive, to be sure.

But the media I discuss here resist such polite and passive centralisation with a
passion!

With a laptop and a modem, a single person will soon be able to transmit and
receive moving images and sound over the phone line to anyone likewise connected.
The linear assumptions of the finite copy, the central geographic site and the
infrastructure to process that finite work to any number of finite destinations
suddenly vanishes.

Our Media are Now Nebulous Clouds of Omniprescent Thought.

This paradigm shift is difficult to make, even for those familiar with the
technology. It almost amounts to a cultural crisis, potentially as historically
significant as the invention of the printing press and the telephone. It is a
change which strikes naked fear into many who remain blissfully ignorant of how
the digital world can suck up media and spew them out ad infinitum anywhere,
anytime from nowhere and no time.

Film making enjoys a multiplicity of approaches, as the means of film production
can vary with the circumstances of the film makers. But constants in the film
world have to do with how the work is funded, made, sold and received. How moving
imagery relates to the society around it is, in the most literal sense, culture.
It is the expression of a cultures view of itself. In the case of mainstream
fiuter games are now thirty to forty something and are looking for something
which consolidates the universalising power of the Nintendo/Sega joy-pad as a
means to access information, book planes, read encyclopaedias, and all the things
people of that age group like to do when offered a choice of moving vision and
sound with which they can interact and control.

Media cross pollinate, and influence each other. We are all aware of the ways in
which big budget movies accommodate the games market. Multi-modal publishing,
means the simultaneous release of titles as film, games, music, spinoffs and
merchandise.

Music shops in the UK have been recently made aware that the means of
distributing CD software titles can share those of the music industry. Indeed
some game developers have even put out albums of music. The music CD and the CD
software share the same artwork, and the a similar distribution system. In the
US, kiosks are available which enable you to cut your own audio CD. The result is
a custom object, maybe a compilation of favourite tracks from different albums.

How far down the track can CD Based film and video kiosk pressing be? Bits of
favourite films only. All the dream sequences of all the David Lynch movies on
one disk, royalties paid for with the plastic, please (I wish!!).

The ability to choose, or filter information on the internet using software tools
like *Turbo Gopher*, *Mosaic* (which uses the hypertext driven 'World Wide Web')
presents us with an existing model for sharing moving picture information. In
pieces. With many other people scattered across the globe in a never ending
ongoing cinema of idea proliferation. This relentless unstoppable currency of
data over the Internet stands in stark contrast to the perceived extent of the
pote simple linear applications of potentially non linear forms

(why just sit and watch passively when you could also pick and choose and
personally edit a film out of your favourite personal criteria in any number of
infinite combinations?)

2) the passive role of the consumer

Who is to say whether the di likely to persist with notions of the audience as a
captive passive recipient . Commercial T.V's delivery of 'eyeballs to
advertisers' is attempting to find new ways to do old things. There is a good
chance though, that 'advertising' as we know it will probably not survive the
transition.

The telephone company has no interest (nor should it) in the content of the
messages it conveys. It just supplies the dial tone and bills you for frequency
and duration, depending on the distance and time of day of the call. Why should
broadcasters see the data networks as new ways to broadcast *video on demand*
over the phone lines (how else will they get to your living room as data except
by satellite?) when the model of the central singular broadcaster in a networked
world is all but replaced by the *Matrix*?

William Gibson, author of *Neuromancer*, speaking on Radio National recently
described the difference between Internet and the *Data Highway* as similar to
that between a shared communal town square and a shopping mall. A shopping mall
is a machine for sucking up money. A town square is a neutral meeting place and
site for shared community.

Meeting strangers online is a profoundly moving and exciting thing to do. Film
makers wanting to try this should call Pegasus networks in Brisbane for details
on membership for an email address, access to newgroups etc (film related ones
abound!) The *Internet Relay Chat* or IRC is the thing to try, or a MUD 'multi
user dungeon'.

If the experience of finding other net surfers were limited to being given the
option to agree to buy, or not agree to buy, a fundamental wrong would have been
committed by the authorising institution that made it so.

Sitting at home with a remote ordering products by hitting the *buy* button is
not a particularly imaginative use of the new technology.

Sending hi-8 footage to grandma and combining it with transferred super 8 from
the 1980s sent to you half an hour before from Iceland is. There may however be
issues of copyright. It is a problem which crops up again and again. The question
is, will the laws (designed to protect the physical manifestation of ideas) be
able to survive in a world where digital products can not in any physical sense
be said to exist?

Ted Nelson, computer guru and inventor of the idea of *hypertext* on his recent
visit to Australia outlined his Xanadu networking and copyright retrieval system.
Bits of media are interlinked across a network made up of special Xanadu servers.
Those who make material available on Xanadu are able to reclaim revenue on
material used, in exchange for relinquishing the context of the work once bought
by another Xanadu user. Here the benefits of networked data exchange are made
compatible with the need of artists to be paid for the work they produce
digitally.

But on a deeper level, Xanadu offers a *linked* software and clip art culture
where the endlessly connected cloud of data on the net is available and just
*there*. There is no centre, no start point, no end. Just a great, ongoing
kaleidoscope of linked information. The significance of linked data cannot be
underestimated. Data interconnected could provide countless variations of image
text and sound: all customised to a personUs needs. A stately pleasure dome for
sure. Where copyright rules, Okay?

Games producers can rely upon encryption to some extent to protect software. When
the game is burned onto a chip, encased in a cartridge or published on a CD ROM,
the material is protected from copying by the means of storage. You cannot really
copy data stored in these ways. Its *burned in*.

These elements are significant, because the independent film community values its
intellectual property and needs ways to safeguard a livelihood from working as
information producers. When the community gets more wired, it will need
mechanisms which enable fair exchange of material.

Film and Games, Film and Games... what are the similarities, if any, anyway?

Like film,

Games and multimedia can utilise narrative in that the context of a players role
in a game is often that of a story protagonist. The game design operates like a
script, but also encapsulates the details of the character and the way they
interact with the settings, other characters. Chapters to stories take the form
of game levels. Usually the level of difficulty for the player increases with
each subsequent level achieved. Within levels there may be several worlds Mapping
and cartography play a huge role.

Like film,

Elements which make a game exciting have to do with its appeal to its target
audience, The late Brian RobinsonUs Swinburne film schoolUs script class *big
3*:compelling action, interactive locations and startling characters apply to
games as much as films. This is true of documentary, narrative, or experimental
multimedia.

These are exploratory media, ones which facilitate concentration, engage the
imagination and challenge the audience member who then feels by means of their
proxy self on the screen, literally a part of the action. The appeal and growth
of multimedia games is linked directly to this.

Barriers to the widespread acceptance of games as media stem from cultural,
technological, and generational misunderstanding.

Yet our day to day experiences are now touched by these forms everywhere: the
supermarket bar code pricing system, the touch-screen kiosks in the department
store and other public spaces, the sampled phone number at the other end of
directory assistance. The automatic telling machine, the pager, the fax machine,
the security system at work and home. All online buttons, all flashing imagery
and processed sound.

Our cities are becoming themselves, giant video games.

Some desktop computer manufacturers now offer teleconferencing video phone
features built into computers which sell for around $7000. They include cameras
built onto the monitor to transmit the speaking face, microphones to transmit the
voice and utilities to compress and send the real-time pictures and sound files
across the globe from an office desk.

Image and sound production is everywhere. Soon the bulk of the affluent West's
population will be involved in the routine task of making imagery and sound for
transmission and retrieval.

Groovy aint it?

Film makers are already at the very centre of these developments. John Hughes,
Sue Macauly, Micheal Buckley, myself, Steve French, Jeremy Parker, David
Atkinson, Diana Leach, Kim Sansovini, Kim Bounds, Sam Thomsom, Troy Innocent,
Elena Popa. The list grows. Film makers are in demand again.

Why Film Makers in Multimedia?

Few other art forms have as central to their modus operandi basic understandings
of the complex interplay between movement, kinematics, juxtaposition, sound and
all the fine delicate elements you learn and create when making a film become
real.

The motion picture arts are entirely compatible, and directly relevant to the
evolution of software and digital culture today. Only the links are not yet fully
understood because we, like the rest of the world are in the centre of the storm
of global technological change. The feeling of post modern dislocation is felt
all the more by virtue of our cultural and geographic distance from where the
action happens faster and on a larger scale.

But what was a *cringe* for film in the early 70s can be the fuel to ignite an
industry which is unaffected by geographic isolation from commercial hot zones.
Modems blast the coastlines into insignificance. Borders don't matter. Vast
oceans donUt matter. The bits and bytes flow like pollen in the wind almost at
the speed of light. Our uniqueness as a cultural site is itself a source of value
in the digital era.

Digital technology does not mean the death of film. It does not mean the end of
video. Or standard magnetic or photo chemical media. This is not a zero - sum
equation. It is not some futurist, modernist war of semiotic attrition. When I
made Puppenhead, I went out of my way to make the film a celebration of the
circumstances of its own production. The 'film'ness of the surface of Kodak Tri-X
was as much a part of the text as the *story* or anything else. Film animation in
literal terms can not really exist in any other medium. Sure you can teach
animation technique without using film. But film is uniquely film. Photo
chemical. Real. Bright, glowing projected light (thanks Corrinne!)

I work in software now, but teaching film animation at Open Channel reminds me of
the importance film holds for me and others who come to learn about Puppets and
models and 24 frames a second. Film lives and breathes within the hearts of those
who have had their lives changed by it. It just donUt go away....

This is not about what will replace film. It is about how can film makers,
frustrated at the stagnation of the media they love and the institutions which
support it find ways to engage their talents, and contribute to the evolution of
a whole new class of making art and meaning? How can film makers make a living in
the 1990s?

Go to the video game arcades. Look at this environment as someone who shapes
movement light and sound into meaning. Look at the arcade as a film maker. Here
is your new domain.Those are moving pictures youUre looking at. Hear those
amazing sounds! Check out the colours! The movement. Look at the level of
engagement of the people playing. If you are an animator, you have been here
before.

These things are the prototypes for an Esperanto of the Imagination (to quote
Brenda Laurel, Mondo 2000 issue 9)

As for effette concerns about *all the violence*, go tell it to Phillip Brophy.
HeUll show you how comics were treated in the 1950s around about the time of the
McCarthy witch hunts. Comics were popular with kids then, too. Besides the chief
censor has installed a classification system for games just like that for films.
Only it took me four months to get through *Doom* on the PC and the British Film
Classification Board charges by the hour!!! As a tax payer, I sure hope ours
don't!

As I was saying... Look at these video games and remember those film school
classes about where cinema first began. Think of how Melies started, how
Eisenstien and Dziga Vertov made the then separate worlds of the circus, the
illusionist theatre and photography come together to become a new art form.
Entertainment for the masses. Behind the big top, next to the freak show. Our
precious art house *Cinemah* was once dismissed as mere sideshow attraction too
one hundred years ago. You entered a cinema with a tinge of guilt, and touch of
voyeurism. And a thrill.

It's time as film makers and artists to cultivate a process of active
participation in the development of the the New Media. But we need support.

We need an Australian Digital Media Commission.

We need new Commonwealth funding structures set in place to finance games anould
need to reflect changes not only in the technology, but in the effect of the new
media on the culture around it. Like the Australian Film Commission, The ADMC
would foster and cultivate a growing digital arts, entertainment and commercial
culture. The emergent lifestyle we experience will benefit from such pro-active
policy.

Multi Lateral Finance Strategy

I propose that such a funding body operate initially under the guidance and
active financial guidance of the Film Finance Corporation, The Australian Film
Commission, The Australia Council, The Departments of Industry Technology and
Regional Development, the Department of Communications, The Ministry of the Arts,
The Ministry for Education. The ABC, SBS.

Corporate support could come from the AEDC, Telecom, Optus, Apple, Microsoft, and
a range of other corporate entities.

Changes made possible with Government finance could be far reaching and
controversial.

Copyright, David Cox 1994.