In his 1991 introduction to Ender's Game, author Orson Scott Card writes about the transaction between storyteller and audience. "The 'true' story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper that you hold in your hands. The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to try and make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.”
I find that my personal artistic manifesto (unlike my procedural “this is how I should work” manifesto, which is most of what I wrote in my last assignment) varies too much from project to project to pin down completely, but I’ve always felt the above quote was very accurate, even though I never considered transmedia and audience involvement in my art until recently. In fact, deep and detailed fictional universes have always appealed to me significantly - I am a major fanboy of most of the franchises Frank Rose used as examples in The Art of Immersion.
The anti-establishment/anti-art portions of Dadaism and the Fluxus movement don’t appeal to my personal sensibilities/manifesto, but the Fluxus movement does seem to be an ancestor of our philosophies here at UCF, and to the concept of transmedia as Rose describes its applications in pop culture. Fluxus creators enjoy experimenting with the intersection of different media types. Notably (and timely), some of the Fluxus philosophy even advocates open-source art, unbound by copyright restrictions. I do identify with the anti-gatekeeper and DIY sensibilities of Fluxus, and I find its advocating of interactivity interesting.
But, allow me to play devil’s advocate. The idea of audience involvement in new art forms appeals to me, whereas the idea of audience participation in the traditional (emphasis on that word) artistic process is difficult to accept. There are plenty of counterexamples to those provided by Rose. Teddy Blass, the founder of Nolanfans.com, the largest Christopher Nolan fan website, discovered in his site’s forums that users were uniting together to create a major fan film. Within weeks, however, the effort fell apart due to infighting and lack of authoritative hierarchy. Other would-be crowdsource production communities, such as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Hitrecord.org, are successful in producing content, but at an unfortunately mediocre level of quality. (Assuming quality is the goal, which it may not be in issue-oriented projects such as World Without Oil.) “Made for the masses” and “made by the masses” appear to have the same effect on artistic integrity.
Notably, Rose’s examples of successful story universes which involve audience interactivity are all massively budgeted franchises, whereas most microbudget efforts to involve audiences directly in the storytelling - at least ones of which I’ve heard - are not as successful. Real interactive successes such as Star Wreck, Homestar Runner, and Red vs. Blue still had a core group of just a few collaborators instead of giving their audience true power to tell a story, while JibJab gives its audiences power to create greeting cards; not stories.
Even in Rose’s book, examples of people "participating" in a story world really aren't. It's just kids writing Harry Potter fan fiction or fans tweeting as Mad Men characters, but none of this "participation" takes place in the official canon of the story worlds. In the context of traditional novel writing and filmmaking, wouldn't that become chaos? For example, if someone gets a copy of 15 Minutes of Faye and recuts it as they see fit, I’m of course completely okay with that, but it would unsettle me if they claimed their remix was part of the official canon of my story universe. The focal point of a franchise around which fans rally (i.e. the original work) would start to collapse if every single fan gets a piece of the storytelling action.
I realize these are the beginning stages of a new art form, which is why I think rather than having a progressive view of the old art form, it's more productive to adopt a view of two separate art forms: the old and the new (whatever the new may be or become). I also realize that the new art form needs to start somewhere: in this case, by branching off of the old art form. In addition, my above arguments view transmedia as an “or” world of traditional zero-sum, when I should be treating it as an “and” world. But ironically, this is no different than the way the experts treat it. From what I’ve read about the professional world of interactive storytelling, most of what’s come so far has been fun side distractions from the “main” story, which is still told by “the professionals,” because, as Kim LeMasters complains on page 310 of The Art of Immersion, “How do you get a human being to behave the way you wish them to behave?” Will a story whose plot and characters are thought out in immense detail for years before the artist creates them be equal in quality to a story created by accident on The Sims? I’m very skeptical, but the point I just made isn’t entirely a fair point, since transmedia is so early in its development. As Kojima says on page 132, "I believe that even today we can tell only a simple story without really interfering with gameplay." The key, I think, is to create a universe (rather than one specific story) so rich with specific possibilities that the audience/player/user will experience a high-quality story no matter which paths (s)he chooses.
Someone has to crack the code of how to give the audience total control of the story without sacrificing artistic quality. I think video games and the research into emotions described by Rose are on the cutting edge of this. After reading about that, the concept of integrating text messages into my film, and other similar gimmicks described in the transmedia chapter of Think Outside the Box Office, seem cheap and old-fashioned. What makes more sense to me is that if we really want to involve our audiences in immersive story worlds, we’ll have to abandon the traditional form of filmmaking in its entirety, instead of adding these gimmicky modifiers to our projects (whether the size of 15 Minutes of Faye, or The Dark Knight), and clinging proprietarily to our possession of the story. We need to, as the Fluxus Manifesto states, “Promote non-art reality to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.” When you divorce the concept of transmedia from traditional filmmaking, it becomes very interesting to me, but sadly, I don’t think it’s compatible with the UCF Film Program.
Interactive universes are something to consider at the conceptual level of a project - not something to tack on after it’s finished. Most of the examples in Rose’s book (with the possible exception of The Matrix), created their alternate realities based on demand - no alternate realities were originally intended for their story. These interactive universes are not part of the main story; they complement the main story. They’re admittedly very cool, but they’re still gimmicks.
I think Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s line from The Futurist Manifesto applies to film and transmedia: “[Art] will not be overtaken by progress; rather, it will absorb progress in its evolution.” Futurism, and its rejection of the past, appealed more to my personal sensibilities than the other manifestos about which I read (I promise I’m not a fascist). Something new is coming, which I believe is not entirely compatible with traditional filmmaking, even at the microbudget level. As described in paragraphs above, tacking interactive modifiers onto a pre-existing story only works well, I believe, with franchises of scale. Personally, I’m interested in both the traditional and the new, but not necessarily in combining them. (Though admittedly I’m still very new to all of these ideas, so my views are constantly evolving. I have too much to learn to allow myself to be close-minded about any of this.)
No comments:
Post a Comment