Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Rules of Machinima?
From the beginning of journeys into SL I have been interested in Machinima, but I have judged it in comparison to film conventions. I'm beginning to wonder if this is the best way to go about it. I suppose that new technologies are usually discussed in terms of previous technologies in an attempt to make discussion easier by utilizing existing vocabulary. Machinima is a new form, however, and different from film in so many ways. Has it started to develop its own conventions and rules of operating? Is this coming soon? Is it unfair to judge it against an art form that has been developing over 100 years? Will this comparison only prove to make machinima stronger by incorporating conventions that are tried and true? This is all on my mind this week and I will continue to blog as I come up with stronger opinions on these topics.
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3 comments:
To quote Hamlet on the Holodeck:
"...the inevitable process of moving away from the formats of older media and toward new conventions in order to satisfy the desires aroused by the digital environment."
Does this mean that applying "old" film conventions to machinima is the wrong way to go? what do you think? what "new conventions" are we talking about in terms of machinima?
West - one of the things that stuck with me from a 'history of journalism' course I took was the trivia that when radio was new, the most common radio programs were people reading newspapers (word for word) on the air.
Also, I also recommend 'Hamlet on the Holodeck' for leisure reading. (I signed it out from the UF Library.) There's a section where the author talks about how it takes a while for people to start using the peculiarities of a new medium creatively (ie partially exposing film prints for a solarize effect).
Kind of exciting to have the possibility of being one of those pioneers.
You are hitting the point. Digital media is so new and moves so fast that we cannot even begin to recognize the difference with what has come before, because of the fact that digital media is itself an eternally shifting and morphing media. When photography came into being all photographers could do to cope with such technology is borrow from the portrait or landscape painting of their time. Like Gritz mentioned, it took visionaries like Christian Schad, Man Ray, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,almost a hundred years since Nicéphore Niépce captured the view from his attic in 1826 to break away from the convention of the borrowed and explore the potential of the medium, but alas, it was short lived because the masses demanded their likeness more than that which they could not understand.
Then came film, which borrowed the narrative of theater (I am simplifying of course) and continued with the tradition of recording "reality" (that word again) while in fact it was, and always has been a mere optical trick and a little more that I will discuss in class.
So now, when digital media arrives, we seem to be unable to grasp the potential, and how could we, if we look to the past instead of the future? Why does SL or any other VR looks as pedestrian as a mall, a battlefield, an airport, a castle, a house? What is it that we need that prevents us to discover the new?
Machinima's problem, despite its potential as a cheap story-telling medium or prototyping tool,an animatic of sorts (and I am interested in those aspects myself I should say), is that it also misses the point and becomes comfortable with emulating the rich uncle. Understandable though, since it lives and has grown precisely in that protected environment where the fascination with the new becomes very quickly a reflection of the old.
Yes Gritz, there is the chance of being one of those pioneers, if only for a short window of opportunity before it fossilizes into the same old crap dominated by corporations and transnationals to keep you under their control.
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