Opera at SXSW 2008

Hirsch acted as moderator and kicked things off by discussing some trends in design (digital and otherwise.) He said that the Wii, iPhone, and certain other Web interfaces (Opera?) show us that less is more - that people just want to reach out and interact with something. Enter Quarterlife:



For Hirsch, Quarterlife is evidence of culture influence entertainment influencing culture.

Spell, a computational biologist, explained his work in terms of borrowing metaphors from other fields. For instance, as he tried to figure out a way to present information from the human genome project, he borrowed some metaphors from music to develop an arc diagram. For Spell, this is how film creativity works - filmmakers borrow from literature and designers.

Kline has worked (as an Art Director and in other capacities) on movies like Forrest Gump, Roger Rabbit, and Beowulf. He emphasized that the bottom line:

"We're looking for new ways to put across the same old stories...there are only 7,12,15 stories to be told hin human kind, and most of what we're doing is telling those stories and making them new again"

He went on to say that everyone thinks they can borrow from other media. This isn't because we're looking for the "best way" to present a narrative but because filmmakers see different parts of the narrative that can be brought to the surface.

Sanders is a film producer, talked about "traditional Hollywood and how that fits with the interactive landscape right now." She talked to a number of filmmakers to find out how they thought design is affecting film. In one way, the "grammar" of filmmaking is taking on some design vocabulary - interactive entertainment (gaming, electronic interfaces) are changing the way filmmakers talk about films and the way they edit (camera movement, first-person camera angles, God's eye views, etc.) Sanders talk reminded me of a great book called Remediation that explains how new media and old media borrow from each other. While many would assume that new media replaces the old, it seems that the two end up taking on the look of one another (CNN looks like a web browser window.) Sanders went on to explain some resistance to these ideas. One school of thought says "the fact that a creative property is interactive nature does not make it instantly appealing." This school says that audiences want to be "led through the Narrative" rather than wanting to lead themselves.

Crump, a writer, attempted to "trot out kind of a theory...that people are changing really, really fast." For Crump, entertainment is changing as well and trying to keep up. He presented three facts:

Fact 1: People are surfing the Web while watching your movie.

Fact 2: Traffic to electronic publications is growing much faster than traffic to print.

Fact 3: Social Networking is the fastest growing entertainment sector. Soon, a majority of online content will be user generated.

Crump believes that storytelling is not keeping pace with these changes, and he cites the writers strike as an example of this. Crump thinks that storytelling is getting more complicated: "Once upon a time, storytelling was simpler." But, he thinks, there have to be some things we can learn from a long tradition of storytelling. Crump's hypothesis:

"Going forward, we need to think of stories as platforms, and the way those platforms will live will depend largely on the audience."

You can think of the world in terms of three different audiences: people who watch, people who share, people who create their own stuff. For Crump, lawyers, Egos, and technologies will probably stop a good bit of of interaction between producers and consumers of content.

As I sat through this panel, I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't a literature expert included. Given the name of the panel, it seems odd that no one asked a literature professor/teacher to join the discussion. Maybe this reflects how people view literature experts - that is, maybe we just think everyone is an expert. In a sense, we are. Everyone likes to read and tell stories, but part of me wants to think that those who study and teach literature for a living could have some important things to say in this conversation. Then again, there probably aren't many English professors (or grad students) at SXSW interactive, and that probably indicats that said professors are out of touch with how culture is getting produced and consumed these days.

As Crump noted, in a recent meeting with a powerful literary agent, he was talking about YouTube and the agent wasn't too familiar. When Crump said "let's go check it out," this agent had to Google YouTube to get there. As Crump said, this might show just how out of touch some are when it comes to new ways of circulating stories.