xMedia Spring 2007
THEORY
Storytelling
Story Content Creation
Tangible & Tabletop Interactions
Tabletop Technologies
Tabletop and Tangible Storytelling
Tabletop Story Engines
Possible Stories
PRACTICE
Team Design Work
Prototype Presentations
Debriefing
Project Development: 1
Project Development: 2
Project Development: 3
Project Development: 4
Final Project Demos
[1] Davenport, G. MAS.845 Special Topics in Cinematic Storytelling. Spring 2004, MIT.
Storytelling
Interactive to me means … something that changes my life, not just pushing buttons.
- Laurie Anderson
Overview
What is the Relationship Between Story and Narrative?
What Makes A Story?
What Are the Processes in Storytelling?
Narrative or Story?
Narrative
–How things are threaded, woven
–The track
–Rhetorical strategies & devices or lack thereof
Story
–What’s being threaded by tellers and listeners
–The train
–Meaning
What Makes a Story?
Context/Content
–Time
–Space/Place
–Characters
–Relationships (Social)
–Events
–Actions
Form
– Genres & Story Structure: between-stories structure
– Units of Meaning: within-story structure
Content/Context: Once Upon a Time
Example story ….
Form: Story Structures*
Linear (Temporal)
Tracks character from beginning to end
Meandering (Spatial)
Winding path w/oapparent direction
Spiral (Mixed)
Returns to anevent or themeat different levels
Branching (Temporal)
Splits into different paths, outcomes
*Truby, J. The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller. 2007.
Form: Story Structures*
Explosive (Spatial)
Multiple paths that extend simultaneously
Network/Node (Spatial)
Multiple paths w/connections – likespiral?
Networked
Multi/two-way …. Discontinuous …
Adaptive
“Mass” collective story-telling …Socially constructed …
*Truby, J. The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller. 2007. [Italics: added to Truby’s schema.]
?
Digital Storytelling“As we learned with the New Orleans project, audiences were happier and more discriminating when first presented with a short version of the story before they dove into the full depth and breadth of the available content.”* -G. Davenport
Interdisciplinary pursuit:
–Content•Elements noted
–Form•Interface
•Data structures
•Algorithms
–Interaction/Experience Design (HCI & allied disciplines• Participation
• Delight
Davenport, G. Keynote address for media course on: Interactive Television Authoring and ProductionUniversidade Lusofona de Humanidades e Tecnologias. Lisbon, Portugal. 2002.
Post-Modern/Digital Stories
In the 1980s many critics described one of the key effects of "postmodernism" as that of spatialization - privileging space over time, Battening historical time, refusing grand narratives ….
This may imply that new digital rhetoric may have less to do with arranging information in a particular order and more to do simply with selecting what is included and what is not included in the total corpus presented.
-Lev Manovich, Lang of New Media
Early Digital Genres
An interactive narrative … can then be understood as the sum of multiple trajectories through a database.
-Lev Manovich
Journey/Road
–Aspen
Mystery/Who-Dun-It
–Murder, Anyone?
–Myst
Multi-POV
–New Orleans in Transition
Emerging Digital Genres
Location-Based/Physical/Mobile
–Augmented Reality
–Media Fabrics
Surface-Based/Tangibles
–Genie Bottles
–Cinemat
Storytelling Processes
Scott’s McCloud’s Artistic Creation Steps
–Idea/Purpose
–Form
–Idiom
–Structure
–Craft
–Surface
Exercise
Analyze one of the story examples seen in class. Write a short story featuring two different viewpoints.
Story Content Creation
Aaron Copeland:Aaron Copeland:
If you want to understand music better, you If you want to understand music better, you can do nothing more important than listen to can do nothing more important than listen to
it.it.
Overview
How Do You Create Digital Story Content?
Digital media elements
Content
Segmentation
Representation
Digital media elements
Interfaces
Creating works in new media can be understood as either constructing the right interface to a multimedia database or as defining navigation methods through spatialized representatlons.
-Lev Manovich, Language of New Media
Data Structures & Algorithms
Computer programming encapsulates the world according to its own logic. The world is reduced to two kinds of software objects that are complementary to each other-data structures and algorithms.
-Lev Manovich, Language of New Media
Digital media attributes
Numerical > can be manipulated, programmed
Modular > structures & methods can be repeated throughout work
Variable > subject to recreation due to modular nature
Content convergence
Motion picture/video
Audio
Text
Graphics/still images
Tangibles
Meta-data (XML)
Motion picture/video & audio
DVD source
HD/DV ($ .wav) sources
Tools: Gordian Knot (front-end), editing software
Encode Edit clips
Encode/compress
Decode Edit clips
.avi .avi
.?
Encode
.avi
Graphics/Still Images
Non-digital sources
Digital sources
Tools: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.
ProcessImport/Scan
Output
.psd .jpg,.gif
.tiff, .jpg, etc.
ProcessOpen Output
.psd .jpg,.gif
.tiff, .jpg, etc.
Text
Metadata
XML, which is promoted as the replacement For HTML, enables any user to create her own customized markup language. The next stage in computer culture may involve authoring not simply new Web documents but new languages.
-Lev Manovich
HTML = HyperText Markup Language (1993)
XML = Extensible Markup Language (1998)
Tangibles
Segmentation
Regardless of whether a new media designer is working with quantitative data, text, images, video, 3-d space, or combinations of them, she employs the same techniques of copy, cut, paste, search, composite, transform, filter. … the existence such techniques, which are not media-specific, is another consequence of media's status as computer data.
-Lev Manovich
Units of Meaning/Unit Operations
Segues/Bridges
Representation
What best expresses/conveys the meaning, transports the participator?
Digital, tangible
Meta-data, themes
Exercises
Create digital assets for both viewpoints of your story - bring the assets to work on this in class.
Story set to include:
–Elements of the story (characters, events, places, sequences)
–Representations/abstractions of the story (meta-data)
[1] Davenport, G. MAS.845 Special Topics in Cinematic Storytelling. Spring 2004, MIT.
Tangible and Tabletop Interactions
Overview
What is Tangible Media and Where Do Tables Fit In?
Exercises
Lasercut or 3D print a tangible object to represent each of the viewpoints from your story.
Tabletop Technologies
Overview
How Do Digital Tables Work?
Tabletop and Tangible Storytelling
The act of listening is in fact an act The act of listening is in fact an act
of composingof composing.. -John Cage
-
Overview
Why and How Would You Put Stories on Tables?
How Do You Create Tangibles for Stories?
Tabletop Story Engines
Overview
What Kind of Engine Can Drive a Tabletop Story?
How Can We Adapt an Existing Story Script for the Tabletop?
–Interface Design:
What content has the audience seen before
What content is appropriate to present at this time in this place
What is the receiver's context*
* Davenport, G. MAS.845 Special Topics in Cinematic Storytelling. Spring 2004, MIT.
Possible Stories
In their important study of new media, Remediation, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define medium as "that which remediates.” In contrast to a modernist view that aims to define the essential properties of every medium, Bolter and Grusin propose that all media work by "remediating' that is, translating, refashioning, and reforming other media, both on the level of content and form. If we think of the human-computer interface as another medium, its history and present development definitely fit this thesis.
-Lev Manovich, Lang of New Media
Overview
What Stories Will We Remediate for Tangible Tabletop Interaction?
Team Design Work
Production Steps
Overview
Assignment
Story content design & creation
Knowledge representation
Story engine/interface for interacting with material
Prototype Presentations
Overview
Debriefing
Overview
Project Development
Final Project Demos