00:35
“What I mean by that [storyworld] is I want to create experiences that allow the audiences to step into the shoes of the protagonist. I want the story itself to model itself more in the way that people are actually consuming their entertainment and media these days. So my work is a fusion of film, gaming, and technology.”

05:45
“And that’s what we try to do when we create storyworlds. It’s about texture. It’s about putting people in the shoes of the protagonist. And it’s about letting them feel something that they wouldn’t normally feel through just a passive film.

Lance describes the order of events in the remixed version of Head Trauma. He talks about how he remixed Head Trauma, added ARG and many other live elements. He calls this “cinema ARG”. But I’m not sure if he mentions the term here.

Then he talks about how the language of storytelling is all new. Of course, certain fundamentals are going to stay the same – like the idea of conflict, for example. But the language of how everything is done is changing A LOT at the moment.

“When I think about these [story/media] outlets, I think about them in terms of like OK if they have the individual arc and then I have the overall arc in the full story, and it becomes about how I pace it, how I get it to an audience, and how I have them interact with it.”

Definition “story architecture”:
“Story architecture to me is kind of the idea of what effectively is a kind of fluidness of creative, technology in terms of how you actually deliver these things, how do you scale them, how do you get them to these various outlets. How do you make it an experience that somebody is going to be engaged by and want to continue to you know hopefully tell somebody else about. And then, you know, business. The last part is kind of entrepreneurial, you know, how do you actually derive your revenue streams from this. How do you actually look at it in a meaningful way, so it is ?impactful? [5:26 min] for yourself.”

“Once you have the data, and it is the future of everything, you know, if we look and we say search was the future, you know, a number of years back, it really is about discovery, it really is about filtering. And a lot of this discussion throughout the day, throughout this whole thing, you know, this conference, is going to be about how do people discover and find you in a world that is swelling with content.”

“What is interesting is, like, normally we started with like a three act structure in a screenplay. In the case of some of the work we have been developing it starts with the build of a universe, bible, game bible, show bible, where we kind of go through and define the world, define the interactions, define the characters, define the rules, and then from there it becomes this amazing kind of depth of information where you know more about the subject than you ever did before.”

Very interesting but very utopian.

161
“Many screen practitioners I have come across don’t seem to recognise that there is a fundamental conceptual difference between how you construct old media and how you construct new media; that old media is about story arcs, editing to build inference and dramatic connotation and achieving narrative outcomes, whereas new media is largely about a real-time, private, momentary, disposable experience that unfolds in a virtual space.” This is way overgeneralised. The two can be combined => entarch!

163
“Even the so-called leaders in global, virtual world thinking, are still thinking old media. Hence the opportunity for the Australian screen industry. […] Australian screen practitioners just need to get ahead of the game and embrace progress, rather than be determined by it.”
“In a film, we measure our codes of morality and values against what is happening to a character. In a virtual world, we get the cathartic benefits without being put in the line of judgement (whether or to this is a false illusion). We are questioning our own reality.”

164
“[…] in our traditional way of looking at things we have to work with a timeframe, whereas someone could remain engaged in a virtual world forever.” (“That could be a young guy starting at 17 years old and ending at 42!”)
“The new era of vital word is about a conceptual exploration of emotions in more abstract ways. It is about exploration of consciousness. Your mission as a creator is to keep that fantasy going. This is based on the relationships your participants find within that world. The basic journey is of participants forming relationships and developing confidence to becoming a mentor or even a collaborative designer.
If audiences are both beneficiary and creator, the virtual world producer is the facilitator, the town planner – it’s a totally different role. You’re centre management. It’s customer service. The creative element is in setting up the next project: what its conceptual design and machinations will be. You want to get to a point with your brand where it can be licensed and sold off, to support your other brandable entities. Filmmakers will do best to think of each business as one aspect of a greater brand.
The six key principles of virtual worlds are shared space, persistence of world, immediacy, interactivity, a graphical user interface (GUI) and the encouragement of communities.The Big Brother house shares all six key principles but, again, from the point of view of the Big Brother participant. The unique experience of each contestant is their “ego journey”, as they experience self growth. But someone self-evolving in real time makes for rather uninteresting TV viewing for the rest of us, so we rely upon the edited highlights.”

165
“In fact, Reality TV is perhaps the closest example of an ego’s journey, although the editing, dramatic musical inferences, “highlights” packages and competitive “winner” outcomes tend to make it lean towards an audience friendly “hero’s journey”. It is still about structuring a passive, prescribed story which builds dramatic point cliff hangers to ad breaks. The Ego’s Journey in the virtual world is more private. There is no audience.” Not sure that’s true.
“There is much that can be learnt from the virtual paradigm in terms of screen content. Films don’t have to be films anymore. The notion of three acts, 90 minutes, does not keep up with the next level of internet customisation already being enacted out there in society every day.” I only partly agree. Film will continue to exist.
“If Johnny Rocku becomes enough of a presence to become a film, so be it but that shouldn’t be the starting point. This is a fundamental conceptual problem.
Filmmakers need to think of themselves as a brand first that has multiple slate of projects under that theme. Once you are established and have a core following you can branch out.”

166
“The reason I prefer to talk about brand is that it has longevity far beyond 90 minutes. Disney, for example, does not have a beginning, middle of end. Disney will go on forever.” “A child will form relationships and an identity with Disney for as long as he or she desires it. That’s his or her journey. Until eventually he or she grows out of it. It’s not about imposing a story within that space but rather gives it enough interest to sustain participants creating their own journeys there.”
“I’m starting to think that social communication is entertainment.” Of course it is.

167
“There is also a need to design for different personality types: some people seek socialisation, some seek a sense of control, some want to nurture and some just want to blow things up! And the one person can go through many different phases. The whole system of designing the virtual world is about human psychology and how people relate to each other at various stages of their own evolution.”

168
“What does the age of ego-centricity do to character arcs?”
“In this new frontier of filmmaking, I’d like to inspire Australian screen practitioners to take a unified approach, to redraft policies together and rethink conceptually the future framework of our ideas. “Who am I?” is, after all, the oldest question on the planet.”

Elaborates on the types of cinema that exist in the western world (mostly Hollywood)

8
“”The urges to disorder and totality of the competing modernities of the 1920s, dreams/projections then, seek generalization, institutionalization in the mid-1930s. They seek to control the social gaze—in short, to govern.”"

15f
“”an aesthetic of astonishment,” but also that the subjectivity it promoted was not only flexible and mobile but also significantly social. The dynamism of the cinematograph as event, rather than narrative, induces its spectators not to anchor themselves as the narrated objects of a screen performance, but to mobilize themselves as hectic and excited participants in an event that leads them not to contemplation but to sharing. It is a brief moment of innocence before the regulation of cinema into an industrial formation, an Eden from which the stories of good and evil would soon eject it. But it is vital to an understanding of cinema’s utopian capabilities that we acknowledge how, in this formative instant, it was able to activate rather than absorb its audiences.”

16
“the Lumière cinematograph was anchored not in literary or popular genres of the novel and theater but in the crowd. Social, public, and active, the event of cinema articulated the modernization of urban experience.”

18f
“[The other scenes of the Lumières] are resolutely scenes of everyday life in the modern world among the bourgeoisie, showing their work and their leisure, with a strong emphasis on technological achievements.”

19
“Alternatively, in a familiar if by now largely discredited argument, we might perhaps be tempted to see the Lumières as the fathers not of film but of documentary.”

23
“Film not only opposes the presumption of a “natural” vision that sees the “real” world as an assemblage of objects: it proposes another, synthetic vision.”

38
“Narrative, then, is not an essential quality of film, but only a potential and secondary quality arising from the production of time in the differentiation within and between frames.”

39
“By the same token, the cinematic event, as a process of perpetual change, does not depend on a prior external world.”

46
“The cyborg process that transforms living labor into fixed technologies allows the skills of all the dead to participate in the creativity of the present.” Black Book film idea
“The stolen labor of those lost, anonymous artisans comes back to life when the frame itself begins to move.”

66
“film’s visual coherence depends on suturing light, eye, and brain, optics, physiology, and psyche”

67
“The ending of the well-made film structures everything that went before.”

79
“if it is the case that a film is a product of social forces, then film scholarship cannot ignore the critical importance of individuation as a result of social process, however unwanted or illusory.”
“”If the artist’s work is to reach beyond his own contingency, then he must in return pay the price that, in contrast to the discursively thinking person, he cannot transcend himself and the objectively established boundaries”
“the passage through the individual author actually strengthens the claims of art to communicate the social, something it could not do if it were free of the individuation that so deeply marks contemporary society.”"
“”every idiosyncracy lives from collective forces of which it is unconscious”"

83
“Where the ancients disputed the necessity of ontegeny with theories of autocthony and parthenogenesis, since the birth of cinema we moderns maneuver at the unclear frontier between human and machine.”

85
“The idiosyncracy of the line as a trace of its maker and the idiosyncracy of infinitesimally graduated differences in interpretation are the social grounds on which cinema moves from the presentation of objects to the stimulation of concepts.”

97
“At some point in the near future when historians recognize that the photomechanical cinema is a brief interlude in the history of the animated image, representation will become, like narrative, a subcode of interpretation rather than an essence of motion pictures.” Because everything will be digital and everybody will be empowered to manipulate content if he wants to, the motion picture will not (and already isn’t) a representation of truth. If at all, it represents an idea of the creator(s), but not reality. Lessig’s focus on remix.

100
“A norm offers itself as a model for subsequent makers, a stable structure that can hold good for decades, like the three-minute pop song, or longer, like the Petrarchan sonnet. Norms legitimate particular practices and sanction deviations.” Many motion picture norms are being challenged at the moment!
“The double contingency of cinematic norms is indeed a function, as Parsons argued, of relations between interlocutors.”

101f
Definition Total Film:
“Total film aspires to bring to the audience a diegesis that can be understood, mentally appropriated, totally. By making the world a theme, it calls the audience to possess it as a whole, and to identify their thought with the world imaged on screen rather than with individual figures, though often enough a protagonist, Christ or Tom Cruise, will provide the rhetorical gateway through which absolute possession can be depicted.”

105
“Their fear was partly that the scale of investment required to wire hundreds of thousands of cinemas worldwide, coincident with global economic depression, would cause studios to go for the safest and most standardized forms of entertainment.”

110
“”the montage combination of a series of segments is not interpreted by the mind as a certain sequence of details, but as a certain sequence of whole scenes—and scenes, moreover, which are not depicted but arise within the mind in image form”"

114
“Eisenstein’s challenge in the years after the 1928 “Statement” is no longer to invent a dialectical form of cinema in which sound and image would, through their conflicts, produce an art form of an entirely new kind. Instead, total cinema must face the necessity of their coexistence and act as if with the knowledge that their struggle has already been resolved. At this stage, totality has been achieved by nominating music as the pinnacle of the sonorous hierarchy and the graphic, compositional line as the governor of the visual, thus finding in the analogy between the moving lines of melody and of graphical cinema the core of a newly harmonious and whole filmmaking practice.”

119f
“In some of his earliest writings Eisenstein had already decried narrative along with the star system and the individualist ethos of Hollywood. We should not be surprised that a director who once dreamed of making a film of Marx’s Capital should produce a film that takes the form of a well-formed thesis rather than a well-made play.”

129
“Sixty years later, the montage of effects has become the montage of affects, and total cinema serves no longer the needs of the anti-Nazi struggle, but the perverse desire for the simulacrum that permeates the contemporary blockbuster.”

143
“television, with its ability to transmit live, had usurped the critical priority of cinema. [...] broadcasting usurped the documentary role of cinema”

143f
“In any film, the diegetic world is often more cogent, more coherent than the everyday. When the film is a fiction, the diegesis will also be more symmetrical, more logical, and more just than we know our world of experience to be. As a result, something radically unstable filters into realist narrative diegesis, a competition between the demands of verisimilitude and those of formal elegance.”

149
“So realism runs between two risks.” “realism is “concerned to make cinema the asymptote of reality—but in order that it should ultimately be life itself that becomes spectacle, in order that life might in this perfect mirror be poetry, be the self into which film finally changes it.”" “”realism in art can only be achieved in one way—through artifice”, a “necessary illusion,” but one that “quickly induces a loss of awareness of the reality itself, which becomes identified in the mind of the spectator with its cinematographic expression”"

160
“Hollywood was trying, in the later 1930s, to image success.”
“Some studios did achieve something akin to a stable house style. The characteristic sound libraries built up by individual studios clearly marked their products with an authorial stamp.”
“Though RKO is often pointed out as uncharacteristic in that there was no single genre or stylistic language that singled out its product, its lack of house style and apparent disinterest in searching for one is typical of classicism.”

161f
“Films enact rather than depict social change, especially the evolution of media and communications technologies.”

162
“RKO’s task in the 1930s was to make new objects, to be ahead of the crowd while still in touch with them. It wanted to change cinema, not the world. RKO, like Hollywood in general, inherited a rapidly evolving consumer in the wake of the Jazz Age and the Depression, but it was happier following trends than assuming ideological leadership.” RKO was a bit like the first entarch might be soon.

163 footnote 2
“Sound-on-film technologies were seen as an extension of these existing technologies.” The technology was patented and hindered innovation. Freed from these hurdles sound evolved as an integral part of motion pictures, before it was just an extension. Today’s new technologies are used as extensions as well, but need to become integral parts of a bigger whole.

163
RKO (?): “Formed out of the combined strengths of the Film Booking Office (a small studio established by Joseph Kennedy) together with RCA (the radio division of General Electric) and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain, prime sites for film release in major cities, Radio-Keith-Orpheum had interests in telephones and telegraphy, music publishing and recording, the vaudeville circuit, and the NBC chain of radio stations. Not surprisingly, the company turned to the musical.”
“Flying’s [the movie Flying Down to Rio] most elaborate dance number is the Carioca, and one can imagine RKO’s flagship theater, the 6200-seat Radio City Music Hall, opened in 1932, encouraging visitors to take it up as the latest dance craze.”

164f
“Today, films take on postcinematic lives on television, cable, video, and DVD, and so live longer than the time it takes to make them, with important implications for their stylistics. But in the heyday of the Hollywood system, production was long and distribution mercilessly short. To exist in the arc light for those few burning hours lent the films something of their passionate innocence, their innocent criminality, the ease with which they evoked and dismissed poverty, disease, prostitution, addiction, and shame. Where Eisenstein sought to rouse in the name of the nation and Renoir bowed to the preeminence of the world, Hollywood had nothing to present but its own illusion. Its only value, the ground of its existence, was entertainment. Hence the mayfly brilliance of its films; hence their mayfly-brief life.”

166
“Altman and Williams both argue that recorded sound doesn’t reproduce a real world: it represents it. But the Hollywood soundtrack doesn’t even represent the world: it orchestrates a diegesis.”

169
“Sobchack’s point, or a part of it, is that we never see with any other than our own eyes save when we see through the eyes of the cinematic apparatus itself.” Not sure I understand.

183
“Narrative depends on symmetry-breaking: ultimately, there is narrative because the universe is expanding.”
“Through these distinctions and differentiations established by breaking the pure symmetry of zero, the chaos of becoming can be bound into stability.” Not sure I understand.

184
“repetition is primordial, and things or events repeat themselves as ever-renewed copies of an original that does not exist” In the end there are but a few original stories.

192
“With Leone’s 1960s Western cycle (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West), the European vision returned to the U.S. market in hybrid form: an Italian film based on a Japanese original made in Spain with German money and a Californian star.”

210f
“In its competition with television, its pursuit of adult themes and expanded horizons, greater explicitation and more persuasive spectacle, cinema in the 1960s abandoned classical restraint in favor of a televisualization of the profilmic. This is how time is metamorphosed in the new Hollywood, in accordance with its rival, sister medium.”

218
“The Wagnerian ambition for cinema to become a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total multimedia experience, has not been lost: it has been dispersed. The film offers only one part of an experience, the second part of which is provided by the soundtrack, promoted as a discrete item.”

218f
“Toys, computer games, fan fiction and Web sites, novelizations, comics, soundtrack and concept albums, fashion accessories, and collectibles, many of them manufactured by wings of the same horizontally integrated corporation, extended the reach of the event film while reducing the cinema premiere to the status of product launch for a raft of brands on a synchronized lifestyle marketing strategy.” -> entarch

242
“Contemporary cinema is more ambitious than contemporary philosophy, but neither undertakes to understand the universe any longer.”

247
“It is not, then, that the world has become simulation, but that cinema events have become spectacle, addressing atomized audiences intrapersonally, turning their gaze inward as the supposed triumph of consumerism decays into poverty, injustice, and ecological catastrophe.”

279
“What makes moving pictures move, as both affective and narrative devices, is conflict. Resolution of conflict may be commercially necessary, ideologically desirable, and rhetorically acceptable as a way of stopping that movement, but it is rarely the privileged moment that reveals the film’s motivations.”

301
“The concept of “culture,” like its offspring “tradition” and its parent “civilization,” today blocks rather than facilitates the communication of change.” -> painful creative destruction
“History films invite us to inhabit our own societies, cultures, and nations, but to do so they must construct all three. That is the history effect in cinema.”

333
“The task of cinema is to deliver audiences to films, and the task of audiences is to constitute films as objects of consumption.”

333f
“Buying the ticket and entering the auditorium are acts of surrender to the economic and filmic machinery of cinema. Watching (as opposed to necking or walking out) is a surrender to the film itself. Ethnographic research on film, however, is always after the fact, never conducted where spectatorship happens, in the cinema itself where any attempt to elicit a response ruins the experience it tries to capture. Cinema has its own uncertainty principle.” The difference between film and the film industry!

336
“Informationalization is the process through which economic domination becomes information domination.”

338
“”space and time becoming more and more expensive in the modern world, art had to make itself international industrial art, that is, cinema, in order to buy space and time”"

356
“Cinema responds by aiming not for endurance but for extension: to universalize itself in space, rather than to secure its survival in time. Here at last it becomes quite clear why special effects must always be cutting edge: because they are not designed to endure, merely to expand. In that expansion, they will form a void at their heart, a void that sucks in souls, in which the audience audiences, a singularity of blinding energy, in which existence is momentarily obliterated, that we call the sublime.” Not sure I understand.

360
“No technique is essentially avant-garde, progressive, or subversive: every technique is capable of becoming merely technical, a tool for further and repurposed productions.”

365
“Neither total nor infinite, the struggle for twenty-first-century cinema is the struggle for not yet finite, not yet infinite, ecological, human, and technological community. If beyond the dimensionless plenum of the commodity there is to be a cinema effect, it will arrive as an art of time, the struggle to construct what no one ever lost: the future.” Not sure I understand.

Chapter 8 in Thomas, PN et al ~ Intellectual Property Rights and Communications in Asia

130
“Copyright reform represents a point of convergence between political, social, cultural and economic forces.” see also p147

136
“A failure to recognise economic potential makes it more difficult to manage cultural activities so as to promote capacity building and value creation.” Like the film industry today: they don’t see how to make money without copyright, so they don’t develop ideas how to make money without copyright.
“In short, the political and ideological context in which China’s filmmakers must operate is preventing copyright from playing a larger role in the film industry’s value chain.”

137
“Copyright continues to be separated from the core problems of filmmaking in the minds of many Chinese directors.”

137f
“‘the biggest problem is not piracy but the system of censorship, and the second is that there is not a film market.’”

139
“[...] many studios do in fact choose to sell master copies to pirate distributors. [...] in order to recoup some money from the practice.”

147
“Copyright represents the convergence of several highly sensitive areas: media, law, economics, politics and ideology.”
“However, as the film industry demonstrates, copyright currently plays a relatively minor role in commercial decisions made by film producers. Censorship and distribution irregularities prevent copyright from functioning more prominently within the industry’s business model. Entrenched ditribution monopolies, outdated modes of rights trading and payment and failure to enforce existing laws are all undermining copyright’s role. Pervasive piracy means that distribution on DVD is barely worth considering as a revenue stream.”

Examined strategies for survival without IP:

• TV: advertising (142f), but that has collapsed, hasn’t it?
• Film: product placement + sale of music copyright (145), but is that anything new?

They compare the different cultures of the two production companies of The Truth About Marika, SVT (Swedish public service broadcasting) and The Company P.
The difference (and to some degree ignorance) between the two companies led to quite a few problems that ultimately lowered the quality of the consumer experience.

Good overview of The Truth About Marika.

The fact that the project played with consumers’ perception of what is real lead to quite some controversy.

“In the terminology of Cindy Poremba, Sanningen om Marika was a ’brink game’, a game in which the activities are so real that it cannot fully be considered to be just a game. The brink effect was created through the combination of the alternate game aesthetics, the emphasis on ‘pushing your personal boundaries’ inspiring participants to do things they might want to do but never would have done otherwise, and the lack of off-game.”

“The central goal of successful immersive game design is to communicate to players that a cage is in place, while making it as easy and likely as possible for the players to pretend that they don’t see the cage.” Quoting McGonigal.
“Sanningen om Marika did not achieve this effect, and as discussed above we do not believe that the producers intended it to. SVT wanted SOM to be deliberately confusing to television viewers, and P wanted to create a brink game experience.”
“The authors of this report believe that the effect [of not achieving McGonigal's effect] was both unfortunate and unethical. It was unfortunate because it made some potential participants afraid to participate, and created unnecessary conflicts between players and newcomers which in turn harmed the game experience for the players. It was unethical because it made some participants engage in a mission that they believed to be serious, and then made them very disappointed when it was not.”

10
“Sophisticated new technology always seems to provoke a flurry of wild and naive speculation about its effects.”

11f
“The technology alone does not create the use to which it is put: technology is implemented (or, as with most inventions, never implemented) according to the prevailing patterns of use into which it can be fitted, and according to the emerging forms of social organisation with which it can align itself.”

12
“TV lines up with (and inflects) the increasing domestic use of technology, the emphasis on home and family as site of consumption; cinema lined up with (and superseded) public forms of entertainment like vaudeville and music hall, the sites of public enjoyment and of the development of non-religious mass ideologies.”

16
TV & newspapers feed off each other.

24f
“The form of the entertainment film is one reason for the confusion between cinema and broadcast TV. The entertainment film can be broadcast on TV, hence it seems as though there is little real difference between the two media. Two immediate objections can be made to this assumption. First, a film on TV yields a very different experience to its viewer, unless that viewer is able to suspend the sense of watching TV and imagine instead the sense of being in a cinema. Second, it is not possible to show broadcast TV material in a cinema in the way that it is possible to show films on TV. Broadcast TV has developed its own forms, those of the serial and the series, which resist showing in the ‘single work’ form that cinema imposes.”

25f
“Cinema marketing sells two rather distinct things: the single film in its uniqueness and its similarity to other films; and the experience of cinema itself. Cinema and film are both sold at the same point, at the point of sale of an admission ticket. It is not the film that is sold at this point, it is the possibility of viewing a film or films; it is not cinema as an object that is sold, but cinema as an anticipated experience.”

26
“tickets are sold [...] on the expectation of pleasure.”
“What is bought in the cinema is the possibility of a pleasurable performance: the performance of a particular film and the performance of cinema itself, both together.”

26f
“Cinema in this way becomes a very precise urban experience, that of the crowd with its sense of belonging and of loneliness. Alternatively, cinema in smaller communities tends to perform a different function when most of the audience are acquainted with each other. Here the entertainment is related to particular characteristics of individuals or of the place itself. The film comes from outside, the cinema belongs to the particular place. However, such group experiences of cinema are becoming more and more rare, and cinema is now characteristically an urban phenomenon, [especially in Britain].”

27
“‘picture palaces’ [are] now the subject of nostalgic photo-books: simple brick shells decorated in bizarre and rich styles, and usually of a massive size to emphasise the grandeur of the cinematic experience.”

28
1920s: “The couple visiting the cinema during this period experienced cinema as an integrated succession of entertainments that went far beyond the simple experience of viewing a film together in a more or less anonymous crowd.”

30
“An idea of the film is widely circulated and promoted, an idea which can be called the ‘narrative image’ of the film, the cinema industry’s anticipatory reply to the question ‘What is this film like?’” => The narrative image is the promise -> the film is the realisation of that promise.
“Payment for a ticket is not an endorsement of a film, nor is it an endorsement of a particular performance of a film in a particular place. It is an endorsement of the narrative image of the film, together with the general sense of the cinematic experience.”
“Cinema demands single films, complete in themselves and distinct from other films.”

37
“The experience offered is one in which an individual film will complete the enigma of the narrative image. The experience of cinema that is offered is one of the public viewing of images with their supporting sounds. These images and sounds, viewed in the particular circumstances of the cinema, produce a particular kind of spectating that is intense and sustained.” Is this any different from TV / home cinema nowadays?

38-61
Ellis uses psychoanalysis to describe the relationship between cinema & viewer? Interesting, but I don’t agree.

38
Cinema is constructed in another time & place => absent from the place in which the viewing takes place => yet it is (very) present.

40
“Commercial cinema, in increasing its scale and scope as far as possible, tries to standardise its audiences to the same kinds of attention to the screen.”
In cinema everybody is alone and in near-darkness => particular kind of mental state: “a concentration of psychic activity into a state of hyper-receptivity”: dream-like, close to sleep => “what is seen is not subject to the usual expectations of plausibility that we apply to everyday life.”

41f
Cinema provokes identification with:

1. apparatus of projection (beam of light from projector = imagined beam of light from spectators’ eyes),
2. narcissistic identification with any figure on screen.

42
“[the] partial suspension of the judging function of the ego [is] necessary for the activities of day-dreaming and the construction of fantasies.” The ghost and the shell are not unified anymore -> one looks at oneself from the outside.

43
“Both dreaming and fantasy deal with fragmented and contradictory representations of figures” (oneself)

45
The spectator is looking at something that doesn’t look back at him = voyeurism.

47
Voyeurism is what constitutes the pleasure & fascination with cinema. I don’t agree, it’s about story.

50
“Gazing is the constitutive activity of cinema. Broadcast TV demands a rather different kind of looking: that of the glance. Gazing at the TV is a sign of intensity of attention that is usually considered slightly inappropriate to the medium.”
“As the conventions for the depiction of reality change, so audiences tend to deride what once was taken as ‘the real’ as being spectacular or a fake.” Perhaps why I don’t like classic films that much?

51
“entertainment cinema has been concerned [...] to play between the [spectacle and reality], to make the real spectacular and the spectacle plausible.”

53
“The cinema image is routinely more elaborate and detailed than the TV image.”

16
“we strive to construct out of a given audiovisual flow a causal goal oriented trajectory that starts at some point and reaches somewhere.”

17
“Cognitive constructivist narrative film theory maintains that narrative films deeply engage and sustain the attention of viewers/listeners since they allow them to construct coherent narratives leading to closure. That is why an overall continuous editing style, synchronized or otherwise cohering audiovisual formations, spatial constructions arranged around the logic of the narrative succession, narrative re-centering and closure have become tropes of popular mass film artifacts.”

21
“It is only because texts offer you a notion that they are going somewhere that you are willing to follow.” PoMos say there is no constant => that’s why PoMo books/films are frustrating to read/watch.

23
“avant-garde modernists presumed a centered self whose confidence they wished to reassess through alienating worldviews and respective textual strategies, whereas post-modernists often presume a computer determined de-centered and split self, whose non-confidence, distraction and alienation they reassure through neutralized split narratives projecting neutralized and inconsequential split worldviews.”

29
“Just like television, computerized interactive films need not replicate cinematic narrative strategies to engage attention.”
“Based upon constructivist narrative film viewing theories, I contend that for non-game, complex, multi-narrative aspiring, audiovisual interactive texts to be deeply engaging, the computerized ‘hyper-linked nature’ from which these works spring has to be consonant with, rather than alien to human cognitive, affective and sensual faculties.”
“For digital based films to generate deep cognitive, affective and sensual engagement rather than shallow distraction, the human cognitive strive for coherence must be taken into account.”

30
Major hyper-narrative split-attention stumbling blocks:

1. non-restriction of narrative threads,
2. incoherent transitions within and between different narrative threads,
3. non resolution of multi-threaded narratives.

31
“while the calculative power of computers may generate endless forking story possibilities, and while the philosophical, social or scientific implications of such narrative idea are intriguing, attempts to actually devise such a labyrinth will divert the viewer’s or interactors’ attention towards memorizing and puzzle-solving cognitive activities.” Films should not turn into puzzles!
“for hyper-narratives to be comprehensible, coherence within narrative threads and between them must be maintained.”

31f
Only give consumers choice at crucial points, points that have moral, survival, or emotional consequences (shoot or not, betray loving husband or not, etc.).

39-58
Interaction in hyper-narratives should not be an end in itself (like in many games which concentrate on skill acquisition) but be used to deepen the consumers’ engagement. Strategies to achieve that:

• primacy & recency
• interaction limited to crucial “what if” or “if only” moments
• look up

39ff
Contrary to psychoanalysis viewers do not identify themselves with protagonists, but empathise with them.

44f
“beyond restless distraction inhering in the possibility of change at will, why should the interactor care to change ‘at will’ if unpredicted change or the entertainment of ‘what if’ possibilities are what fascinates him/her in non-interactive narratives to begin with? Moreover, narrative change, when pre-meditated by the author, deeply engages the viewer, whereas if change is given into the hands of the interactor or the ‘poacher’, who cannot himself devise complex cohering trajectories, whether for lack of talent, knowledge, experience or time, the result will most certainly be shallow, distracting and game-like.”

46ff
Ben Shaul says that Jenkins says that film (narrative) & gaming are combinable, but that this would then lead to films comparable to slapstick or Bruce Lee where story only serves to link gags or fighting scenes. But perhaps Jenkins is not talking about the successor of film, but an additional genre/form?

50
“It seems therefore that interactive hyper-narratives should pay little attention to skill acquisition for that enhances a shallow gaming attitude, avoid automating interaction for that enhances redundancy, and refrain from offering intermittent gaming transitions between behavioral interaction and cognitive construction, for that arrests the engagement that dramatic narrative succession engenders.”

47
“environmental storytelling” -> Ben Shaul’s or Jenkins’ idea from First Person?

49
split attention = “[the] split between mastering the skills needed to perform effective interventions and his/her cognitive construction of the narrative trajectories.”

69
“what sustains our engagement and attention in narratives is a dramatic succession underlined by causal logic and a sense of moving towards a goal rather than spatial immersion.” 3D is nice, but not necessary for a narrative (film) to be successful. Yes, perhaps, but if you see cinema as an experience, then offering more may be better.
“amazement counters deep emotional and cognitive narrative engagement and generates split attention” Not sure about that!

78
“for reciprocal interfaces to be hyper- narrative engaging, they should lead to unexpected protagonist reactions and narrative developments.”

84
“Based upon a cognitive-constructivist approach to narrative and the viewer’s activity it has been suggested that film narrative is designed in such a manner that it rewardingly plays with the viewers’ strive to construct a cohering, intelligible, goal oriented trajectory out of the film’s audiovisual flow, by introducing surprises, distractions, diversions and postponements along the way. Moreover, cognitive and emotional viewer engagement results from the cumulative effect achieved by the narrative’s temporal dramatic succession of events that leads to closure.”

84f
“The book identified the points at which interactive hyper-narratives threaten narrative coherence, dramatic succession and closure. It then suggested feasible ways to turn these deficiencies into advantages. Hence, rather than allowing for the computer-enabled design of many intersecting narrative threads that lead to interactor cognitive confusion and disengagement, it has been suggested, following Bordwell’s analysis of ‘forking path’ narrative films (e.g., Run Lola Run), that optional narrative threads be restricted, and that transitions between narrative threads be confined to crucial decision points, arrived at after a causal coherent dramatic build-up and followed by a causal coherently built narrative thread. Moreover, the viewer should be allowed to construe meaningful interrelations between different threads, evoked through inter-narrative-thread temporal, spatial, action and character recurrence, parallelism or variation. Also, in order to overcome the disengagement and confusion posed by hyper-narrative transitions between options that lead to different outcomes, it has been suggested that the maintenance of a cumulative effect derived from a narrative temporal dramatic succession that leads to closure, can be achieved through the use of repetition and return to scenes where temporal constrains are introduced, and through using primacy and recency effects.”

85
“a rewarding and narrative-engaging design of the relation between the interactor’s behavioral action and its audiovisual figuration may be achieved when there is a coherent reciprocal correspondence between the figured audiovisual evolution and the type of behavioral action applied to this figuration.” Depending on how the consumer interacts with device/narrative, the narrative evolves/reacts differently.