Bill Buxton on the Future of Media
June 7, 2008 – 8:57 am
Bill Buxton is a researcher at Microsoft and and Acadamy award winner for his creation of Maya. The following is a paraphrased (and slightly augmented) version of his presentation:
Film is technology based. One may think it is an art, but emotion and chemistry on celluloid is no different than digital content on the web. The craft is different, the expectations and constraints are different. But every lens the filmmaker chooses is a technological decision.
Films used to be restricted to a highly selective group who had access to the technology required to make them. Now they can be done by average people. New media makes it possible to make a film differently. The creative is opening up, the technical opens more possibilities to more people, but the craft struggles to keep up.
How to keep up and evolve the craft of film making? Just gotta push this stuff, practice practice practice to get good, try stuff. Movies don’t have to be real, there are so many tricks and short cuts that technology offers you don’t have to be locked into the old expensive way of storytelling with film.
Technology might even be about creating such compelling storyboards and shot planning that you’ve already made a low res version of your story before you even get the funding to shoot the real thing. That way, one can mockup a really close version of the story with cheap technology, work it, hone it, perfect it before you go and shoot the expensive film sequences. New media can mean massive cost savings and efficiencies for traditional film making.
Today, electronic film making is computationally about as complex as music was a few decades ago. You can sample, remix, and create electronic video that is derived from other content to create a new product. And you can do it on your laptop today. You can be god and create any scene you want without having to rely on reality. For example: Pixeldust allows you to take out any moving content from existing film footage (say free stock footage) and use it as a background. Then overlay your film footage of your actors. It’s still all film, just remixed.
On another front, video games have taken narrative cues from film makers and made stories that are interactive and participant oriented like a spectator sport such as hockey. Story matters — its about the emotional engagement with people. And in this way, interactive is not limited to one player: others can get emotionally involved and the media can engage a crowd.
“The future is already here, its just unevenly distributed.” – William Gibson
The future of technology is already here, its just that not everyone gets it yet, and no one knows exactly how to use it yet. Its a gamble left to the artists to work out before it goes mainstream. New media right now manifests as folk instruments: amateur tools that allow people excluded from access to the real tools to try stuff out. Technology tends to bypass barriers to entry that have traditionally been used to ensure a closed exclusive group has control over maintaining a minimum quality of craft.
The challenge now is that new media engagement opens new possibilities to new people, many of whom do not have classical training in an artistic craft, and this changes the way we can effectively use the media. Most people make the mistake of translating stuff they know and throwing it up in the new domain. That doesn’t work. People easily get wrapped up in the problems, constraints, and limitations of the last technology (i.e television and movies) when addressing the new technology. And that doesn’t work. Gotta approach it fresh and the amateur has an advantage there. So do kids because they treat it for what it is, not how its like something else.
Microsoft Interactive Surface project – like the iPhone, but on a tabletop. Touch screen and interactive features make this table a part of the interface like the surface-ground relationship in art. Put your phone, or camera, or videocamera on the table and all the digital content from these devices is automatically displayed and connected in a transparent way. Content is not limited to the domain it originated from anymore — new media means that content is now transparent and transportable to any place and any device.
How do you tell stories now? How do you craft a message that can accommodate platform ambiguity? Stories no longer need to be linear. You don’t need to got to the theatre to see the story. And, you need to think differently and push these assumptions to be sucessful storyteller in the future.