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