From the Silver Screen to Cybercinema:
Applying Film Theory to Web-Based Interactive Design
Yoshiko Matsuda Burke (bio)
Digital Design Program
School of Design
University of Cincinnati
Abstract
As the time-based elements of video, audio and animation emerge as the dominant data elements of interactive web systems, designers are challenged to discover modular structures that immerse the user in navigable environments from which they derive a unique and rewarding narrative experience. This paper presents an approach to web-based interactive design that fuses the experimental techniques of early 20th century filmmakers with contemporary theories on engagement, user experience, and the programming capabilities of Adobe’s Flash software as a means by which digital designers can exploit the narrative possibilities inherent in the “new medium” of interactive web-based communication.
Introduction
Technological advancements in digital compression algorithms, computer processing speed, and the widespread acceptance of broadband Internet access have transformed the Web into a distinctly time-based medium, one capable of transmitting digital media to a global audience, on-demand and instantaneously. When its inherent advantages for delivering digital content are coupled with the aspect of user interactivity, the Internet represents a distribution channel positioned to deliver traditional filmic forms as densely textured, highly tiered, interactive audio-visual mosaics, one that is having an enormous impact on “the cinematic imaginary” (Shaw 2003). As digital video, audio, and animation emerge as the predominant structural elements of mediated, navigable cyber-environments, digital designers are challenged to explore concepts of interactivity as they relate to narrative form and structure. Beyond basic branching plot options and video game mazes, contemporary designers are now poised to create interactive forms that encompass “modular structures of narrative content which permit an indeterminate yet meaningful number of permutations” (Shaw 2003), forms that can potentially alter the ways in which stories are told–and more importantly–experienced by its audience.
Storytelling as a form of cultural expression has encompassed modes of discourse that range historically from the spoken word to the binary language of the computer age. Whether printed as words on a page or projected as images on a screen, the process of structuring and conveying elements of time, space, and human experience into a series of connected events that inform or entertain has become known as narrative design. A fundamental component of our human consciousness, it remains one of the oldest and most powerful experiences because it structures information in ways that allow us extract meaning and create knowledge (Shedroff 2001). The “transposability” of narrative has allowed it to transcend the formal differences of every successive form through which it has been expressed (Chatman 1978); yet the emergence of each new medium has spawned imaginative approaches to the way stories can be structured and disseminated: narrative techniques, codes and conventions that form a unique “language” by which it becomes accepted and understood. Early cinema met with skepticism and a lack of enthusiasm by audiences who reacted with bewilderment to the first movies they saw, unable to derive any meaning from its nascent form (Miller 2004); however, with time audiences became familiar with film’s basic elements of frame, shot, scene and sequence. Soon thereafter, cinematic techniques like parallel action, flashback, and montage were recognized as conventions and “film language” began its expansion into the elaborate and highly developed code of narrative explication and expression that exists within cinema today.
Contemporary narrative design is premised on the basic tenet that story structure is inherently linked to the method by which the story is told. In Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan correlated audience perception of information with its means of conveyance in his notably prophetic assertion, “the medium is the message” (1964). But a lesser-known, yet equally profound passage of that text was McLuhan’s acknowledgement “…the content of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph” (1964). McLuhan’s recognition that the representational power of one form is referenced to another provides the basis for a broader, more fundamental understanding of media design: that cultural media can never operate in isolation. This idea that emerging modes of communication function in a constant dialectic with older forms, continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other has led media theorist and practitioners to seek inspiration from their predecessors in order to explore and exploit the intrinsic narrative possibilities of each new form (Bolter & Grusin, 1999). In experiments designed to overcome the constraints of theatre, the Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein analyzed the novels of Dickens and Joyce, the poetry of Walt Whitman, Japanese scroll painting, Kabuki theatre, haiku poetry, and Disney cartoons “and in consequence his theory of montage and filmic experimentation grew more complex” (Kinder 2003). Media aesthetician and theorist Herbert Zettl examined the inductive approach to abstraction employed by the painter Wassily Kandinsky and his Bauhaus colleagues as a basis through which he deconstructed and analyzed the formal aesthetic elements used in contemporary television and film production (Zettl 1990).
Over the past century, as representational technology advanced and became a widely accepted part of popular culture, the dominant narrative form shifted from print to visual media. This transference took hold as the stationary mediated environments of photography became mechanically imbued with illusion of motion when sequenced over the newly added dimension of time and “cinema–a very particular regime of the visible–was born” (Manovich 2001). Now, at the onset of the 21st century, media theorist Lev Manovich has observed that “cinema is being poured into a computer” as part of “the shift of all culture to computer mediated forms of production, distribution and communication” (2001). Digital communication technology–with its vast reservoirs of storage media and random access–is now capable of instantaneously transmitting and manipulating massive data streams of digital video over the Internet.
Digital video distributed over the Internet is now reaching mass audiences; since its launch in February 2005, the web site YouTube.com now has over 100 million videos viewed every day and is visited by an estimated 72 million individuals each month (BBC 2006). Industry demand for compression technologies to deliver digital video at low bit rates without compromising quality is on the rise; revenue for digital video encoding reached five hundred million dollars in 2005 and is estimated to increase to nearly two billion dollars in 2012 (Goo 2006). The developing global infrastructure for broadband delivery of digital video is equally remarkable, with connections in the United States–the world's largest market–currently estimated at fifty-one million. Broadband subscriptions in China are growing at a staggering seventy-nine percent annually; by 2010 its number of broadband households will reach one hundred and thirty million (Newswire Today 2006).
The potential for video distribution via the Internet has not gone unnoticed by the electronic media industry. In October of 2006, Web search company Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion. In November 2006, CBS uploaded more than 300 clips to YouTube.com that averaged about 850,000 views per day in the first month and resulted in an increase of ratings to its late-night programs adding 5 percent or 200,000 new viewers. Subsequently, CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith gleefully observed, "Professional content seeds YouTube and allows an open dialogue between established media players and a new set of viewers” (Reuters 2006).
Although these recent developments exploit the Internet’s capacity to expand distribution channels for existing media genre, they do not challenge the medium to discover its own native narrative form, one that utilizes its most intrinsic quality–interactivity. In his introductory chapter to Future Cinema: the Cinematic Imagery after Film, Jefferey Shaw has envisioned “a new poetics of narrative” being afforded by the emerging digital technologies through “the conception and design of narrative techniques that allow the interactive and emergent features of the medium to be fulfillingly embodied” (2003). Shaw has acknowledged the Internet’s capability to further the “evolution of the traditions of independent, experimental and expanded cinema” only if the aspect of interactivity is used to transform the traditional spectator-spectacle relationship of film and television (Shaw 2003).
The traditional cinematic narrative model is theorized as a chain of events in cause and effect relationship occurring in time and space, where plot is the author’s organization of those events over time. Like its cinematic predecessor, web-based interactive narrative unfolds as a time-based experience, yet its development occurs in an environment in which the user can affect or change the plot. Traditional film–like literature–is comprised of fixed narrative components stored in finite media that must be experienced in a linear manner in order for the reader/viewer to yield the intended meaning of its creator. Stored digitally rather than in a fixed form, interactive media elements maintain their separate identities and can be assembled into numerous sequences under the user’s control. In this interactive context, designers are far more like architects than writers as the story can change in response to user input, altering its outcome and meaning (Meadows 2003). This collaborative environment subverts the passive, voyeuristic role in which audiences experience traditional time-based narrative media and now “the window into a fictional world of a cinematic narrative has become a window into a datascape” (Manovich 2001).
As web-based, interactive media emerges as a narrative form, the legacy of contextualization and experimentation continues as digital designers search for appropriate media antecedents to aid them in creating narrative structures that exploit and enhance the capacity of their medium. In Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Butler and Richard Gruslin have defined a medium as “that which appropriates the techniques, forms and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (1999). They concluded, “What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (Bolter & Grusin, 1999). Lev Manovich, in The Language of New Media used the history and theory of cinema as a conceptual lens “to map out the logic driving the technical and stylistic development of new media” (2001). Manovich has predicted that cinema will serve as the language through which future global audiences experience new media; its recognizable codes and conventions functioning as a “toolbox” for all cultural communication, transcending barriers and integral to its understanding:
A hundred years after cinema’s birth, cinematic ways of seeing the world, of structuring time, or narrating a story, of linking one experience to the next, have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data. (2001).
Marsha Kinder, whose artistic collaborative, the Labyrinth Project, produced a number of critically-acclaimed interactive narratives including Bleeding Through Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 and The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River has observed, “the best way to realize the full potential of a new medium is to explore productive analogies with a wide range of earlier forms” (2003). She has cited the historic contextualization employed by Eisenstein as influential in her decision to correlate interactive narrative techniques with prior cinematic work “because I strongly believe that the advancement of any medium can be greatly accelerated by new applications of experimentation from the past” (Kinder 2003).
During the 1920s, cinema –like the modern Internet–was a medium of discovery. Early film movements shaped the principles of filmic form with various approaches to narrative structure, the treatment of screen space, shot sequencing and camera perspective. But despite cinema’s rich heritage of technological and creative diversity, it was ultimately the American Hollywood film movement that came to define its methods of production and distribution, technological apparatus and narrative forms. Hollywood’s hegemony standardized the filmic aspect ratio, seamless continuity editing, and sequential narrative. By 1930, it had marginalized many of the other experimental approaches (Bordwell & Thompson 1986). Some eighty years later, the marginalized techniques of certain early experimental filmmakers are once again being considered as appropriate models for a new medium in a comparable stage of defining itself. Manovich’s historical contextualization of narrative conventions has encompassed the early cinematic movements of French Impressionism, German Expressionism, and Soviet Montage as models for structuring new media. He finds strong historical ties between new media and such avant-garde films; their approach reflecting the “social logic” of contemporary post-industrialized society “which values individuality over conformity,” rather than the “logic of the factory” used in the standardized mass production of movies by classical “Hollywood” cinema (Manovich 2001). Contemporary media theorists have argued, “the hegemony of Hollywood’s movie-making modalities is increasingly being challenged by the radical new potentialities of the digital media technologies…” (Shaw 2003). In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin maintained that the “remediation” of past forms could span the space of cultural history to refigure the future, “One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form aspires to effects which could be full obtained only with a changed technological standard, that is to say, in a new art form” (1969).
As the elements of cinematic perception, language, and reception transition into the realm of new media, students in the Digital Design program at the University of Cincinnati are using the experimental theories of the early twentieth century filmmakers Abel Gance and Dziga Vertov as the “conceptual lens” through which they devise interactive web-based “storytelling systems.” In each case, the students are exploring myriad structural and experiential configurations as they link historical cinematic approaches with contemporary ideas on interface design, audience engagement, user experience and interactive narrative form:
- Eisenstein’s montage theory with database narrative;
- Gance’s approach to split screen with spatial narrative; and,
- Vertov’s “Kino Eye” manifesto with immersion in navigable space
These narrative systems are designed to immerse the user in an exploratory environment from which they derive a unique and rewarding experience via their interaction with thematically related database ingredients in the form of digital video, animation and audio clips. In each case these new media objects are controlled by the user via the interactive programming capabilities of Adobe’s Flash software. However, while exploring these filmic paradigms, each student must distinguish notions of audience engagement in the traditional cinematic narrative–where the creator has control over all aspects of the story–from that of interactive narrative, where absolute control over narrative development is willingly relinquished by the creator in order to enhance interactivity and user engagement.
Sergei Eisenstein: Montage
“In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations of Goethe (1828)
With these words Sergei Eisenstein began his 1931 essay, A Dialectic Approach to Film Form. An ardent Marxist, Eisenstein believed that art was always in dialectic conflict according to its social mission, its nature and its methodology (Eisenstein 1957). Eisenstein developed his style of montage editing in the early 1920s as part of the Soviet State Film School along with his contemporaries Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov. Eisenstein and his colleagues differed from Western film theorists who viewed the individual shot as the basic structural unit of filmic sequences. The Soviet School theorized that film does not exist in individual shots, but rather through their combination, their sequence: through editing into a whole (Bordwell & Thompson 1986). In his early films–Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925), and October (1928)–Eisenstein applied classical Marxist/Hegelian dialectic principles of opposition and conflict to his use of montage editing, which he considered “the ultimate statement in filmic language” (Eisenstein 1957).
Eisenstein cut his films for maximum collision from shot to shot and sequence to sequence, making the edits “not only perceptual, but also emotional and intellectual; his aim nothing less than to alter the audience’s total consciousness” (Bordwell & Thompson 1986). Eisenstein’s belief in dialectic montage was in deliberate opposition to Hollywood’s continuity editing, a technique based on the transparency of edits and a presumed passive audience. Instead, he actively challenged the audience to apply intellectual closure to his sequences, whose ultimate meaning could only be derived through the juxtaposition of each individual shot. Eisenstein believed that, given two distinct and perhaps apparently unrelated shots, the audience would “generate for themselves a way of reading the two images together or in terms of each other” (Kawin 1992).
By the end of the 1920s, Eisenstein’s use of montage came under increasingly disapproving scrutiny by the Soviet political forces. The Soviet Montage period came to the end in the early 1930s, replaced by a new artistic policy called Socialist Realism. Eisenstein continued his work on montage, producing a number of notable films such as Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Ivan the Terrible (1945), until his death in 1948. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) has since become his most influential montage film, especially its Odessa steps sequence, which has been praised as one of finest spectacles in film history. Although Eisenstein’s influence can be seen in many famous Hollywood films like Alfred Hitchcock’s shower sequence in Psycho (1960) or Brian De Palma’s remake of the Odessa Steps sequence in The Untouchables (1987), his vision for montage editing as an extension of social, ideological and intellectual process that would reshape the syntax of cinema has yet to be fully realized.
Montage, Database Narrative and Interactivity
Whereas the Hollywood “cinematic experience” subjugated all aspects of cinematography and editing to the primacy of its narrative, Eisenstein conceived of The Battleship Potemkin (1925) as an editing construct. Rather than presenting the film as a seamless whole, he emphasized Potemkin’s distinct elements: five opposing sections, each subdivided again into colliding segments comprised of individual juxtapositions of contrasting images (Lehman and Luhr 1999). Rather than subordinate it to the outline of a narrative, Eisenstein’s editing patterns form the basis for Potemkin’s underlying ideological theme: principles in opposition (Bordwell & Thompson 1986). Based more on juxtaposition than conventional dramaturgy, the narrative structure of Potemkin “roams freely through time and space to construct an intricate pattern of images calculated to stimulate the viewer’s senses, emotions, and mind” (Bordwell & Thompson 1986). In conceiving Potemkin, Eisenstein understood that “despite his control over the dialectic montage of visual and audio attractions in the films, the resulting collisions took place not on screen or in the celluloid but in the mind of the spectator” (Kinder 2003).
Inasmuch as Eisenstein conceived the narrative framework of his films, the digital designer must also view the interactive story as constituent components of a system rather than a fixed linear narrative in order to fully understand and exploit its intrinsic potential. In a very real sense the “interactive narrative” is not a literal narrative at all, but rather a repository of narrative possibilities, a “database” existing within the framework of a conceptual interface. The database—with its buttons, media clips, images, text and sounds—is at the heart of the interactive narrative design process. Manovich has viewed the database as a “symbolic form of the computer age, a new way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world” (2001). In database narrative, the interactive user constructs the narrative trajectory, choosing which media objects to display or which paths to follow, linking the elements in a particular order. Through the process of selecting and juxtaposing images, sounds, animation and text the user takes on a role similar to that of the traditional film editor. The deliberate engagement of the user represents a break from cinematic “auteur theory,” in which the director is perceived by the audience as “injecting a personal artistic vision into a film or television program” (Butler 1994). Although the traditional film audience is able to understand cinematic language, it cannot speak it (i.e., make films) (Manovich 2001). Given that all computer users can speak the language of the interface, the goal of the interactive designer is not to “author” the story, but rather to encourage the user to “construct” or “edit” the work.
Despite its formal differences, Marsha Kinder has envisioned a “productive dialogue between the language of cinema and the interactive potential and database structures of the new media” (2003). She categorizes all new media work produced by the Labyrinth Project as database narratives, “whose structure exposes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and are crucial to language: Certain characters, images, sounds, events and settings are selected from a series of categories and combined to generate specific tales” (Kinder 2003). Once these categories are identified and the task of what database element to retrieve is defined, the interactive user is “launched on a narrative quest with motives and consequences” (Kinder, 2003). This interactive narrative process should be linked to a concept that connects the project’s database ingredients, its navigational activity and the project interface. Jeffrey Shaw, in his introductory chapter to Future Cinema: the Cinematic Imagery after Film, has termed these types of systems as “recombinatory narratives” that “embrace the idea of an unascertainable complexity of path options, leading to an unforeseeable patterning of narrative conjunctions” (2003). Yet these are not chaotic systems, “each one has a meta-narrative identity embodied both in its selection materials and in the underlying algorithms that determine manifold combinatory permutations. It is here that the unique artistic definition of each work is being articulated” (Shaw 2003).
Students in the Digital Design program are examining the cinematic concept of montage as theorized by the experimental Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein as the structural foundation for defining when and how datum can be transformed from mere information to narrative components. Eisenstein’s models for juxtaposition, collision and association form the basis by which the user can conceptually derive a “tertium quid” or third something greater than the sum of individual data ingredients: the images and sounds. In utilizing this recombinant process, the user should experience a narrative outcome that is figurative, evocative and unique.
In his web-based interactive narrative Thoughts, University of Cincinnati Digital Design student Matt Broerman employs Eisenstein’s model of montage as the foundation by which the interactive user transforms individual datum, in the form of digital image, video and sound clips, into narrative sequences that develop in a decidedly non-linear manner. Through the use of Flash Actionscript programming language, Broerman allows the user to sequence the visual and audio clips by either association or collision to create a sense of dialectic. Through this user-initiated process, the narrative outcome is less literal and a more abstract, mood-provoking result can be obtained. In Thoughts Broerman utilizes a user-centered focus toward interaction design, first defining the specific user experience objectives–what they will ultimately think or feel as a result of interacting with the system. These objectives link the conceptual and structural framework of the entire project–its database elements, navigational items and interface.
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Figure 1. Thoughts |
Figure 2. Thoughts |
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Thoughts tells the fictional story of Alex Winters, a young man who has recently been committed to a mental institution following the divorce of his parents. This expository information is revealed in first-person narration during the intro movie. As we see the “State Evaluation for Admission” papers layered over a rear view of a human head with an exposed brain (Figure 1), we hear Alex, “These days I just don’t know...I felt forgotten when my parents split up…” As the evaluation form is torn away, we see photos of Alex and his parents fly over the “Criteria for Commitment” form with the “Mentally Ill” and “Dangerous to Self” boxes both checked (Figure 2). Alex continues, “My moments of happiness are few and far between…I’ve got so many thoughts just running through my head…” At this point the title “Thoughts” is superimposed over the exposed brain and the user can hit the “Enter” button to go to the Main Selection page (Figure 3).
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Figure 3. Thoughts |
Figure 4. Thoughts |
This expository sequence is linked to the project’s user experience objectives: building a strong sense of identification between Alex Winters and the user. Broerman’s concept is to create an engaging narrative experience where the user selects and edits various thoughts and feelings from a database of movie clips to create different thoughts and memories for Alex, and perhaps themselves. In essence, it allows the user to get inside Alex’s head–quite literally. The interface reinforces those objectives–it is Alex’s exposed brain. As the user positions the mouse over various parts of Alex’s brain, memories and feelings such as “childhood, love, death, sadness, relaxation, happiness, fear and family” appear as designated areas. At the top of the screen, the user is invited to “Drag the Brain to Build Your Own Thoughts.” When the user drags pieces of the brain into the timeline, they are transformed into movie clips that the user assembles in an order of their choice (Figure 4).
Broerman’s system interface thematically links to the project’s concept, but its navigational elements also connect the objective realities of the design environment with the subjective realities of the user—their thoughts, memories, and emotions. The use of visual metaphors here help to create pictures in the mind of the user “by appealing to people’s perception–sight, sound, touch, and kinesthesia–as well as triggering their memories” (Rogers, Sharp and Preece, 2002). Metaphor, contrast and repetition are all used as non-literal alternatives that create navigational choices tied to the subjective elements that enrich the user experience.
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Figure 5. Thoughts |
Figure 6. Thoughts |
Each clip is made up of familiar images and sounds that connote feelings–a mother and child, family members at the dinner table, nervous eye movement, a hearse, a gravestone–and are represented in various parts of the brain. Each clip reminds us of Alex’s past and perhaps our own. Once the user has drug several clips to the timeline, they are invited to hit the “start thinking” button to display the sequence of memories they have created in the “thought windows” inside the brain (Figure 5). The user can add audio clips to supplement the mood. Once the user determines the audio that best suits their memories, they can hit the “remember” button to re-experience the set of memories they have created (Figure 6). Here Broerman allows the user the aspect of variability in the sequences they create, one that would not be possible with a modular digital structure.
Database elements and navigational items are linked thematically and structurally to the user experience goals. Movie clips–the database elements–are kept short and fast, just like fleeting thoughts. All text and headlines are direct references to thinking or the brain (i.e. “lobotomy” deletes all clips from the timeline and returns you to the beginning, “remember” replays the movie). To execute the user’s creation of the “memory” sequence, small examples of all the movie clips are set off-stage. As the user chooses clips, a variable in the Flash Actionscript is set (i.e. movieA, movieB). Once the user hits “start thinking,” the correct clip, based off of the previous variable, is duplicated to the stage in the correct position and scale. Once the first clip is done playing (movieA), the frame jumps forward to query the “movieB” variable and determines that movie clip, and so on through “movieE.” Given that the media objects are stored digitally, rather than in a fixed medium they are able to “maintain their separate identities and can be assembled into numerous sequences under program control. In addition, because the elements themselves are broken into discrete samples, they can be created and customized on the fly” (Manovich 2001.) Corresponding with Eisenstein’s montage theory, the variable sequencing and juxtaposition of the clips in the timeline can alter the meaning of each narrative sequence, creating a unique and satisfying set of experiences for the user.
The second student project, by Nick Mitrousis, is entitled, Synthesis (Figure 7). His concept is based on the Eisenstein’s idea of dialectic opposition, whereby thesis and antithesis are juxtaposed to form a “tertium quid,” or third something that cannot be experienced in the individual components, thus allowing the user to derive a new or unexpected meaning (Zettl 1973). Synthesis allows the user to build narrative sequences through the selection and juxtaposition of video clips, transition effects and musical audio clips. The data ingredients are grouped into two opposing categories, “natural” and “artificial.” Both sets of video clips are kinetic and involve some form of movement within the frame or by the frame of the camera itself. The “natural” clips include shots of natural scenes: gentle waves of water and low-angle tracking shots of a forest. The “artificial” clips are of man-made artifices: moving subway trains or shots of city traffic at night from the perspective of a moving automobile.
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Figure 7. Synthesis |
Figure 8. Synthesis |
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Mitrousis creates an aesthetically unified visual design that contributes to the user experience–enhancing the thematic environment, reinforcing the structure, and clarifying the options available to users. The interface for Synthesis is centered on the metaphorical theme of connected molecules, connoting the idea that through the construction of these sequences the user is fusing disparate components and engineering new, recombinatory entities. Icons, buttons and menus are all thematically related to the overall concept and goals of the user experience. The text and graphical interface elements have a scientific look resembling a periodic table of elements The visually pleasing composition draws the attention of the user, conveying a positive message clearly and quickly–it attracts, motivates and directs.
In Synthesis, Mitrousis constructs an interface that ties into Jefferey Shaw’s concept of “content characterizations that would permit the automatic generation of narrative sequences that the user could be modulate, for instance by using a genetic module of selection” (2003). Here the user can drag the “natural” and “artificial” clips to the sequence interface, which is the nonlinear editing timeline, thus creating a sequence that has a new meaning, or “synthesis,” each time, based on the order they have chosen. Additional layers of visual effects and sound effects can be applied to the individual or multiple clips in the sequence interface to further alter the meaning (Figure 8 and 9). Clips can be juxtaposed or layered onto each other in the timeline. Information for the effects is stored in an array structure where each effect is indexed. Array is a high-level programming structure that holds multiple values that are referenced by an indexed number. On the right hand side of the interface are three buttons: “transcribe, delete and synthesize.” Dragging the data ingredients to the “transcribe” button allows the user to preview the movie clip. The delete button can be used to remove clips from the timeline. Pressing the synthesize button opens a large viewing molecule that allows the user to watch their narrative sequence as an endless loop (Figure 10). Closing this window takes the user back to the project’s interface to build new sequences.
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Figure 9. Synthesis |
Figure 10. Synthesis |
By encouraging this aspect of choosing and sequencing by the user, the collaborative environment of Synthesis “fractures the perspectives of the individual author, places new perspectives in the hands of the readers, and accommodates a relationship between reading and writing” (Meadows 2003).
Abel Gance: Split-Screen and Spatial Narrative
“The frame makes the image finite. From an implicitly continuous world, the frame selects a slice to show us…. Just as painting before it, cinema presented us with familiar images of visible reality — interiors, landscapes, human characters — arranged within a rectangular frame.”
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David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art (1986)
Peter Lunefeld, in The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, credits the twentieth century as “the century when the screen became an integral part of the industrialized world” (1999). However, in April 1927 at the Paris Opéra, the French film director Abel Gance challenged conceptions of cinematic screen space when he utilized three projectors and a forty-foot wide triptych of three side-by-side screens to project the last eighteen minutes of his epic silent masterpiece, Napoleon. Gance had filmed several scenes with three cameras with the intention of creating the long continuous panorama, a technique, which he called “Polyvision.” During the editing of Napoleon, Gance realized that by projecting three different images side-by-side, "here was a new alphabet of cinema. I had only to create the grammar” (Brownlow 1983). Gance used the greatly expanded screen space for both vast panoramas that spilled over all three screens and triptych images that splintered the screen into simultaneous and parallel imagery.
Polyvision’s wide-screen process immersed the audience in a dense visual filmic space and subverted the passive spectacle-spectator relationship of cinema by encouraging saccadic eye movement through which the audience could concentrate on one particular frame or scan the many different screens simultaneously, allowing the “freedom of the spectator to choose his own interpretation of the object or event” (Bazin 1967). Gance viewed this technique as one that would reshape cinema, "It will become a universal language if you make the effort to try to read the new letters which, little by little, it adds to the alphabet of the eyes" (Kawin 1992). But even though Gance’s “music of light” predated technical innovations such as wide-screen cinema by a quarter of a century and influenced generations of influential filmmakers and video installations artists, it was an impractical format for mass distribution–its innovative treatment of vast narrative space eventually subordinated by standardized aspect ratios and its split-screen replaced by single images sequentially projected on a single screen. For decades to come, Gance’s theory of co-existent images–the spatial narrative–would become marginalized by the widespread acceptance of the more conventional paradigm of the burgeoning film industry, the sequential narrative.
Gance’s legacy of split-screen spatial narrative briefly reemerged in Hollywood during the late 1960’s with Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler (1968) and Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). Contemporary films that have included split-screen techniques include: Mike Figgis’ Timecode (1999), Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1999), and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000). In each of these films the use of multiple frames is not an aberration, but an integral component of the film’s narrative syntax, heightening tension or drawing contrast and connection through action happening to different characters at the same time. Although these films were successful–both critically and commercially–Gance’s vision of split-screen as a dominant narrative form may yet be fulfilled in another medium: the emerging medium of web-based interactive cinema.
Split Screen, Spatial Narrative and Interactivity
To the early film critics who found his Polyvision technique confusing and laborious, Abel Gance once wrote, "Do me the favor of believing that maybe your eyes do not yet have the visual education necessary for the reception of the first form of the music of light" (Kawin 1992). Gance’s insight into the necessity of visual education is now frighteningly prophetic as contemporary culture navigates through a multi-windowed world of computers, televisions, cell phones, iPods, kiosks, DVD players and navigation systems. Lev Manovich has argued that “spatialization–privileging space over time,” has resulted in postmodern culture as computer media “replaced sequential storage with random access storage” (2001).
Gance’s model of split screen is an ideal model for the emerging genre of spatial interactive narrative. Birk Weiberg, in Beyond Interactive Cinema, has found the temporal structure of cinematic sequential narrative to be one-dimensional and insufficient for interactive narrative where information can be structured in multiple dimensions, “Time is usually too abstract and dysfunctional as an interface to databases, while a spatial construction seems more appropriate” (2002). Like Gance’s Polyvision, spatial narrative in an interactive context is premised on Manovich’s principle of “the aesthetics of density” (2003), where multiple media objects are presented to the user in an interactive exploratory environment and “the logic of replacement, characteristic of cinema, gives way to the logic of addition and co-existence. Time becomes spatialized, distributed over the surface of the screen” (Manovich 2003). Interactive spatial narrative requires that the designer view the story as constituent elements of a system, where all media elements are accessible to the user, rather than a fixed linear narrative. In doing so, the designer must construct a repository for the components that will eventually comprise the narrative experience for the user–the system database.
The Odds of a Student’s Life, an interactive we-based narrative by University of Cincinnati Digital Design student Sabine Koth, is based on the idea of split screen and spatial interactive narrative. It follows the somewhat comic story of Ralf and Stephan, two Austrian exchange students and roommates at an unnamed American university as they struggle to avoid expulsion and ultimately enjoy time with their friends. The story begins as the user is given the perspective of an intruder who enters their rather messy apartment (Figure 11). Once inside, the user is in an exploratory environment where they must interact with objects in order to advance the story. By interacting with the various objects in the room, the user is able to draw expository information about the narrative and our two characters. By clicking on the hat rack we learn that Ralf–raised with three sisters and former roommate of two female artists–is convinced he knows all the thoughts of women and is obsessed with his wardrobe (Figure 12). Clicking on the basketball foreshadows conflict, as we learn that Stephan’s schoolwork has been less than stellar and that Ralf and their friend Diego “never stop partying with Stephan” (Figure 13).
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Figure 11. The Odds of a Student’s Life |
Figure 12. The Odds of a Student’s
Life |
By selecting a magazine on the floor, the user is greeted with a full-screen with the headline “You have entered the apartment of Stephan and Ralf. They are videotaping their life in the United States. Have a closer look at the computer screens.” Once the user clicks on the dual monitors, they begin to discover much more about our characters as recorded footage about Ralf and Stephan begins to play and our story unfolds (Figure 14). Koth utilizes dual streams of interactive video as we follow the parallel actions of Ralf and Stephan in multi-screen format throughout the narrative. This format is consistent with Manovich’s belief that “the next generation of cinema — broadband cinema — will add multiple windows to its language. When this happen, the tradition of spatial narrative which twentieth century cinema suppressed will re-emerge once again” (2003). Here the simultaneous streams of imagery serve to heighten the interactive aspect of the user experience by engaging them and allowing them to choose, as Gance did, which part of the frame to watch at any point in time.
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Figure 13. The Odds of a Student’s Life |
Figure 14. The Odds of a Student’s
Life |
The two screens show dual video streams of our two main characters in different rooms or different locations, with each monitor occasionally dividing into split screen (Figure 4). Koth also manipulates the constricting idea of frame space by allowing the characters to occasionally cross over screens in absolute synchronization (Figures 15 and 16). In citing models for web-based narrative systems, Shaw has suggested that an ideal feature for exploiting the medium’s capacity for interactivity is the “design of content characterizations that would permit the automatic generation of narrative sequences that the user could modulate” (2003). In The Odds of a Student’s Life, the user is given that level of interactivity and control. Buttons on the monitors allow the user to control sound volume, and to move to various narrative plot points (previous, next, forward, rewind) where Flash Actionscript instantaneously regenerates the next narrative module in the form of an .swf file containing the video clips.
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Figure 15. The Odds of a Student’s Life |
Figure 16. The Odds of a Student’s Life |
The narrative unfolds as Stephan and Diego try to hack into the university’s computer system, calm Diego’s frantic mother and ultimately meet with the Dean in their quest to be removed from the “expelled list.” At the same time, Ralf is busy planning a party and trying on various outfits. At each stage in the narrative the user is given a number of different narrative path selections, controlling what the characters should do and where they should go next. This again automatically regenerates a new streaming video clip. As the user advances through the spatialized environment, their interaction with the system helps them achieve a sense of agency, “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices,” and one of the aesthetic principles and characteristic pleasures in digital environments and interactive narrative (Murray 1997). The narrative resolution for The Odds of a Student’s Life comes in the form of the party that Ralf has planned, whether the user chooses to have the Dean expel Stephan and Diego or not. During the party, the user can click on any of the attendees to see close-ups of them in the other monitor (Figure 16).
Dziga Vertov: Subjective Camera and Camera Mobility
“I am eye. I am a mechanical eye…. I free myself from today and forever from human immobility. I am in constant movement”
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Dziga Vertov, Kinoks Revolution Manifesto (1923)
Historically, filmmakers have experimented with the concept of “first-person” camera or “subjective” perspective since the inception of motion pictures. In the formative days of filmmaking, keyholes, binoculars, and other apertures were often used to motivate an on-screen character’s viewpoint. A “first-person” camera perspective, often referred to as a “point-of-view” shot, unites the gaze of the camera, actor, and audience. This state of visual unity can induce increased excitement in the viewing audience by placing them inside the dramatic circle of action while building a strong sense of identification with on-screen characters. Throughout the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov's 1929 experimental documentary Man With the Movie Camera, the audience sees images of the cameraman as he is filming, what they are seeing. But instead of simply documenting objective reality, Vertov transforms it through the cinematic technique he called “Kino-Eye,” through which he “fuses the recording glance of the camera with the eye of the spectator” (Daniel 2002). The concept of “Kino-Eye” is utilized as the film’s underlying principle and represented visually at several points in the film by the iconic image of a human eye reflected in the lens of a camera. Vertov’s visual approach to “Kino-Eye” utilizes camera mobility, placing the lens at perilously high angles and dynamic low angles, moving it through the heart of crowded cities and thrusting it into extreme close-up. Throughout Man With the Movie Camera, Vertov reflexively restages his discovery of the "Kino-Eye" method for spatially decoding the world and “along with him, we gradually realize the full range of possibilities offered by the camera. Vertov’s goal is to seduce us into his way of seeing and thinking, to make us share his excitement, as he discovers a new language for film” (Manovich 2001).
Dziga Vertov began producing documentary footage at the age of twenty, when he was placed in charge of all Soviet newsreels of World War I. Following the war, Vertov, his brother Mikhail, and his future wife and film editor Elisaveta Svilova, formed the Kinoks, meaning “cinema-eyes.” The Kinoks insisted that the cinema of the future be the cinema of fact–newsreels recording the real world, as “life caught unaware” (Bordwell & Thompson 1986). Vertov expounded the idea of film truth and the superiority of the camera over the human eye, holding that film could uncover “a truth not perceptible to the naked eye” (Vertov 1926). Vertov also advanced Kino-Eye as a true Marxist method by which one could organize visual chaos into a coherent, objective set of pictures that “record visual phenomena so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten” (Bordwell & Thompson 1986).
Although the Kinoks rejected “stage cinema,” Vertov had been influenced by the French Impressionists’ use subjective camera and frame mobility. The Impressionists, including Gance, felt that if the camera was to represent the perspective of an on-screen character’s eyes, it should move with the ease of a person. To achieve that effect they strapped their cameras to carousels, cables, pendulums, bobsleds and locomotive cowcatchers. Lev Manovich has observed that Man With the Movie Camera is structured around the camera’s “active exploration of city spaces, and not only because it fetishizes the camera’s mobility. Vertov wanted to overcome the limits of human vision and human movement through space to arrive at more efficient means of data access” (2001). In Man With the Movie Camera, Vertov mounts the camera on the roof of city buildings, underneath passing locomotives, and on moving automobiles, thus enabling audiences to take a journey through different spaces without leaving their seats.
As techniques for improved mobile camera support developed in the early twentieth century, camera movements (pans, tilts, dollies, zooms and tracking shots) became an alternative to the controlled, formalistic approach of sequential narrative, where editing provided instantaneous perspective shifts via “cuts” to different camera angles and points of view. Moreover, it became impossible not to see camera movement as a substitute for movement by the viewer. The immersive viewpoint of the roving camera eye served as a surrogate for the audiences’ eyes and attention, symbolizing the state of being there. But even as pioneering filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles championed the expanded use of exploratory camera movements as a method for counteracting editing and engaging the audiences’ imagination, it also became subjugated to sequential narrative and its reliance on the conventions of editing to switch between different viewpoints, shifting an assumed passive audiences’ attention from shot to shot and providing the viewer with a “scarcity of images” (Manovich 2003) in its screen space. Vertov's concept of linking subjective camera and self-reflexive cinema, creating a sense of identity between the audience, filmmaker, and filmmaking process would also fade into obscurity, reappearing briefly in the late 1950s in the work of certain directors of the French New Wave.
Subjective Camera, Camera Mobility, and Interactivity
The continually changing perspective provided by Vertov’s subjective and mobile camera challenged the notions of on-screen and off-screen space being developed in Western sequential narratives of that time. As such, “it conforms to the concept of spatial narrative, with all areas of the screen accessible to the viewer’s gaze” (Manovich 2003). Manovich has viewed Vertov’s “Kino-Eye” method of spatializing exploratory environments as being useful in new media paradigms, as, “computer culture gradually spatializes all representations and experiences, they are subjected to the camera’s particular grammar of data access. Zoom, tilt, pan, and track–we now use these operations to interact with data spaces, models, objects, and bodies” (Manovich 2001). Through the use of Flash Actionscript interactive programming language, digital designers are now able to empower the interactive user to “become the camera–the mechanical eye.” In controlling the virtual camera –to track, pan, dolly and zoom–the user’s gaze is linked with that of the camera as they becomes actively engaged, immersed in the examination of objects, figures and data ingredients–reorganizing and uncovering connections about their continuously changing spatial environment.
Relinquishing control of the virtual camera to the interactive user relates back to Vertov’s concept of self-reflexive cinema as the interactive user, the virtual camera, the user experience, and process of discovery are unified. The perspective of subjective camera in a navigable virtual environment can also give the user a sense of agency–the ability to take action–which human computer interface specialist, Brenda Laurel has defined as a key component of first-person experience (1991). The sense of agency created by control of the virtual camera presents a fundamental shift from traditional film narrative, premised upon the assumption of a passive audience who suspend their sense of disbelief and accept the filmic world as a form of reality. Janet Murray has written that when the user enters the fictional world of an interactive construct they actively create belief rather than suspend disbelief. “Because of our desire to experience immersion, we focus our attention on the enveloping world and we use our intelligence to reinforce rather than to question the reality of the experience” (1997). Here the role of the interactive designer differs greatly from that of the filmic director in that the goal is not to direct the narrative, but rather “to provide a context and an environment in which the narrative can be discovered” (Meadows 2003). This paradigm more closely coincides with the advocacy of Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz, who “calls for strategies whereby the autocracy of the director and his subjugating optical apparatus can be shifted towards the notion of a cinema located in the personally discoverable periphery” (Shaw 2003).
In designing this experiential interactive environment, emphasis should be placed on creating an interface that is not a mere container but also a part of the conceptual experience, reinforcing the emotional tone and mood of the story and allowing the user to “interact with the information in a way that helps us build a personal context and integrate the information into our previous understandings” (Meadows 2003). This system strategy treats every aspect of the user experience as the direct result of a conscious design decision. Applying principles of user experience goals to the treatment of screen space in interface design involves anticipating interaction with the project’s navigational elements and considering what that interaction with the system will feel like to the user. It recognizes the course of action users are most likely to take and makes those interface elements easiest to access and use. The key is to group and spatially arrange the information elements in ways that support user tasks and goals as they progress through the interactive system.
In 2003, 25-year-old Bolivian director Rodrigo Bellott used the split screen as a dialectical device throughout his film, Dependencia Sexual, stating, “I wanted to transgress the oppressive language of a single narrative image and to try and create an audio-visual dialogue that disturbs the complacency of the passive spectator” (Bergan 2003). Mark Beechy’s student project, A Day on Film (Figures 17 and 18) uses Vertov’s concept of spatial narrative and Bellott’s dialectical pairing by presenting simultaneous streams of video in the form of two video camera viewfinders that represent both conscious and subconscious thoughts. Beechy’s interactive narrative unfolds like a detective novel as our protagonist, subjectively represented in first-person perspective by the user, pieces together the events of one day prior–a day that he cannot remember.
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Figure 17. A Day on Film |
Figure 18. A Day on Film |
A Day on Film is the fictional story of an unnamed protagonist and his roommate, Mark. As the title and the preloaded intro movie play, we see a series of still images of scattered remnants of the previous day–a whiskey bottle, two shot glasses, and two video cameras. We hear our protagonist in first person narration, “I woke up on the couch, slightly disoriented…expecting to have woken up in my bed. My roommate Mark wasn’t home. I could tell…it didn’t look like he had home in a while.” As we dissolve to a wide shot of two video cameras placed side by side on the table, we again hear the narration, “I saw the two video cameras. I remember that Mark and I had spent yesterday filming our day for a project at school. Wondering why I had opted for the couch instead of my bed, I thought I’d run through the videos.”
At this point the intro movie transitions to the title, “A Day on Film,” and we dissolve to a first person perspective of the viewfinders of the two cameras (Figure 17). Not knowing which camera belongs to Mark and which to our protagonist, the two simultaneous streams of video begin to play. Within the larger subjective and mobile frame of the computer screen, both cameras give us mobile framing and a first person perspective in each of the viewfinders. Each camera viewfinder displays the same timecode data information in its viewfinder. But the two viewfinders give the user dramatically different visual accounts of the prior day’s activities. The camera viewfinder on the left presents us with imagery of the camera operator immersed in rational activities–waking up, watching the news and having breakfast. Objects in the frame are properly exposed, in focus, and the camera movement is smooth and stable. By contrast, the viewfinder on the right presents us with a much darker account of the day’s events. We see canted angles, slightly out of focus, as our camera operator struggles to get out of bed. When he finally does, he heads to the kitchen. At this point our two characters cross paths. The spatial perspective of both cameras is of the kitchen and we hear in the left viewfinder one character acknowledge the other, “Morning.” As the viewfinder on the left shows our character going up to his room to study, the right viewfinder shows the other character going to the refrigerator, getting a beer and going to watch cartoons on a television partially obscured by a number of empty beer bottles (Figure 18).
A Day on Film exploits Vertov’s use of camera mobility as the user is able to control the first person perspective of the camera by mouse position, to pan left or right, zoom in or out, and focus on either viewfinder to more closely investigate and explore the video. Each viewfinder has controls where the user can adjust the volume, pause the “videotape” and rewind, fast-forward, or jump to the next or previous segment. Flash Actionscript instantaneously regenerates the next narrative module in the form of an .swf file containing the embedded video clips. Interacting with these objects allows the user to jump through the story in a decidedly nonlinear manner, examining and re-examining the footage. If the mouse is placed at the center of the work, the viewer can see both screens at the same time and hear the sounds from both screens equally.
A Day on Film utilizes principles of user experience goals to anticipate the user’s interaction with the navigational elements and consider what that interaction with the system will feel like to the user. In this context, designers should recognize the course of action the user is most likely to take and makes those interface elements easiest to access and use. The key is to group and arrange the information elements in ways that support user tasks and goals as they progress through the interactive system. If properly arranged, the interactive design elements help to heighten the user’s sense of engagement, which “involves a kind of complicity. We agree to think and feel in terms of both the content and conventions of a mimetic context. In return we gain a plethora of new possibilities for action and a kind of emotional guarantee” (Laurel 1991).
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Figure 19. A Day on Film |
Figure 20. A Day on Film |
As the narrative advances, our left viewfinder character continues his rational activities–studying, doing laundry, taking out the trash. As the video on the right viewfinder becomes progressively disturbed, sometimes fracturing into split or quad screens (Figure 19 and 20), we see our character continue drinking, playing video games and then going outside to work on his motorcycle. Once outside, the perspectives of both viewfinders become similar. We hear our unidentified character in the left viewfinder ask, “What’s going on?” At this point both characters go inside to watch television. As they sit on the couch our right viewfinder character continues drinking and occasionally the same image appears (Figure 21). The frequency of identical imagery on both viewfinders increases as our left character decides to join his roommate and pours two shots of whiskey. As the drinking continues, the user and our protagonist discover that both camera operators are in fact the same person as the viewfinders eventually show identical images that end up face down on the couch (Figure 22) and then to black, and we hear our protagonist say “Oh no!” Here the user realizes that both characters are the same person–that our protagonist is in fact Mark. We have been watching both his conscious/rational state (real or imagined) and his irrational/subconscious state (real or imagined). The screen then fades to static white noise and the “Replay?” button appears.
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Figure 21. A Day on Film |
Figure 22. A Day on Film |
A Day on Film uses the two dialectically opposed, yet related, space-time entities in the form of camera viewfinders to create what media aesthetician Herb Zettl calls, “screen gestalt… the perception of separate screens as an organic whole” (1977). With the multi-screen perspective, Beechy shows both persons simultaneously in their separate, yet related events and allows the user “to clarify and intensify an event, or event details, without stripping the event arbitrarily of its complexities” (Zettl, 1977). A Day on Film also takes Vertov’s Kino-Eye manifesto a step further by matching the view of the camera with that of the subconscious perspective-the mind’s eye. Beechy presents multiple levels of subjective perspective as the user, in the virtual role of the protagonist, chooses to view either viewfinder from a first-person perspective. But at the same time the user is presented with the two first-person viewpoints recorded on each camera. Murray defines digital environments as “procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopedic” (1997), and in A Day on Film the user is both detective and editor in an exploratory, spatialized, digital environment–reshuffling the timecoded material to compare, contrast and ultimately connect the mystery that lies therein. Here, much like Vertov, Beechy has transformed the normally static and objective database to the level of narrative in an interactive and participatory context.
Conclusion
As this paper demonstrates, the theory and process involved in digital interactive design can draw from its cinematic predecessors to create exciting new narrative paradigms that forever alter the relationship between storyteller and audience. History has shown that the art and craft of storytelling transcend the varying modes and methods through which they are told. As Mark Meadows notes: “The emergence of interactive narrative isn’t a revolution. It’s the rebirth of the existing art form of narrative as Chimera, a living form whose body is composed of the forms that have come before it” (2003). Cinema has helped to shape new media, and new media is now poised to shape the future of cinema. The pervasive digital video screen in contemporary culture is fast becoming a two-way channel, one in which the user not only understands the “language” of moving images and sounds, but they are able to speak “the language of the interface” (Manovich 2003), and manipulate and control their experience with that digital database.
As new media and new digital tools for manipulating new media change, so will the process of organizing and conveying narrative. And as millions of new global users create and distribute their own stories–forming new languages with the digital data they capture, juxtapose, and interrelate–the principles of Vertov, Gance, and Eisenstein will inevitably be opened up for redefinition in an entirely new context. Ever-changing culture will inevitably result in ever-changing possibilities for cinematic language and other forms of cultural expression. The interactive digital designer must understand this convergence of old and new as they prepare to meet the challenges of engaging an ever-expanding, future global audience.
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