The Design Brief
This project aims to become a short fiction film on how technology’s attempt at simulating the natural world can prove to be problematic. The basic premise of the film is that the path technology and man are taking together is a dangerous one, one that is taking us further away from the natural world. I personally feel that man’s growing disconnect from his environmental surroundings is something we must think about.
For some time now I have been intrigued by the line between the ‘real world,’ and the ‘virtual world.’ I believe the online world gives us many freedoms as well as takes away some. The use of anonymity for one is extremely powerful and allows people to express in ways they cannot in ‘real life.’ At the same time however, we lose out on fundamental aspects like touch, smell, taste, blood, dirt etc. Masks are both put on and taken off and there seems to exist a heightened sense of honesty between people, possibly due to the nature of being able to be an anonymous identity online. Communication online allows us to express in a very real and human way, yet the mode of communication itself is so unnatural.
It is important to understand the architecture of such spaces. To me they live off the option of the safe ending, much like in films and television. You can turn your machine off, poof the world is gone. We can say anything and be anyone because you’ll never have to meet the people you meet online in the real world. You can change your identity at any point and while gaming for example, you can always start over. You can also have multiple identities, stepping in and out as a different avatar. Second Life (SL), a 3-D virtual world, is not even a game, rather a ‘real world,’ like the one we live in today except with style. The difference however, between watching a T.V show and living in SL, is that SL is dynamic and continues to change with the way users construct and interact with it. 95% of the content in SL is constructed by the ‘avatars,’ that live there. The difference however, is that in real life you can’t start over. You have a social and biological responsibility, which if neglected can prove to be harmful.
Living online affects us both biologically and psychologically, and many of its effects can be seen today. For example, Amsterdam has come up with gaming rehab centers for gamers who manage to mess up their ‘real life,’ relationships as well as lose their motor skills. One gamer got so addicted that he wouldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom; rather he would set an empty bottle next to him. He would eat if there was food in front of him, otherwise not. A part of the program at the rehab center makes the gamers perform simple tasks like rolling a ball through their legs to the person behind them. They also go through a series of exercises that breakdown their competitive nature internalized by them due to the competitive nature of the games the play. They are advised to never game again, much like heroin addicts. Virtual worlds like SL are gaining more and more popularity and it is expected that by 2011 four out of every five internet users of today will be part of some online world. A big reason I feel people get addicted to living online, is that one can make real money in a space like SL. You can buy property, start a business, or get a job and earn money.
India is still nascent in its wake of technology as compared to other countries like Japan and The United States. Yet India’s economy is growing at a rapid pace, and many technological changes are starting to influence our lives. On the more positive note however, India and other countries in the Indian subcontinent are different. One example can be drawn from our sense of family. We have cultural support systems that do not exist in other parts of the world. Our parents look after us and their own parents, and when we get older we do the same. It is in our culture to look after and welcome those that are in our family and make guests feel at home. Another example is food. Our country is still largely agrarian and many of us who live in the city still buy our vegetables from the market and cook food the way it has been traditionally. These sensibilities, like identifying the different spices we put in our food connects us to the natural world. It is however, slowly deteriorating as mass produced products fill the market to homogenize our taste buds. In Jaipur, Rajasthan, where I come from, the entire city feeds the birds. It is in their culture and tradition to do so. At dusk every telephone and electricity wire is covered with sleeping pigeons. To care for and nurture another are aspects that make people better human beings, and it’s a shame that these values are getting clouded by a new kind of societal structure that is emerging.
Research Questions
How far can we go with simulating the world around us, what are the different technologies that exist today already to mimic image, sound, touch etc.?
Will our bodies start to look different and will certain organs become dysfunctional because of our relation to the world around us. For example, people who live in cities walk a certain way vs. people who live in villages. Same way people who grow up in front of the computer will have a body as well as a body language of their own.
Will our diets change much like how food changed for a working person always on the go?
How will a person who has for example, never been to a waterfall experience a waterfall in the virtual space? What will that experience mean to them and how different can that experience be for another person who goes to the same virtual ‘programmed’ location?
Given that everybody has more than one identity, and that the virtual space is a place to explore our different identities, will people begin to realize and be conscious of their different selves, or will we fall into categories of identities?
Approaches/Process
- Narrative and Language
The story which is in the process of being written continues to change as I discover new things about the virtual world. The characters in the film represent different viewpoints on whether the simulated world is problematic or not, how it is thrilling or beneficial etc. Through the interaction of the characters, and the weight I give to each my point of view shall emerge. It is of course not so clinical. The film deals with human emotion and concepts of love, loss, identity and memory.
- Treatment
The look and feel is extremely important. The way I’m going about the film is finding locations and materials in the existing world and through visual clues move between the virtual and the real. There will be two kinds of actors, the virtual actor and the real life actor.
The virtual actors will be the avatars I create in SL. These actors will be played by people in the real world. The avatars can be molded to great detail, for example you can even decide how long your eye lashes should be, or what fabric you wear. After some research on SL I have discovered that it is possible to shoot in this space within the program itself. You can shoot both point of view shots as well as third person shots. The camera can go pretty much anywhere. The footage gets saved in a space you dedicate in your hard drive and can be edited in editing softwares like Final Cut Pro. I have been spending some time in SL, walking around and exploring locations, camera functions and properties of the space itself. SL now is voice enabled, so instead of people typing to converse, which they still do, many people are talking to each other. Another thing about the space is its sound design, which is extremely well crafted. For example you can be by the beach, the sound of the wind, the birds, the ocean etc is done really well.
This brings me to the Real Life shooting. The character lives in a space like Monte CarloMonte Carlo (an apartment building complex that looks like Lego land, in Yehlahanka). lends itself to the vision I have of the future. One where the trees are planted in exact distances from each other, there are hardly any people seen, yet traces that they live there exist like the cars parked in the parking lot. The protagonist exists in both worlds, and through the narrative that takes us between these worlds, the worlds seem to come together at a point where it gets confusing for the viewer to distinguish which is real and which is not.
The Story (Tentative…continues to change…so lets just look at it as an idea)
In the future, where we have become immersed in online worlds, a young man lives his life like everybody else. He walks around, goes clubbing, attends exhibitions in the virtual space, relaxes on the beach etc.
The film opens with him before he enters a club.
(Real Life video): It gets established that he is alone and is entering alone. In this space he sees people dancing, and spots this one girl in the crowd with a tattoo of a crow on her back. This symbol stirs something in him, something that he cannot remember. He eventually leaves that space, drunk and walks outside and looks up at the night sky.
(Second Life video): Staring up into the night, from his point of view we fly up and it transitions to day time clouds and mist. The camera comes down and in the clouds we see an exhibition space floating in the sky. He attends a photography exhibition there. The images he finds himself looking at are of death and a landscape that has only traces of life left in it. He continues walking through the space and finally stands in front of an image of a crow, buried in the ground, covered with dirt and soil. He keeps looking at this image, staring at it. At this point he meets a dwarf; the dwarf is the artist/photographer whose exhibition it is.
(Real Life video): The man is seen sleeping, his eyes open. He wakes up, opens his window, looks outside drinking his coffee and smoking a cigarette. Outside you see a Lego land road, perfectly aligned. His doorbell rings and a delivery man delivers a parcel of something that looks like a large painting.
We see the man sitting on a sofa, in a very white, minimal living room, looking up at the image of the crow buried in the ground, that he has already hung up on his wall. He looks at his clock, that strikes 9:00.
(Second Life video) An extreme top shot, coming down through the clouds we see a man walking on the beach, as we get closer we see it is the same man we saw at the exhibition (the protagonist). We then see the dwarf sitting at a table that the man joins him at. They have a conversation here.
Man: Why meet here? It’s so secluded, not a soul for miles…
Dwarf: Why not, look at the view. Listen to those birds.
Man: [Half smiles and turns to look at the view]… it is quite lovely.
Dwarf: [after a pause] So tell me you and crows… what is it? The connection I mean…
Man: I don’t know. I can’t remember. Everytime I see a crow I feel like I’m forgetting something. Something important. Something I shouldn’t have forgotten.
Dwarf: [with a small smile on his face] That’s a lot of importance given to something you cannot even remember. Why is it so important to remember?
Man: I don’t know… [pause] I feel like something died. Something inside me. [pause] And you?
Dwarf: Maybe it is my duty to remind people of death so they can live.
Man: [gives him a quizzical look…]
The Dwarf, which will be revealed later, is part of an underground group of people that chooses individuals to help them remember the life and connection with the natural world they have lost. The Dwarf, taps into the memory of the protagonist’s childhood, a memory that lies hidden and asleep. Through his photographs and art he takes him through a journey that eventually makes the protagonist remember his childhood and a relationship he had lost. He manages to remember playing as a child with a little girl and with the help of the dwarf finds the girl he used to play with, who too is lost in the virtual world. The fragmented memory that is gnawed at repeatedly in the film is one where the two children bury a dead crow and the girl sings a song to the bird after its burial.
I have not yet decided what will happen in the end, and much of the story is still to be figured out.
References/ Inspiration and Resources
I have been going through various websites, projects, films and books that have inspired me and influenced me. Some of them are listed ahead with a small explanation.
We Feel Fine (www.wefeelfine.org/)
- A new media project by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar
‘Started in August 2005, We Feel Fine is a program that harvests human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)
As a result you get a database of several million human feelings.’
This data then allows you to for example see which city was the happiest city in the world at any given point in time. You can also click on the link of the blog and enter the online world of the person who wrote the line.
The Suicide Club
- A film by Sion Sono (2002)
This film deals with Japanese popular culture. It depicts through a series of creepy dark visuals and twisted narrative the scary truth about the youth of Japan. The central theme of the film is inspired from the mass suicides that are taking place in Japan. There are suicide clubs, and cults that form over the internet, and often these suicides are referred to as cybercides.
The Man Without a Head (L’Homme sans tete)
- A film by Juan Solanas (2003)
This film inspired me because of its mesmerizing visual quality. The visuals speak of a time period that is in the future, yet decadent, old and empty with traces of industrial waste. A visual translation I had been thinking about much before watching this film, this film has helped me to dream more.
Films and videos by Michel Gondry
(The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; The Science of Sleep; Let Forever Be; Around the World and more)
Gondry’s work has inspired me and made me think a great deal. He too uses human actors to perform what machines do. The human error as well as the perfection in the representation of the machine is partly what is so beautiful about his work. The way Gondry depicts dreams and creates sets is also something that I gain inspiration from.
The Fifth Element
- A film by Luc Besson (1997)
The Fifth Element is a film set in the future. Its interesting to see how they have predicted how cities will look and space will be organized. The set design and special effects in this film are commendable, considering the film was made in the late 90’s.
Other references are:
Reality Bites and article about Second Life from The Newsweek
Always – on / Always – on you: The Tethered Self, a paper by Sherry Turkle
Numerous chat rooms and web sites on the internet
Learning Outcomes
I hope to gain a better understanding of the subject I have chosen. Alongside I hope to understand and pull off what it takes to make a successful online film!
