Immersion

One of the issues that has come up recently in conversation with level 5 students has been why and how do game players get hooked into a game. In particular I know some of you are interested in how to design for levels. Issues such as allowing for a player to become familiar with the game world and its mechanisms during low level gameplay have been discussed in seminars and how as levels get harder the player gets sucked in as adrenaline levels rise have been hinted at in my previous post. But there are lots of other issues to consider. One of which is game immersion.
One way of describing immersion in a game or a film or other media environment is when "media contents are perceived as ‘real' in the sense that media users experience a sensation of being spatially located in the mediated environment." (Wissmath, Weibel, & Groner, 2009).

The immersive experience is a kind of relocated spatial world that the user inhabits and starts to believe in. Once they believe in this world they can start to make decisions within it that make sense as to the ‘rules’ of this world. If the world is undersea, you can swim or dive even though you are of course in reality on dry land. If an audience or player is completely immersed in their experience they have what Coleridge termed, complete ‘suspension of disbelief’. However, if the plot or storyline has inconsistencies people can easily break out of their imagined world and therefore game designers have to be very careful as to how they integrate elements from outside that world. For instance a learning tutorial can be written into a video game as part of the overall plot.
Wirth, Hartmann, et al. (2007) in their article, ‘A Process Model for the Formation of Spatial Presence Experiences’ provide a diagram of their unified theory Here it is:


A Process Model for the Formation of Spatial Presence Experiences


Those of you that had to sit through my lecture on Communication theory might notice a similarity with some of the communication theory diagrams.
The stages in the process model show how first of all players form a representation in their mind of the world they have encountered within the game, then the next stage is to make the game world their primary point of reference or ego reference frame, which is where they suspend their disbelief.

As Jamie Madigan pointed out (2010) “Once that mental model of the game world is created, the player must decide, either consciously or unconsciously, whether she feels like she's in that imagined world or in the real one”.
There are two main factors that encourage total immersion, the first is a detailed and thorough world model (sound, images, spaces, types of movement, characters, strong plot etc) and the other is a consistency of how things operate within that model, (do you have to suddenly use an awkward device such as a button to activate that doesn’t seem consistant, heads up displays, tutorial messages, damage numbers appearing over enemies' heads? )
As Madigan points out (2010) “Cognitively demanding environments where players have to focus on what's going on and getting by in the game will tie up mental resources. This is good for immersion, because if brain power is allocated to understanding or navigating the world, it's not free to notice all its problems or shortcomings that would otherwise remind them that they're playing a game”. Above all though, I would suggest it is the strength of the narrative that will suck a player in, just as in a film or a book.
Therefore when designing stages one of the first issues is how to begin the narrative and then how to get the player to learn the rules. The total immersion point should be not too far into the game or the player will not get sucked in, but not too early or the player will not have time to acclimatise to the rules and nature of the game world.

Madigan, J (2010) Analysis: The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29910/Analysis_The_Psychology_of_Immersion_in_Video_Games.php Accessed on 14. 12. 11
Wissmath, B, Weibel, D., & Groner, R. (2009). Dubbing or Subtitling? Effects on Spatial Presence, Transportation, Flow, and Enjoyment. Journal of Media Psychology 21 (3), 114-125.

Wirth, W., hartmann, T., Bocking, S., Vorderer, P., Klimmt, C., Holger, S., Saari, T., Laarni, J., Ravaja, N., Gouveia, F., Biocca, F., Sacau, A. Jancke, L., Baumgartner, T., & Jancke, P. (2007) A Process Model for the Formation of Spatial Presence Experiences. Media Psychology, 9, 493-525
N.B. Jamie Madigan, Ph.D. is a psychologist and gamer who explores why players and developers do what they do by studying the overlap between psychology and video games at The Psychology of Games website. He is an excellent writer to look at for anything to do with video gaming and psychology.

Gaming, realism and hyper-reality

Image from World in Conflict


“I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.”
RONALD REAGAN, speech, Aug. 8, 1983

It’s interesting to reflect on Ronald Regan’s musings from the 1980s. As a former actor turned president he was probably more aware than anybody how reality can be a construction. Realistic war simulators are now the norm in combat training and for a while now the divide between realism and simulation has been blurred.
As Galloway (2006) notes, “The conventional wisdom on realism in gaming is that, because life today is so computer mediated, gamers actually benefit from hours of realistic gameplay. The time spent playing games trains the gamer to be close to the machine, to be quick and responsive, to understand interfaces, to be familiar with simulated worlds.”


David Wong (2007) was worrying about war sims when he wrote this, “I'm starting to think that even World in Conflict, a real time strategy game so "realistic" it takes a NASA-built Quantum supercomputer to run it, has left me woefully unprepared to fight an actual war.” He went on to describe what he would like to see in ‘reality’ war games, including:
“I want a war sim where native townsfolk stand shoulder-to-shoulder on every inch of the map and not a single bomb can be dropped without blowing 200 of them into chunks. Forget about the abandoned building wallpaper in games like the Red Alert series. I want to have to choose between sending marines door-to-door to be killed in the streets or levelling the block from afar, Nuns and all. I want to have to choose between 40 dead troops or 400 dead children, and be damned to hell by chubby pundits from the safety of their studios regardless of which way I go.”

But this type of ‘real’ reality isn’t what people want to see. Most gamers want an escape from reality, but paradoxically want more levels of realism when making that escape. So what’s this about? I posted a blog a while ago that included some thoughts on, the Sublime, the Liminal and Moments of Epiphany. (16th Dec 2010). I was reflecting on why certain images hold our attention in such a powerful way that they seem to take us beyond our everyday experience and provide an entry into higher states of consciousness. One aspect of the sublime I didn’t really unpick was the sublime as “an idea belonging to self-preservation” (Burke, 2009). In On the Sublime and Beautiful Burke goes through lots of different ways in which the sublime can be approached. At one point particular qualities of sound are picked out by Burke, such as the sound of far off cannon fire or a slow ominous beat, as being sublime in their effect. What runs through all his examples is a sense of thrill or excitement that is created by being able to observe something potentially fatal without having to actually experience death or near death. The rumble of far off cannon fire is very different to the experience of actually being fired upon, but there is still a thrill and adrenaline jump when you hear those cannons in the distance. The sublime could perhaps therefore be used as a concept within which to explain the need for an escape from reality, together with the need for higher levels of realism within the games that we use to affect our escape from reality.

Burke’s observations are similar to some descriptions of adrenaline addiction. As Lisa Fritcher (2009) has observed, “Some adrenaline junkies place themselves into dangerous situations. Others prefer to know that they are physically safe, but pit themselves against obstacles that make them feel unsafe”. What we do know is that a thrilling encounter creates a rush of endorphins that is simultaneously energizing and relaxing. However, this "feel good" hormone that was designed to alleviate stress on a short term basis or for emergency situations is something we can become addicted to, and as Hart (1995) suggests, adrenaline addiction can be the unfortunate outcome.

The physiological make-up of human beings lies at the core of how and why we behave. When an animal is confronted with a perceived threat it reacts. The animal will use as many resources as needed and as much energy as possible to deal with the threat. When faced with danger, the two main options are fighting, or getting away. In the face of danger, the body automatically induces high levels of physiological arousal which prepare the organism for emergency responses. (Hayes, 1994). As Atkinson (1996) explains, when the external balance is disrupted, our body changes its internal balance accordingly. These internal changes include; increased heart rate, blood pressure and respiration, which accompanies the pumping of more blood to the muscles, and the associated supplying of extra oxygen to the muscles and the increased work rate of the whole heart-lung system. This is linked to increased sugar rates in the blood, facilitating rapid energy use, and accelerating metabolism for emergency actions. Thickening of the blood then occurs to increase oxygen supply, enabling better defence from infections and to stop bleeding quickly.
What the individual experiences as these things take place is a sharpening of the senses. Your pupils dilate; hearing is sharper, muscle response faster and you think much more quickly with your body/brain. This is because you have increased blood supply to peripheral muscles and the heart, as well as to motor and basic-function regions in the brain but you also have decreased blood supply to your digestive system and irrelevant brain regions (such as speech areas). At the same time as all these events are occurring, endorphins; natural painkillers are secreted. (Atkinson, 1996; Hart, 1995, Hanson, 1986) This physiological explanation of what happens when we encounter a fight or flight situation mirrors what happens when we play a video game. If we let ourselves think there is danger to ourselves ‘self-preservation’ comes to the fore, and this lies at the core of both Burke’s idea of the sublime and the reason our chemicals kick in. Realism in gaming could therefore be read as the creating of more and more effective triggers for this response.

The recent development of procedural animation technologies, have allowed the development of games that rely heavily on the necessary suspension of disbelief to make your body think there is a real threat. The necessary levels of realism can now be facilitated by realistic whole-body muscle physics combined with ‘ragdoll physics’ as an integral part of the immersive gaming experience. Real-time simulation of biomechanics and a related motor control nervous system is now possible because of the developed link between software applications that simulate both evolutionary biology and robot control theories. As different areas of scientific understanding and technology are integrated and software developed that is compatible to 3D form generation and movement software, we will experience higher and higher levels of simulated realism. The lack of differentiation from the real world might of course become a problem, however ghost stories have always induced fear and excitement and the associated release of adrenaline and endorphins and we have never had any historical difficulty in sorting out the real from the imagined, I suspect therefore that we might still be able to sort out which is which. If we can’t differentiate fantasy from reality we will lose one of our essential survival mechanisms, but if we can fake it, we should also be able to spot the fake, as lying and truth detection have always been essential to the human condition.


Bibliography
Atkinson R. L. et al. (1999) Hilgard's introduction to psychology London: Wadsworth

Burke, E (2009). On the Sublime and Beautiful London: OUP

Galloway, A. R. (2006) Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture London: University of Minnesota Press

Hanson, P. (1986) The Joy of Stress London: Stoddart

Fritscher, L (2009) Adrenaline Junkie http://phobias.about.com/od/glossary/g/adrenalinejunkiedef.htm Accessed on 3. 12. 11

Hart, A. D. (1995) Adrenaline and Stress London: Thomas Nelson

Mirtich, B. V. (1996) Impulse-base Dynamic Simulation of Rigid Body Systems Berkeley: University of California http://www.merl.com/people/mirtich/papers/thesis/thesis.html Accessed on 4. 12. 11

Flyboy Is Alone Again This Christmas

I went to see the shadow puppet opera ‘Flyboy Is Alone Again This Christmas’ on Friday night in the Howard Assembly rooms. In this show, musician and shadow puppet artist Matthew Robins tells the heart-rending story of Flyboy, a mutant half-human/half-fly, who is trying to live a normal life in a small town. Animations projected onto the big screen created using on old overhead projector, lie at the centre of a live shadow-puppet opera as Robins and his band sing and perform on stage. It was great and a wonderful example of what you can do with low technology.
Matthew works with the puppeteer Tim Spooner and a band of musicians. The show was wonderfully low-tech: Matthew played piano and sang the story, while Tim worked getting all the cut outs onto the screen for the stories or at times using layers of video projection, paper backgrounds and puppets for pieces using live video and moving superimposed cut-outs.
One story called Nosferatu and Me, where Matthew and Nosteratu mostly ride around on their bicycles and then rent a DVD in the evening, is really so simple it is hard to believe it would work live on stage with a grown up audience, but it works very well and it’s very funny. But it does get all a bit awkward when Nosferatu gets too friendly.
Matthew Robins’ songs are very narrative driven and quite often have lots of complicated scenarios. He was finding it difficult to hold people's concentration in pubs and nightclubs where he was playing his own penned music, so he added live visuals using shadow puppets. As Matthew said, “It worked and suddenly people were really focused and would watch the whole show!”
He now says he is, “writing a rock-opera concept album about mutant spiders that will hopefully be a cross between Tommy-meets-War of the Worlds-meets-Bat out of Hell-meets-The Man from God knows Where”.
Nearly all of these animations are done by cutting out black paper using a sharp scalpel. An old OHP (I bet there are lots of these still hiding in cupboards in educational institutions throughout the country) was used to get the images enlarged and up onto a screen behind the musicians. This is almost the same technology as Indonesian Shadow Puppetry and works really well if you have a simple and clear narrative to tell, with easily identifiable characters. In this case ‘flyboy’ is an easy cutout, or at least Robins makes it look as if it is. If you want to test a character for easily identifiable visual characteristics, try cutting it out of black paper and then check out its silhouette.
I realise I’m working with people who want to use digital technology to carry their ideas. But most transmedia characters have had to stand the test of recognition across several platforms and media types. The narrative strength in this case is all. The short flyboy stories are gripping and easy to follow by children as well as adults. Perhaps ‘Flyboy’ could be a future children’s favorite. He has all the ingredients. Easily identifiable visual characteristics, a storyline that mirrors those of many heroes, including travelling on long voyages and meeting strange creatures, a love story and a Christmas adventure.

Using a case study in an essay

An audience watching Christian Marclay's The Clock

When looking at writing about certain aspects of film or game it is often useful to use case studies. Particular films or games can be examined and you can make your points with precision as well as be able to direct your reader towards the original material. In an essay it can be a way of being able to use your specific interest in a particular film and use it to illustrate a more general concept. In this case the relationship between editing and our experience of ‘time’ in film.


Pulp Fiction: Quentin Tarantino Miramax Films 1994
Watch the clip at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKQ-BpO4Gzo&feature=related

In the drug overdose scene at the movie’s midpoint, Vincent (John Travolta) attempts to revive Mia (Uma Thurman) by stabbing her in the heart with a hypodermic needle filled with adrenaline. The scripted scene fills us with tension. We hold our breath hoping that Mia is going to make it. The reason we hold our breath is because the script is written already “edited” for suspense.

How does Tarantino do this? By writing overlapping action. Tarantino’s script includes cuts to the needle, the red dot and the faces of the characters. These cuts lengthen the time needed for the real-time-event of the stabbing to occur.

Time in film is perhaps one of its most interesting aspects. A film runs for a specific length of time and we watch it in real time. However a film is rarely cut to reflect the actual time an action, narrative or event takes. One of the few that does this is High Noon a 1952 American Western that tells in real time the story of a town marshal forced to face a gang of killers by himself.



Because time is so important to our understanding of the world, a film director can shape our experience of it to heighten tension, confuse or disorientate us or suggest we are ourselves aging as a film develops. Christian Marclay's The Clock is perhaps the best example of a meditation on time in film. This 24 hour long film collects together thousands of clips from films, each clip referring to a specific moment of the day, these being edited together to make one complete day which if you want to experience it means sitting in the cinema for 24 hours and watching it in real time.

In Pulp Fiction, although Vincent counts out three seconds on the dialogue track, it takes three quarters of a page for the moment to take place—or 45 seconds of screen time. That means that we are holding our breath 15 times longer than Vincent’s three-second countdown suggests. Through purposeful use of editing, Tarantino’s script is guiding the reader’s emotional experience, and delivering a scene that itself can be imagined as a mini-movie.


The red spot


About to drive the needle in


Tarantino doesn’t write in descriptive sentences or paragraphs like novelists, but builds his scenes in shots. Each of his sentences implies a specific camera angle. “Implies” being the operative word here, as camera angles and lenses are not called out, but understood from his description.
The script’s pacing mimics what will later be seen on screen. Paragraph and sentence length suggests how long a shot will play on the screen. For example, a single one-sentence paragraph implies one shot. The implication is that it should play out longer on screen than would, say, multiple shots implied in a four-line paragraph. The white space buys the single shot time. Adding an editorial aside like “Mia is fading fast. Nothing can save her now” is like saying “hold on the shot.” It again gains the shot more screen time.
This excerpt (below) from the original script is taken from mid-scene.
The top line is from Tarantino’s script, where no camera information is given. The text below each line written in brackets in capitals relates to the camera shot actually used in the film.

Vincent lifts the needle up above his head in a stabbing motion. He looks down on Mia.
(LOOSE CLOSE-UP VINCENT) (VINCENT POV – MIA)
Mia is fading fast. Soon nothing will help her.
(HOLD ON MIA.)
Vincent’s eyes narrow, ready to do this.
(TIGHT CLOSE-UP – VINCENT)
VINCENT
Count to three.
Lance, on his knees right beside Vincent, does not know what to expect.
(WIDE SHOT – LANCE AND VINCENT)
LANCE
One.
RED DOT on Mia’s body.
(CLOSE ON RED DOT )
Needle poised ready to strike.
(CLOSE ON NEEDLE)
LANCE
Two.
Jody’s face is alive in anticipation.
(CLOSE-UP JODY)
NEEDLE in the air, poised like a rattler ready to strike.
(CLOSE ON NEEDLE)
LANCE (OS)
Three!
The needle leaves the frame, THRUSTING down hard.
(CLOSE ON NEEDLE)
Vincent brings the needle down hard, STABBING Mia in the chest.
(MEDIUM SHOT)
Mia’s head is JOLTED from the impact.
(CLOSE ON MIA’S HEAD)
The syringe plunger is pushed down, PUMPING the adrenaline out through the needle.
(CLOSE ON SYRINGE PUMPER)
Mia’s eyes POP WIDE OPEN and she lets out a HELLISH cry of the banshee.
(CLOSE-UP ON MIA’S EYES)
She BOLTS UP in a sitting position, needle stuck in her chest---SCREAMING
(WIDE SHOT - MIA)

Writing cinematically requires understanding the language of film, knowing how to use it creatively and translating it into script form. Editing is just one of many film techniques. Lighting, sound effects, camera angles, camera positions, transitions, space, framing and so on are other tools available to the essay writer.

Although edited and added to by my own reflections most of this text is taken straight from ‘Cinematic Story Telling’ by Jennifer Van Sijll Published September 3, 2007
Find the original at:
http://www.moviemaker.com/ screenwriting/article/cinematic_storytelling_20080722/

Why do we like animation?

How to draw a rabbit that has swallowed a plate.

So what is it that makes animation so compelling? My own feeling is that it is very close to real life experience and yet at the same time is an abstraction from it. This allows me to get the essence of the communication without having to be confused by the details. As an artist who draws a lot, I try and use that basic link between experience and its abstraction as a way of creating metaphors for life and its meaning. There are of course other ways of doing this, such as writing or creating music and these can be put into animations as well, each element supporting the visuals, so that more and more complex communications can be achieved, but at the core of an animation is simply abstracted movement in time.

All of us have an innate understanding of life and the physical laws that underpin it, for instance when you bounce a ball you can catch it and throw it each time instinctively. But when it comes to making an animation, you have to interpret the ball's motion and re-create it frame-by-frame. Basically designing motion is translating daily experiences into a time-based, 2D platform. This ability to abstract and analyze perceptions that we normally take for granted is the real skill behind animation.

The first thing that therefore captivates me when viewing an animation is an experience parallel to my bodily experience of moving through the world and responding to the things that I experience in it. I can get involved in it because it’s like life and the difference between what is inanimate and what is animate is movement and movement means life is there.

The second thing I experience in an animation is that there is a degree of abstraction. All the superfluous stuff is eliminated and I’m allowed to concentrate on what the animator is asking me to concentrate on. In comparison a film has everything in it that is recorded through the lens and I have to select out what I think is the most important, just like I have to do in life. It’s therefore easier to understand what the animator is presenting and also a bit of a relief for my overloaded perceptual mechanisms.

In order to be a good animator I would therefore suggest you need to grasp some of the fundamental concepts and laws that govern the behaviour of objects within the real world. These objects will either be moving or moving in relation to something else. How the landscape changes as we walk through it is as important to our understanding as the quality of our movement through it. The way a pair of legs is animated changes as the character starts running, or begins hopping. This will of course change the way the landscape moves in the background. Figure and ground are vital relationships and ones that have been essential to all Western European Art since the Renaissance.

However this is not all about sight, it’s as much about touch and feel. We understand weight in a particular way and expect its consequences to be understood and visualised in a good animation. If this is working well our body starts to feel in tune with the animation. You could argue that a full phenomenological grasp of animation is essential to its understanding and that of all the arts except for dance of course, animation requires high levels of embodied reading.

An animation’s capacity to carry visual invention is enormous and I’m always impressed with a good animator’s grasp of visual possibility. In 1964’s "The Pink Phink" (DePatie-Freleng) the possibilities of painting on a flat surface and all the illusionistic tricks you can play with these are just there to be enjoyed.


"The Pink Phink"

However it’s Chuck Jones’s playing with the possibilities of impossibility that first of all drew me to animation. Just think about the implications of these images in the ‘real’ world. Impossible distortions, fragmentations and splits that go far beyond anything Cubism offered and visual paradoxes to fox even the most aware visual psychologist.









For a mouth to stretch this far what would the underlying bone structure be like? There is a visual logic here not far away from D'Arcy Thompson's theories of transformations in nature that can be found in his book ‘On Growth and Form’.


From 'On Growth and Form'


So in some extent we get back to where we started, an awareness of physics was I felt at the core of our understanding of good animations and in Chuck Jones’s case I’m looking at an awareness of biological evolution. Perhaps it’s an art-form that is forced to grasp the real world’s underlying scientific principles. Is it something to do with the suspension of disbelief I have when I rely on the fact that my eyes appear to operate using persistence of vision? Is it just that I’m a sucker for anything that stimulates my fight or flight mechanisms, my body's primitive, automatic, inborn response that prepares it to "fight" or "flee" from perceived attack, harm or threat to my survival?


A few favourite animators
The woman Czech animator Michaela Pavlatova’s short animations, in particular Laila, are a great exercise in what you can do with few resources. She uses simple Flash animations, to great effect.

See: http://www.michaelapavlatova.com/laila/

For me another classic is Don Hertzfeldt. His animated stick figures are very simple but his timing and characterisation are brilliant. See the stuff rejected from The Family Learning Channel or ‘I Am So Proud of You’. He still uses a 35mm rostrum camera to do all his animations.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgQqSVrkkag

Adrien Merigeau uses the computer to enhance rather than support his work. He has done music videos, such as the Villager’s 'Cecelia' but ‘Old Fangs’ and ‘Le Carnet de Chloe’ are really great mixes of technique and approach. However above all his films suggest a background in looking at comics.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR-Kox34wgk

Chuck Jones is of course just fantastic and I have used several images from his cartoons above to illustrate my ideas of visual invention. His ‘The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics’ is a brilliant exercise in how narrative can support formalism in animation.


Chuck Jones: The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics’
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmSbdvzbOzY

Writing about the business

Working towards the Essay

Several people have flagged up that they would like to write about the business of film, game or animation. In particular as transmedia storytelling evolves, people want to explore how the business itself is changing.
One of the big issues is always how to put in several components into an essay for instance history, factual research into the business as well as theory.
A typical starting point can be something that’s current. For instance, Mark Hall’s obituary was published in the Guardian last week. (See Obituary section Monday 21st November 2011)
Mark Hall was a co-creator of Danger Mouse and worked with Brian Cosgrove to set up Cosgrove Hall Productions. The obituary covers his life and work from public information films in the late 1960s, his first award winning animation Magic Ball 1971/2, and work on Noddy (1975), up to their last announced children’s series HeroGliffix. However their first real international success was with Danger Mouse (1981/92). This was a character with real transmedia potential and the merchandise alone generated millions. This series also spawned Count Duckula (1988/93). However the structure of film companies came under threat in the 1990s. Cosgrove Hall productions used to work for Thames TV, which lost its ITV London broadcasting franchise and therefore they had to move to Angela Television and the distributer ITEL and they therefore rebranded as Cosgrove Hall Films. This allowed them to set up new studios equipped for digital animation. BBC revivals Bill and Ben as well as Andy Pandy were made by the new company (2001 and 2002). In 2003 Cosgrove Hall Films was absorbed into the newly unified ITV which finally closed the business two years ago.
The history of Cosgrove Films mirrors that of the industry as a whole. By looking at this one company in detail you can get a feel for how small animation studios developed, (one or two man businesses) broke into the business (at that time the developing commercial TV sector), had to cope with wider success (marketing internationally, developing merchandise) early games development (see game for Spectrum), changes in the structure of the TV business the development of digital animation etc.





There is a real retro feel to this.

So what other issues could be looked at to flesh out an essay. You could take one of Cosgrave Hall’s characters and examine why it might have been successful. One area we looked at was media specificity. Because a ten minute episode needed 2,000 drawings, as a cost-cutting measure, the cartoons made frequent use of repeated footage and "in the dark" sequences (black with eyeballs visible only, or, in Danger Mouse's case, simply one eyeball). A recurring setting for episodes was "The North Pole" - so chosen because the white, snow-covered backgrounds would require minimal painting and colouring. Other studios working at the time were too concerned with ‘quality’ and not enough with storytelling and character development, thus being unable to bring in products within target budgets. So one area of media specificity is to do with speed and ease of production and how to increase production rates using the implications of the media being worked with.
Another issue is character type and recognition. The eye patch is a classic easy to recognise format (see my earlier blogs on Indiana Jones’ hat) and the secret agent character is another (James Bond etc.) This can lead us to the fact that there are only 7 great stories and that the plot of Dr No echoes that of Gilgamesh etc etc. which can then open out into a whole section on ‘spy fiction. See how TV programmes such as Danger Man (1960–68) The Man from U.N.C.L.E (1964–68) and I Spy (1965–68) influenced the ideas behind Danger Mouse.
As you can see the starting point isn’t that important. By working around any start we can find several layers of information that may become sections in our essay.



Lego gets in on the Danger Mouse action

Phenomenology as an approach to film and game theory.

Above: A collage of images from the shower scene in Psycho

Many writers on film and game concentrate on the intellectual aspects of theory. However my experience of watching film or playing games is much more physical. I start with a feeling and this usually resides in my bodily reactions. I’m not the only one who feels this.

Vivian Sobchack states in : Carnal Thoughts – Embodiment and Moving Image Culture.
“Nearly every time I read a movie review in a newspaper or popular magazine, I am struck by the gap that exists between our actual experience of the cinema and the theory that we academic film scholars construct to explain it – or perhaps, more aptly, to explain it away.” (2004: p.52)

This gap between theory and experience is sometimes where trying to write about film and game becomes unstuck. What we are writing does not seem to match up with experience. I want a way of writing that reflects how film and game experiences move me. In particular at that moment when I want to cry or laugh out loud or get that hand clenching tension as I wait for the monster to reveal itself or find out if the hero survives.
Phenomenology is centred on perception and how our senses make meaning. It is also called embodied thinking. Therefore when trying to analyse responses to a film or game it’s useful to focus on how we are perceiving the world normally and how a construct like a film or game forces us to perceive differently.
Deleuze and Guattari state that the three great domains of human creation are art, philosophy and science. These three different modes of expression are they suggest; perceptual, conceptual and functional. In particular they argue, art relies on the creation of sensuous aggregates. (Rodowick in Furstenau, 2010, p. 31)
The term ‘sensuous aggregate’ is one taken from Husserl who used it to describe a ‘unified intuition’ (Farber, 2006) and is a term used to describe the various feelings and bodily knowledge that come to us through pre-cognitive thought. This ‘sensuous aggregate’ is something that I might also call a ‘feeling tone’ when describing an experience.
These feelings must come from my bodily experience of the real world. For instance at this time of the year when I leave work it’s dark. It’s also dark when I get up. This absence of light definitely makes me feel slightly depressed. This isn’t just my feeling, scientists have now linked depression to an absence of light and seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a recognised medical condition. If I catch movement out of the corner of my eye I’m alerted to something, I therefore switch my attention on and if I can’t spot anything when I do this I become nervous. I’m aware of something that possibly exists but I’m not sure what it is. In a dangerous situation this of course would lead to real fear. In film or game these experiences can be triggered by the way a film is shot and edited or a game constructed and lighting levels decided upon.
The theoretical concept, ‘the abject’ is according to Kristeva (1982) situated outside our normal symbolic order, therefore being forced to face it is a traumatic experience. The usual examples used for this are being faced with a corpse, death, excrement and rot etc. However it could also be argued that these are simply learned responses to colour and textures that we associate with disease, food rotting, meat going off etc. and are bodily warnings to stay away from potentially dangerous situations. In art, in particular in film and game we can be made to experience these feelings through colour selection, (for instance food may be photographed when lit under a blue light) or texture (slimed surfaces etc) purposely developed to create revulsion.
In Psycho the scene when Janet Leigh is having a shower is a classic piece of phenomenological editing. We are drawn in to believe she is relaxing and oblivious to the world whilst she showers, this being something everyone of us can bodily feel. We all escape momentarily from the world in a shower’s warm jet of water. Then suddenly a shadow appears outside the curtain. That mind- shrieking violin music starts up and then the knife plunges into her naked back again, and again. The physicality of each blow is felt by us with even more force because we have been drawn into that feeling of being warm and naked in the shower. We have unconsciously achieved a bodily empathy with Janet and therefore feel the blows that much more deeply. The ripping of the shower curtain as she falls, and the cut to the blood swirling down the drain all add to the sense of bodily disruption because of the rapidly changing camera angles. We associate these changes in viewpoint with moments we have experienced such as falls and accidents, when we are violently forced to see the world from low and difficult angles. Hitchcock knows how to get us to engage with his film, in particular he is controlling our ‘sensuous aggregate’ by building physical associations with characters and situations and thus subjecting our overall ‘feeling tone’ to a complete filmic makeover. Bernard Hermann's eerie score further reinforces the development of the ‘feeling tone’ of the film. His high-pitched violins encapsulate the whole feeling of the film. Sounds of that tone and pitch being associated with the scraping of metal on metal or that awful screech you get when animals are being killed, again associations that develop through real life experience.
Technically nearly the whole film was shot with 50 mm lenses on 35 mm cameras. This closely mimics normal human vision, which deeply linked the audience’s perceptions of the cinematic world to their own real life experiences.
I could go on but the point of this post was to highlight one of the areas of communication theory and demonstrate how it could be used to look at film or game. I’ve also cited references used, so that those of you starting to develop essay ideas can get used to how citations should appear in a text.

References

Aaltonen, Minna-Ella (2011) Touch, taste & devour: phenomenology of
film and the film experiencer in the cinema of sensations. MPhil(R) thesis. Obtained at: http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2666/01/2011aaltonenmphilr.pdf
accessed on 14. 11. 11

Farber, M (2006) The foundation of phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and the quest for a rigorous science of philosophy London: AldineTransaction

Furstenau, M (2010) The film theory reader London: Routledge

Hitchcock, A (1960) Psycho Paramount Pictures

Kristeva, J (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection New York: Columbia University Press

Partonen, T & Lönnqvist, J (1998) Seasonal affective disorder The Lancet Volume 352, Issue 9137, 24 October, Pages 1369-1374

Sobchack, V., (2004) Carnal Thoughts – Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkley,
Los Angeles, London: Routledge

Batman and Tintin

There is a new Batman Game 'Arkham City' being launched this week, as well as the new Tintin film coming out. This of course had me thinking about their roles as transmedia characters and why these comic book figures have survived for so long and still seem to have relevance.
I looked at the on-line promotional materials for the new Batman game and interestingly there was no gameplay, it was simply a series of images that were designed to reinforce what we already know of the character and the environment of Gotham city. The opening sound was of course the theme tune to the Batman movies, (not of course the "Da Da Da Da Da Da Da Da BATMAN!" one), but the Danny Elfman written theme from the 1989 Tim Burton film. http://www.hark.com/clips/rttkwddvls-batman-theme-song. Burton established the dark gritty feel of Gotham using both Frank Miller’s reinvention of the character and a nod to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for the setting. The game keeps this dark lighting and in the clip there were further references to the settings of early James Whale Frankenstein movies, in particular the lightning flashes and operating tables.
Rocksteady's David Hego has explained that Arkham City's use of light and shadow and warm and cool lighting are used to direct a player's attention within the environment. He has had much to say about the stylised realism used to design the characters. He called the exaggerated features and realistic textures of the character models, especially that of the Joker, a kind of hyperrealism. He feels that hyperrealism also circumvents the problematic issue of the uncanny valley. (See my post of Monday, 29 November 2010, as well as http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/oct/27/tintin-uncanny-valley-computer-graphics?INTCMP=SRCH a Guardian article on the problems with the new Tintin film, which I shall get back to). As Hego states, "One of the big advantages of the stylised realism was we were jumping across the uncanny valley… By making [the characters] so stylised, you can forget about uncanny valley because you accept that it's not real."
In some ways the game is a celebration of the Caped Crusader’s expansive mythology.
The main narrative of Arkham is a story based on the internal corruption of Gotham City which is portrayed as a type of disease, the Joker is slowly dying, internally corroded and we get the sense that everything is diseased and old. These are themes that Paul Dini (a long time Batman writer) has used several times before and of course Grant Morrison has been scripting Batman recently (Batman Incorporated) and has imported his unique take on conspiracy theories and double layering of realities. All of this seems perfectly suited to the current climate of economic depression and corruption within the global economy and banking systems.
It’s interesting to unpick why Batman (created in 1939) should still be relevant and Tintin, a character created in 1929 should be not quite so pertinent to life now. Both though have resilience as transmedia characters that has ensured that they are returned to over and over again.
The key to Batman’s cultural longevity is that perhaps the “devil has all the best tunes” and taps into deep archetypes, and holds together in one character several key concepts and archetypal psychological models that enable us to on the one hand have empathy with the roles he plays out and on the other accept his almost god like powers to overcome evil.
Perhaps it’s the 19th century where we need to look for the roots of these fictional beings. Both Batman and Tintin are detectives, they hark back to the classic model of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes who first appeared in 1887, but Tintin is more in the Alan Quatermain mould, a character developed by H. Rider Haggard in 1885, (Indiana Jones being a more recent reinvention of this) he is an adventurer inconceivable outside of a colonial or post-colonial setting.



Batman can be traced back to the 1886 novel by Stevenson, ‘Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ and Bram Stocker’s ‘Dracula’ of 1897.






These images are specters that haunt an evil society. The late 19th century was a time of heavy industrialization and it saw the rise of global capital, mass population transfer to city living, the evils of slums, downtrodden populations. In 1848 Marx had published the Communist manifesto, a manifesto that starts, “A spectre is haunting Europe” this spectre was a response to the evils of a capitalism that was then as now rampant and people’s fears were echoed in the shaping of new archetypes that could combat the dark forces they were confronted with. Science being on the one hand a potential savior, but on the other a means of destruction, this duality reflected in Mr Hyde’s horrific nature as the reverse of the scientifically minded Doctor Jekyll. The ability of scientific thinking to solve problems was a clear vindication of the Enlightenment project, (a project that was to be questioned by the Romantic movement) and paradoxically once again, just as science seemed to be the only real answer to the world’s problems a new dark territory opened out to us through the work of Freud and an awareness that our unconscious was shaping our supposedly ‘logical’ responses to life. This duality, the potential of science to solve problems, (the detective) and the awareness of the power of the unconscious (the vampire, the bat in the night, Mr Hyde) is what makes Batman so interesting. Perhaps there is not enough contradiction in Tintin’s make up to ensure his relevance to our lives under 21st century late Capitalism. Tintin is essentially only knowable as a comic book figure. His complexity lies in the relationship between Hergé's ‘ligne claire’ drawing style and the printed text. Batman on the other hand has had numerous writers and artists depict the character, Bob Kane as an artist and Bill Finger as a writer, never fixed his image beyond the initial concept which has morphed with the times. Tintin would not be Tintin without Hergé, hence the problems with the new Tintin film, but Batman is open to constant re-interpretation.
Both characters are tied to childhood, but in different ways. Batman will forever act out the night of witnessing the death of his parents, Tintin will never grow up. It’s only when we are happy supported children that we believe that we don’t need parents, because their support is such that they seem as natural as water is for fish to swim in, we can’t imagine the world without them. As we mature, there will be always a point of parental loss and we then have to make our own decisions about life and face the tragedy of our own drama. Perhaps this is why Batman’s early loss resonates with audiences as they get older and Tintin’s angst free life is more something for the child in us. Tintin’s fictional life is one that is essentially comedic, the action may be tense but it never descends into the dark, his soul is spotless, but Batman’s is dark and torn around the edges and is tragic.
Both characters have animal shamanistic elements. Tintin and Snowy come as a unit. An inseparable combination reminiscent of Philip Pullman’s dæmons. Batman is of course a ‘manbat’, he dresses as a shaman would, clothed in an animal costume designed to alter his persona and strike fear on his enemies. His bat animus (Jungian term) being a primary anthropomorphic archetype of the unconscious mind. In one comic thread Batman first learned of the powers of bats from ancient North American indian folklore, so it is not too far-fetched to assume that his writers have been very aware of the shamanistic links and play with them, Hergé of course never reflects on this relationship and Snowy is simply a very knowing dog.
Perhaps above all the fact that Batman is normal, (well as normal as an Olympic athlete is), means that we can see ourselves being able to do the things he does. This is often the flaw in Superman, who is very hard to relate to and therefore to defuse this films of Superman often have a comic element. Superman’s origins on a farm, don’t have the same relevance to us as an urban childhood. However I’m now drifting off the point so perhaps I better stop. It would be interesting to hear readers own views of these two releases.



The above image of a shaman is from Les Troyes Feres cave complex and is over 14,000 years old.

A reminder that it is reading week next week

Level 5
Assessed tasks that should be on your blog by the end of the year.
1. A scanned in image of an annotated text.
2. Notes from seminars. If you didn’t attend seminars you can of course go to the contextual studies area of your DFGA Moodle and look for the lectures and other supporting information and texts. The more notes you have the better the mark.
3. A short review of a film or a film’s opening credits.
4. Notes taken from a theoretical text. (These could be notes taken from the Marshall McLuhan 'Medium is the Massage' reading) (Scan in or type up)
5. A mind map demonstrating how you developed aspects to a theoretical concept / idea.(Scan in)
6. A moving image analysis. (This could be stand alone or part of the essay)
7. Other work done that has helped you develop an essay. Such as notes made, practicing writing academically (for this you could use the set academic writing tasks in the essay writing handout such as how to triangulate or summarise), an introduction to the essay, examples of practicing correct Harvard referencing.
8. The essay itself which could include an image analysis, could demonstrate good academic writing, have a clear introduction, be Harvard referenced correctly etc. and as such it would evidence 7 and 8. However you could develop a higher mark for the portfolio by demonstrating the fact that you tried out things before writing the final thing. This is a good way of using drafts and ideas that perhaps don’t make it into the final essay to bolster your portfolio.

Additionality (i.e. ways of getting higher marks) can include personal reflections on theory/practice, responses or comments to what Garry Barker has posted to his blog or comments on other students' blogs. This demonstrates a commitment to the whole group learning.
You could also post about films that you have been to which could be commented upon and analysed, computer games you have played, books you have read, events you have been to etc. Basically anything that you have experienced or thought about that helps demonstrate that you are thinking contextually about your practice.

The actual essay has to be printed off and submitted to the contextual studies office separately.
The final blog which will act as your portfolio to be submitted for summative assessment. Submission Date:27/3/12
NB The final blog portfolio can include a revised version of the essay done in response to formative feedback.

What you should have so far (To get up to date by the end of reading week)
A thread on your blog with module code and title: OUDF205 Contextual and Theoretical Studies 2
A scanned image of an annotated text
Notes on sessions so far
(For extra points any notes taken in the general lecture programme for all students) Optional but can give additionality
A mind map demonstrating how you developed aspects to a theoretical concept / idea.(Scan in)


Level 4
What you should have by the end of reading week
A thread on your blog that identifies the module. (OUDF 104)
Notes taken in lectures (scanned in or typed up)
Notes taken in following seminars (scanned in or typed up)
Any record of further activity such as looking at modernist or post-modernist films and commenting on them.
The moving image analysis task which is available on Moodle.

Leeds Film Festival and Thought Bubble

Big Man Japan Director:Hitoshi Matsumoto

Big Man Japan has been to Leeds before it's a hoot, dont miss its screening as part of the film festival.

It’s nearly time for the Leeds Film Festival again. This is an event so easy to miss out on. My suggestion is to go through the programme and be selective, if not you can get really lost as there is so much on offer. So, what am I going to prioritise?
Simply because I’m someone who spends a lot of time drawing narratives, the Thought Bubble event on the weekend of the 19th and 20th of November, is an event I won’t miss. http://thoughtbubblefestival.com/
It’s a chance to catch up on small press offerings and see if there are any people out there making comics that deal with subject matter outside the norm. Last year Darryl Cunningham http://darryl-cunningham.blogspot.com/ was a hidden star. His graphic novel ‘Psychiatric Tales’ is a brilliant series of observations made when he was working in a psychiatric ward. You can see his work on-line and it was his on-line presence that started to alert publishers that here was a major talent that needed publishing.



Darryl is a classic case of an artist experiencing the world and then processing it through his work. He demonstrates that all our experiences have potential to be source material for creative art. When I was giving a lecture the other day on comics I was thinking of Darryl when encouraging everyone to look at underground and independent press publications. The last thing the world of transmedia needs is yet another superhero, the gold dust in terms of character development is always hidden in the fantastic complexity of real life. Darryl’s latest work looks at science, a potentially boring subject elevated by his clear treatment and focus. Again not a subject you would normally associate with comic books, but that’s the point.


The other area I’m always interested in is the Fanomenon section. The Méliès d’Argent competition has a whole mix of shorts and odd things that are usually 70% rubbish but 30% are gems. I’m really looking forward to what could be a post-modern classic. The Last Screening by Achard, is a French film that is set in a little one-screen arthouse picture palace that plays Renoir’s ‘French Can-Can’ on loop. In between screenings the proprietor recites passages of dialogue with the patrons. But the screen is set for closure, so some of the proprietor’s more violent pastimes may have to be curbed. I’m told Achard’s film is out-and-out preposterous, a soulless essay that’s livened by a smattering of striking imagery and a few neat juxtapositions. Sounds good to me.


The Last Screening

I’m also intested in seeing ‘Mystics in Bali’ which is a 1981 Indonesian horror film directed by H. Tjut Djalil. The film revolves around the Balinese mythology of the leyak and was originally banned in Indonesia, but pirated copies found their way onto VHS first locally and then internationally. The film eventually gained cult status, particularly after the proliferation of the internet. The way this film has slowly become popular is a great example of accidental viral marketing.
There is also some classic Japanese horror; including a screening of one of the Ghost Cat films. The Ghost Cat story was first filmed in the silent era (1918) and the first Japanese talkie was Kazuo Mori's Ghost Cat & the Red Wall, (1938), so it has a long history and is comparable to Murnau’s Nosferatu which first aired in 1922.


Poster for Ghost Cat

I’ll be interested to see how many reviews get posted over the period. Getting to see films that position themselves outside of the normal conventions is another way of helping build up a wider range of visual references and it really helps when it comes to making decisions when you are looking through the camera lens and deciding how to frame and what to do with the lighting.

The Brothers Quay and Light Night

Friday night was light night in Leeds. In the basement of Leeds Town Hall was a wonderful exhibition of the work of the Brothers Quay. Any animation student, anyone thinking of using stop motion film techniques, anyone thinking about how to create sets for film and anyone who just wants to see some of the best creative imaginations working in this country should get there right now. The work is stunning.
Not only this but the Brothers Quay have been invited to come and play with the canvas that is Leeds, to create something that will alter the way we see the city, something people will remember as part of the myth of Leeds. They have proposed a large-scale work called ‘Overworlds & Underworlds’ which will place in May next year, and will explore the flow of people and water through the city. It’s hard to believe that Leeds has been brave enough to take the risk of letting their dark imaginations lose on the city. All praise whoever brokered this.



Since the late 1970s, the identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay have made a unique contribution to stop-animation. Each Quay film is riveting, using attention to detail in sets and characterization to draw you into a strangely convincing other world. Look at their work through the lenses they embed in the side of their miniature sets, then experience how these images are animated to music and movement, evoking half-remembered dreams and long-suppressed childhood memories, fascinating and deeply unsettling in turn. Their films are often described as surreal, moody and macabre, representing a world frozen in time, full of cobwebs and dust, mirrors and strange machines. One of their best-known films, ‘Street of Crocodiles’ was adapted from a short story by Polish novelist, Bruno Schulz and selected by Terry Gilliam as one of the top 10 best animated films of all time. The set of Street of Crocodiles is on display in the ‘Dormitorium’ exhibition and when I went in they were screening some of their films too. In fact film critic Jonathan Romney included Street of Crocodiles in Sight and Sounds best 10 films of all time. They are that good. They also work on music videos. See His Name is Alive ‘We are still married’ and ‘Cant go wrong without you’. Because they work in such a classic style, I believe these videos are timeless, their own vision is so powerful, The Quay Brothers’ use of black and white and shadow is so intense that these music videos transcend the genre. Perhaps for music fans the work is too powerful and I know some find their work hard to take. However all the best art is difficult, in the case of the Brothers Quay they tap deeply into the dark side, but do it with exquisite craftsmanship, control of lighting and texture and a terrific knowledge of how to frame and pace an animation.



Check out their films in the collection, ‘Phantom Museums: The Short Films Of The Quay Brothers’.
Watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7u3lPcDh50

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsMYOeOIZYE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gIb0bTWj6w Street Of Crocodiles

Those hats

The Fedora Hat

So why did I get interested in hats in my last blog post. At the core of this year’s contextual studies is transmedia theory and one aspect of this is the concept of migratory characters. Migratory characters need to be easily recognisable and in the game world of course scalable. Making a character identifiable when it’s only a half inch high is a tricky business and a good hat can do the job for you. Characters need to remain consistent over the course of their transmedia development, because narratives themselves change and will be less easy to recollect. Within prolonged engagement with a narrative, stories can begin to merge and become indistinguishable from each other, characters however are easier to identify and recall, especially if they have a good hat.
This indicates the importance of character in establishing audience engagement with a transmedia concept. It is the characters that remain a constant point of contact for the audience. Regardless of what is happening within story episodes on TV, plots in film or situations within games, the characters should be recognisable and familiar and therefore should help orient the audience within whatever aspect of the narrative they find themselves.
Perhaps each component of a transmedia story should be designed as canonical from the outset. Therefore a hat needs to signify this. Going back to the Indiana Jones model, his hat is a fedora and its wide brim means it’s not far off a cowboy hat. Early cowboy films established the hat as a way of distinguishing good from bad. White hats for the good guys, black for outlaws. Even the Lone Ranger had a white hat. These types of hats signified excitement, adventure, the outdoors etc. basically you wouldn’t wear a hat like that indoors. Most importantly though it made the protagonists easy to spot.
Jones’ hat belongs to a family of ‘hunter’ hats, such as Crocodile Dundee’s or the one Hugh Jackman wears to hunt vampires in Van Helsing. If you go on-line to buy a similar hat you end up having to go through stuff like the Bounty Hunter Outback collection, in fact you can even get Crocodile Dundee hats, this is text directly taken from the website:

“There’s something about a crocodile hunter hat that speaks of adventure and the great outdoors. The most famous wearer of this stylish yet practical form of headgear was of course Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee, and anyone choosing one now as their hat of choice risks comparison with the original croc hunter himself.”

It would appear that the hat can also signify a world. ‘A world’ that is a setting for any transmedia character is also important, is it big enough to be developed, would the audience want to spend time in it? These type of hats suggest big adventure worlds, so they work yet again. Besides being scalable, can these hat characters be watched as well as played? I suppose the issue here is can they be intellectualised for a passive audience (film/TV) and can they be actualized for an active audience? (Game player experience) Yet again yes to both things. Why does SuperMario wear a hat? (Sonic’s hair effectively becomes a hat).

So as you do I did a bit of research on Google, the Hero's Hat I now find out is a Vanity Item from the action-packed adventure game Terraria. It's part of the Hero Outfit, the other parts being the Hero's Shirt and Hero's Pants. You can even get an Archaeologist's Hat. To quote; “The Archaeologist's Hat is a Vanity Item that is dropped by Doctor Bones. It is the head slot component of the Archaeologist's Outfit. The outfit's appearance resembles the clothes of famous archeologist Indiana Jones. The Hat sometimes disappears when dropped by player; this is presumed to be a bug.”


The Archaeologist's Hat from Terraria

It’s all of course part of the hero’s journey and all heroes have their identifiable characteristics, Hercules had his Lion head, knights and Captain America have their helmets and Dick Tracy his yellow wide brim fedora, which takes me straight back to Indiana Jones. The fact is because of that hat we don’t need to explain where Indy came from, or show how he got embroiled in a conflict with the Nazis. It’s evident from the start that this is a man who goes on exciting adventures, that he has probably been on lots of similar adventures in the past, and is likely he will go on plenty more adventures in the future – perfect for Transmedia franchising.


Hercules


Dick Tracy

Troll Hunter

One of the things all of you as students will be asked to do is review things you have seen. So perhaps I should at least have a go myself. I went to see André Øvredal’s Troll Hunter at the Hyde Park over the weekend. So some thoughts.

I was a bit worried during the opening 10 minutes. The cinema vérité style has been used so much since The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and for me it had reached its most comedic effect in ‘Never Been Thawed’ and ‘A Day without a Mexican’. It’s almost impossible to go back to those days when a hand held camera kept running seemed to heighten the reality of horror, hand held cameras now just seem to increase my awareness of sea sickness. They are just another convention and when used had better be used thoughtfully and with purpose. However after a while I started to think that the technique itself was been used as a joke and this was done to reflect the content, which itself was another joke. Shaky-camera, green night-vision, cameras still running after being dropped, the shattered lens shots, long-lost footage; all played off against the monster in the dark, government conspiracy theories, young people trapped in a horror situation that they can’t seem to escape. But then the details start adding up. A shot of miniature trolls as tourist souvenirs, connected with something, I realised this film has a history that goes all the way back to the troll doll. My sister had one in about 1965, The Trollies Radio Show, had trolls singing ‘Wooly Bully and Manfred Man’s ‘Do Wah Diddy’, the Trolls are well known within the world of Kitsch culture and had a track record of being marketed by the Norwegian tourist board. It was their hair I couldn’t stand, or was it my sister’s preoccupation with platting it? Whatever, Trolls are not just part of nursery time culture any more, but even I must admit the ‘Three Billy Goat’s Gruff’ used to scare the hell out of me and the scene of the sheep and the Troll coming out from under the bridge brought it all back.
I must get back to the tourist thing. Part of the format was clearly a reference to tourist board films, like those we get celebrating Scotland’s wild beauty and rough wilderness. I’m sure Norwegians are inundated with these and film-makers probably cut their teeth on them, shot after shot of fjords, mountains and forests do start to wear you down after a while, but again, I was starting to get the humour; a particular type of Nordic humour, but it was definitely funny in a not laugh out loud sort of way.


Indiana Jones


Alan Quartermain


Ray Winstone Tracker


Otto Jespersen Troll Hunter

Jespersen's performance as the troll hunter is essential to the film's success. He is a well known comedian in Norway, so it’s a bit like Jack Dee playing Indiana Jones as far as Norwegians are concerned. That straight faced acting method he uses is part of his comedy ‘act’ and we are meant to see the link between the hero’s costume, (bush hat, boots, belts etc) and the tight lipped, manly man’s man of action movies. See Sean Connery’s Allan Quartermain in ‘The League of Victorian Gentlemen’ or even Ray Winston in ‘Tracker’. Do the clothes make the man? In this instance they at least make the connection.
Jesperson’s performance just about saved the film from the exhausted and overused mockumentary format, and allowed the film to play off subtle humor with physical tension. That tension was often due to footage that had been a product of ‘night vision’ filming, which had then had grain added in post-production to make it even more realistic night vision footage. That peculiar green and quality of otherworldliness is just right if you are going to construct a world within which horrors can grow and suddenly arrive out of the dark. Perhaps this is why so many early black and white films still affect us. Old tricks, like never show the audience the monster, but show tree movement, shadows, make us feel and hear vibrations from heavy footfalls, were all used well. The moving trees in Kurosowa’s ‘Throne of Blood’ still being the best tree image; the forest in Disney’s Snow White is out of the same visual history, which goes all the way back to Altdolfer’s ‘St. George in the Forest’ or the forest of Fangorn in Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’. In fact when we see the Troll, it’s as always a bit of a disappointment, but in this case it’s OK, because it’s a joke and the troll is easy meat for the hunter. Just turn the light on and the troll is turned to stone. It would have been a good moment to suddenly turn the light on in the cinema at that point and watch the pale audience reaction. Somewhere the light as tool to remove darkness myth is still more resonant in the movies. We still gather together for comfort in the dark, listening to stories around that single point of illumination. In this case it being the Hyde Park Cinema, people had twigged the joke early and were chuckling along as the film went through its various acknowledgements to other cultures.
So how was it? Part horror movie, part social satire, part Norwegian travel documentary, part monster movie, part vehicle for one of Norwegian’s best known comics, it was a film that I found slightly confusing as how to react. Mildly funny, very knowing, too long and at times just poor, it did ask some questions and keep me in my seat, so it can’t be bad, or can it?
Comments welcomed.