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Beyond Machinima: Rudy Poat and John Gaeta on the Future of Interactive Cinema
GS: Do you play games now or are you interested in gaming at all? John Gaeta: I am not a hardcore gamer, but I'm absolutely fascinated by the game content evolution. I'd say you'd have to put me in the casual gamer column. The understanding of the experience and the underpinnings of the design is something I can see very clearly as I watch my friends play. I've had a lot of experience over the last few years talking with different developers and designers about their quests. GS: While speaking to Rudy, he mentioned that you guys saw this as a gateway into a higher level of production for gaming cinematics and game rendering. What interested you in that in the first place?
JG: Basically, to me, there are fundamental characteristics of cinema and interactive gaming that have developed over many years that are very reliable techniques to capture the imagination of the player or viewer. There are attributes and paths of entertainment that have a lot to do with the experience of not being able to control anything, the mystery laid out in front of you, the unpredictably, the singularity of a sculpted vision as a director and writer can lay out. That's really the polar opposite of interactive gaming, and I'm not going to get into that whole discussion because that's happening on the sidelines ad nauseum, in an interesting way. There's a lot of debate and discussion of why interactivity needs to remain in the particular format that it's in because it's about the play and it's about the experience. I feel that's a completely rock solid theory that people put out there. Interactivity is definitely using a different part of one's brain, and it's a wholly different entertainment experience. I have no interest at looking at gaming and suggesting that story lines can be improved, because that's a completely case by case basis based on what the concept is and how it was executed. GS: Sure. JG: The same goes for film. We all know that there are remarkable films that change your life and there are films that pass you by and you don't care. It will always be that way. That's the nature of film. I'm curious about several things. One, from a technical point of view, I think this is going to be of great interest for film makers as it will give them access to ideas that they could never achieve through the process of pre-visualization. In the last few years, this has allowed people to try things that were previously unthinkable, because it allows you the higher understanding of simulating your film in advance. You suddenly receive this wisdom that was impossible to imagine your way through. Pre-visualization, to me, became a gateway to higher concept in cinema. Essentially, it is a simulation, and in the last few years we've gone from doing it in a laborious hand-sculpted way to what, I believe, is taking hold now is greater and greater reliance on more sophisticated simulations to allow you to visualize cinematic content. The strongest linkage between cinema and games in terms of partnerships between the two industries and artists has to do with visualizing content per se. The deeper we go into this, the more we will align the platforms, methodologies and artists behind them. It's happening, we see it happening, and we all have a lot of associates that are able to pass back and forth between the two industries and actually do quite well. If this change continues at the pace its going, coupled with the fact that the audiences for film and games are changing quite a bit with the new generations growing up on interactivity and are becoming addicted to being able to access more from their entertainment, it's infinite exposition. The problem with film is that you can never develop the characters deeply enough, or find out enough nuances about the world in the setup. You potentially become frustrated before they wrap it up in two hours, or nowadays ninety minutes. The screen time is definitely creating the risk of an empty feeling at the end. Like, I didn't get enough depth out of that story experience. Games allow you infinite expository capabilities, and that is possibility the strongest characteristic of a game universe. Where I'm coming from now is [I'm] watching, and in some ways helping to push, the trend towards an alignment of applying simulation of both game and simulation content. The technology used for it and the artist used towards it. I want to unify the conceptualization of film and game in the same moment, and to allow the execution of the final rendering of certain cinematic content within the same platforms such that once that is working at a quality level that will pass muster for a wide screen high definition theater system. The idea is that one would have access to that exact same content for an interactive experience to create a much deeper, immersive experience to have at the periphery of the director's vision. To step back and try to simplify that statement: let's say a director sculpts a scene and you're riveted by it in the theater experience, and you've experienced it in the way they wanted it seen. Then, here's the opportunity to revisit that exact same scene. It's a three dimensional interactive mirror of that exact same content, assuming that certain things can be achieved like chronological time and it's not so abstract in its editorial construct. You know what I mean? GS: Yeah, I think so. |
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