Month: October 2022

Non-Linear Narrative

I wasn’t sure if todays class would be another workshop or a lesson so I asked David in an email. He informed me he would be going over non-linear narrative but at this point I had already decided on staying home. However, I can assure you it wasn’t out of laziness. I still do work for my old job and was recently given the blueprints for a new construction mansion. I actually prefer estimating full new houses vs smaller miscellaneous jobs so I was excited for this one. The only downside is that my boss is hoping to review this estimate with me, the company owner and the architect on Thursday so I need to be ultra prepared. That being said, I still feel guilty for skipping class today so to partly make up for my absence, I am going to learn exactly what a non-linear narrative entails.

Wikipedia says that non-linear narrative is when “the narrative does not follow the direct causality pattern of the events featured, such as parallel distinctive plot lines, dream immersions or narrating another story inside the main plot-line.” Quentin Tarantino significantly popularized this technique with his films such as Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill and the Hateful Eight. In an interview Quentin says “audiences, as long as they’re in good hands, they like being curious, they don’t like to be told everything… If they think the story teller will eventually take care of them, they can wait.” What I think Quentin means here is that as long as the viewer trusts the story teller to eventually tell them, they don’t want to know everything right away, they enjoy trying to piece together the narrative from the limited information they have. I experienced this recently when I saw The Watcher. Its a psychological thriller on Netflix based on a true story about a family moving into a new house. Everything starts out great, with a sort of too good to be true element as you follow a happy family begin a new chapter of their life in the house of their dreams. Disturbing unexplained events begin to occur and ramp up exponentially throughout the series. Grasping onto every new piece of information, you are cascaded with red herrings as the story gains a new level of mystery each episode. It feels like the more you learn, the less you know. This was so addicting that I watched the whole series in one sitting. The story was linear for the most part but did incorporate some nonlinear aspects as some events would be told through a characters recollection or flashbacks. My one complaint with this series is the ending. What kept me so glued was the future relief of the mystery being inevitably solved. This never happened leaving me very unsatisfied. At first I was mad that I had just invested all that time in something with no return and I still mainly feel that way, however I am beginning to see why the story teller chose this path. The true story that the series was based off was also unsolved and I think that the story teller wanted to share the same frustration that the real people must’ve felt. He wanted to put us in their shoes, no matter how bitter and unsatisfying they were. The reason I wanted to discuss The Watcher so heavily is that I feel like it shares a very similar element to a lot of non-linear narratives. That element being, manipulating the viewer to create their own story from the very limited information they have. The viewer feels a desire to understand so they dive down rabbit hole after rabbit hole with every new piece of information. A lot of non-linear stories slowly unfold giving the viewer just enough oxygen (information) to survive but not enough to satisfy them. Demanding their full attention as they don’t want to miss a precious bubble as it quickly floats by.

I have an idea for a psychological interactive thriller that I would love to explore. I’m not sure yet if VR would add more than it would subtract here so I haven’t determined detail yet. The main overview is this:

It is a POV from the perspective of a man (you) going crazy. It starts with hyper realistic dreams that you don’t know are dreams until you wake up. They start out fairly harmless but ramp up throughout the movie as they go from weird dreams to traumatic nightmares. It causes you to never feel comfortable because you never fully know if you are in one or not. An example would be you wake up and are preparing breakfast with your wife, you are talking to her as she cuts a bagel. She looks up at you and says “I’ve always wanted to try this” before abruptly pulling her arm back and stabbing herself through the neck with the blade. You instantly wake up in a panic as you realize that none of it was real. Maybe the next day you are preparing breakfast with her and she looks at you and says “I’ve always wanted to try this” in the same tone causing you to panic for a split second as you prepare for the coming brutality. Nothing happens though, it was just coincidence. Maybe you even are given the option as to leap over and grab the knife out of her hand vs sitting and doing nothing. Leaping over causes her to jump maybe cutting her hand in the process. She is mad and confused and says something like “What the fuck!! Why did you do that?!!” you apologize as you vaguely explain how you just got panicked because of the crazy dreams you’ve been having. She understands and forgives you as she shows a great sense of empathy and love. This relationship is a very healthy one, there is none of that pointless anxiety birthing secret keeping that happens so often in shows where the audience is left screaming “TELL THEM” at there TV. This is a realistic, healthy relationship, one that you feel couldn’t have a messy ending as both parties are so communicative. As the series goes on, the dreams get crazier and crazier. As you begin to get less and less sleep, you get more and more paranoid. Maybe people in real life start referencing things from the dreams that you didn’t tell them yet, making you slowly believe that everyone is in on it and against you. The paranoia peaks when your wife starts to do this too. It starts out slowly with something that’s easily shrugged off but never the less it plants the seed. As it progresses that seed grows until eventually you decide not to tell your wife about something. This begins the true isolation and full on plunge into paranoia. What keeps the viewer interested is that they are fed just enough information to believe that they ARE the right one and everyone IS out to get them. You know that you are getting paranoid and going crazy and you know to fight it but every time you do you are met with more evidence that you are actually onto something. By making this story interactive I feel like I could greatly take control of the balance of trusting them vs trusting yourself. For instance, it starts out about 99% trusting them until around midway through where its about 52% trusting them. You begin to nose dive as the scale tips and you are trusting yourself more than them. As you look for more and more evidence you fight it, but are met with counter information that makes you question if the first thing was true or not while simultaneously questioning the second piece of information. You are not just watching someone go crazy, you ARE the person. You decide whether or not to keep things from your wife, you decide whether or not to spy on people, you decide whether or not to lunge forward and snatch the knife out of your wife’s hand. You decide how long to fight the paranoia for but if you continue to resist submission, the evidence becomes harder and harder to ignore and eventually you feel like you might as well as least check. I think a cool aspect would be no matter what side you are on, it always feels like the wrong side. And if you convert to the other side it feels like the right decision up until you’ve done something that you can’t take back and your whole plan crumples with one piece of solid disproving information. Maybe then if you go back to the first side, right as you settle in you learn that the piece of information you got that disproved everything actually might have been false and it launches you right back into questioning everything. I think it would be cool to have a bunch of different endings that essentially span from it ALL being in your head and you being completely wrong, to it ALL being true and you really were onto something. You always get the opposite ending to what you believed though, so if you want it to all be true that they are out to get you, you fight the paranoia and trust everyone until maybe eventually they capture you are sacrifice you in some cult ritual,, orrrr if you want the ending to be that where they WERE all normal, then you dive deep into isolation and paranoia. I would also throw in some easter egg story lines that are only found through a succession of very specific choices. Some fun ones might be where you join and lead the cult that was once preying on you, or where you become a serial killer, or where you convince your wife its all true even though its just paranoia, ruining both of your lives, or where you “beat” the paranoia and have a kid only for him to ultimately vanish with signs pointing towards the cult that you thought was just in your head. This would be a super extensive project but I feel could set the bar for what interactive films COULD be while also educating / giving perspective of what paranoia is like. It would also be incredibly scary, particularly the nightmare dreams. It would be very hard as it would be a first person film to add the non-linear element but I feel like it would still be important to incorporate it. Maybe this would be in form of a day dream or flashback or life flashing before your eyes or a real dream that you wake up from and explain to your wife “hey remember that time blah blah blah… I just had the weirdest dream about it”. Just little bits of information to help build the groundwork for each character and help the viewer understand them better and understand why they do what they do. A good one would be looking at your wife, you feel like you are on the brink of proving your “crazy” theories correct but she is sobbing and saying if you don’t drop it she will leave you. As you look at her face you have a compilation flash before your eyes of all the amazing memories you’ve shared together and all the previous battles you’ve fought yet overcome anyway. Music would be playing and it the audio of each precious moment would seep into the next. It would be heartbreaking and convince most to drop the theories and choose her. Either choice would soon have you regretting it though.

Currently sitting in Kelvins class as he teaches everyone about NURBS. I remember learning about NURBS at the beginning of the year with Escape Studios. The teacher tried to show us how to create a banana and it was a disaster. Maya kept throwing up bugs and I remember being really concerned that this program was the “industry standard”. I only used them one other time and it was to create a pot for a potted plant. It actually worked pretty well but other than that I always avoid them. I created a pumpkin with polygons and it turned out pretty good, I’m hoping we texture them at some point as it would be so satisfying. If not, maybe I’ll just texture on my own.

Yesterday in Pierre’s class we had time to work on our own projects. I organized my Eevo interactive structure and then spent the remainder of class watching tutorials on importing google maps to a 3D model in Unity. It seems fairly straight forward but will definitely take some serious computer power. I’m excited to give it a go, I think it’ll open up some doors for new effects. You can mimic drone shots to a lower quality but with the right filters and maybe speed of the video, people might not notice.

I have an amazing idea.

I feel like a lot of VR installations, cool as they might be, are often unnecessary. Yes I know it’s “art” and art is subjective but lets just be real, some of it is dumb. I am in the boat that there ARE stupid questions which I feel is a similar boat to the one I’m explaining now which is, just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean you should. The only reason a lot of VR things are done is because they CAN and its NEW. Which yea I know you don’t always know what you should or shouldn’t do until you do it, but I personally feel like you should actually identify what will be added by making it VR and if that outweighs what you will be losing like accessibility or possibly turning someone away from VR. I really felt this with Datamoshing. Its a glitchy video effect that I love where you corrupt 2 videos together to form a super glitchy transition. This is a great effect and combined with masking and keyframes can be greatly expanded upon… However, it became too accessible and everyone started doing it to random things for no reason. Because of this it lost a lot of its novelty and is now sort of looked at as old news. Anyways, I guess what I’m trying to get at is that this idea benefits specifically from VR. Alright so lets get into it. You know how museums have giant dinosaur skeletons? Well I noticed that when viewing them I don’t see it as a dinosaur, I see it as a whole different thing. I don’t look at the bone structure and envision how the muscles would’ve attached or how the stomach would hang. I simply see a giant skeleton as a finished product. It’s also not scary to see a skeleton. Apart from the film “Night at the Museum” I’ve never imagined a giant dinosaur skeleton chasing me. I look at a skeleton as more of a man made structure rather than a once growing living animal with thoughts and instincts. What if in front of these giant skeleton structures, there is a VR headset that when you put it on, you are no longer in a museum, but in the middle of a Jurassic jungle with plants and bugs surrounding you. In place of the skeleton is now a living and breathing T-Rex that’s sniffing the air and looking around. It towers over you in a surreal way. A way that generates a level of fear/anxiety even though you know 100% you aren’t in danger. The type of feeling that isn’t visibly noticeable until someone startles you and you jump a bit higher than normal. Another way this could be expanded on is when they have multiple skeletons frozen in a fight. This one when you put the VR headset on the fight is actually happening right in front of you. You see one massive animal topple over as a T-Rex attacks, ripping out chunks of flesh while it snarls and growls. You hear the losing animal screech as it calls out for help from its tribe. You hear its tribe calling back from behind you and you turn around to see the alpha of the tribe barreling right past you towards the T-Rex to save its partner. And this is just one of the many scenes that could be done. It’s exciting and gives you a real perspective of scale for these giant beasts. Standing in front of a T-Rex skeleton lets you know what it feels like to stand in front of a T-Rex skeleton. This would let you know what it feels like to stand in front of a T-Rex.

A BETTER COOLER MORE FUN AMAZING PROFITING LIMITLESS IDEA WOULD BE……

When I was younger I would travel with my family to North Carolina to visit my Grandma. Sometimes on the way back we would pass a Dinosaur park to which I always NEEDED to stop and see. Now that I’m older I suspect that whether or not we passed the Dinosaur park was not random at all and instead a loving fathers detour. Man I love my Dad. Basically you would pay an entry fee and then walk around this forest on these asphalt trails. As you walked you’d see giant life sized dinosaurs existing just how they would’ve. Even though I had been many times, it was always surreal to spot them in the bushes or by the trees. I want to recreate this within VR. Imagine the same exact setup with trails through the woods but now you are handed a VR headset at the beginning. You put it on and are in a VR prehistoric environment with never before seen plants, bugs and creatures. The trail in your VR headset turns, bumps and elevates exactly how the trail in real life does. As you walk along the path, you’re surrounded with intense sounds from bushes rustling, bugs buzzing, wind in the trees, heavy foot stomps, light pattering through the brush and a variety of roars/screeches and calls. There is a great sense of unknown as you are blasted into a foreign environment. You are curious and excited yet cautious and uneasy. I would work with historical pros to make the experience not only exciting like Jurassic Park but more importantly educational and accurate like Prehistoric Planet. As you walk you are intrigued by not just the giant dinosaurs that you see in clearings but also the small things like a prehistoric frog hopping off the path as you approach or a carnivorous plant closing up trapping bugs inside. Whether its big or small you are captivated by it because it’s new and real. The experience would be programmed like a game rather than a predetermined video. It would play out a lot more random and natural than a set storyline. Think of this like a raw open world and NOT like a 2D platformer. Obviously the experience wouldn’t be completely random, you would need to assure that everyone gets to see what they came for so let me explain. It would be programmed like a game so the AI dinosaurs know where you are but not WHAT you are. They look at you with the same confusion/caution that you would to them. And yes I mean look at you. For instance, you are walking past a group of Triceratops grazing, you make noise, whether that be talking to point them out to your team or stepping on an unavoidable bunch of sticks and leaves creating a crunch, the Dinos get alarmed and raise their heads to look at you. Eyes and head following you as you move. Not like a video either, like they actually look right AT you and maybe if you make too much noise or move to much they turn and run away. As you continue you begin to see bigger and bigger creatures until eventually you stop because there is something pushing its way through the trees ahead on the trail. You see snapping and birds flying as a T-Rex steps out onto the trail, stopping briefly to turn his head towards you as he’s trying to figure you out, he decides he’s not interested and walks off the trail snapping and pushing down trees as he goes. Maybe you also have a version where he is chasing a smaller animal across the trail and you hear the deep thudding of the footsteps as they approach freezing in your tracks as they quickly get louder and louder. The main thing is that no matter where you are looking, there is something to see. Everyone has a slightly different experience and will see at least one thing that no one else saw. The car ride home will be full of everyone sharing and explaining something they saw that the others didn’t while the others do just the same back. This would greatly increase re-visits as people would notice something new each time. The other great part is that you could have different trails and experiences for all age ranges. One for younger kids that could involve helping a baby dinosaur find its mother. It follows you along the trail getting distracted chasing giant dragon flies or taste testing all the various plants, liking some and shuddering from others. This gives me the ambitious idea to add gloves to the tour so that you can actually pet the dinosaur or maybe reach up and pick it a fruit that it can’t reach. I feel as though this wouldn’t be logical, but it is important to keep in mind as a possibility. You could also have a trail that is no dinosaurs, just bugs, smaller mammals and plants. My favorite idea though is one where you walk through the day the meteor hit. It starts out normal as you walk through the jungle. Eventually you get to a lookout point where you have wind and a great view. Then you see the small sunlike figure in the sky as it grows larger and larger. (I think in real life the meteor hit so fast that if you blinked you wouldn’t have even seen it. It would be a lot cooler though if you watched it shoot across the sky, getting hit with an intense heat lamp as it passes over. Maybe we could do this part in slow motion to show how fast it was actually moving. Of course we could do it inaccurately like a movie would where you watch it slowly/dramatically streak across the sky but I think that would defeat the whole purpose. I want this to be a real representation of how it actually played out. I think its eye opening to see how such a thriving earth that existed for an incomprehensible amount of time can be completely demolished in the blink of an eye. I also think it would be cool for when the meteor hits, the ground you are on shakes. Then depending on demand, maybe the story continues where you watch the earth grow very dark as the air born ash blocks the sun. Maybe you are now hit with cold air as the temperature drops and snow/ice covers the ground. Watching every last dinosaur die out. I want to keep this more dinosaur than human in the historical sense but it might be cool to have you go through a super fast time lapse pausing briefly at important moments just to give you a visual connection of this land to the one before. Also it would be very eye opening in terms of time perspective. Humans are a drop in an ocean in terms of time spent on earth and most people know that, however I feel like its something that you can not ever fully understand/believe and this would help us get closer to actually experiencing the raw scale of it.

David skipped class today (Monday) because of “off-site meetings”. This is the second week in a row where we had no instructor on Monday. I really hope David somehow makes up both classes. I was also so excited to come to class and tell everyone about my sick dinosaur idea. Now I have to wait until Wednesday. Which will be fine it just really takes the wind out of my sails.

Finally up to date so I should be able to remember these lessons better.

We meet again,

David was sick today, a lot of people have been recently. Not me though, I’ve gotten lucky. I wish I would’ve stayed home today because I have some work for my previous job to do. On Wednesday we started the day with a little time to review Eevo, an interactive story building program I signed up for a demo of. Then we had a 2 hour long meeting about “Time Management and Working Independently”. This was ironic to me as it was such a waste of time. I asked the class if they ever enjoyed those things and it got the same reaction as if I asked about their thoughts on ice breakers. The presenter was very nice and had great energy but the material was rather dule. It could’ve all been summed up to “take breaks, don’t procrastinate, ask for help, minimize distractions” in about 15 minutes but instead we spent 1.5 hours on this asking the class their opinions every slide. I know people are trying to make the presentation interactive but it just wastes time when the material is so straightforward that no one interacts. Maybe its just one of those things that you pick up little tricks subconsciously and it really does benefit to hear. Actually now that I write it out, I feel like that’s probably the case. For the rest of class on Wednesday we worked on our interactive film. Basically we just filmed our shots and started uploading them. I was pretty salty when we went to film in the library and got kicked out due to “lack of permission”. So we have to film on campus but we aren’t allowed to in certain areas? When I say it out loud it actually sounds very reasonable but I was so annoyed at the time as I didn’t want to film at the school to begin with. We didn’t have Eric this week because he was doing a presentation and so instead we spent more time working on the interactive film. I was pretty disappointed by this because I really like Eric. Maybe I like him because we come from the same continent and I feel like I can relate more when we talk therefore making me a lot more comfortable talking to him. Or maybe its because I was impressed with his artistic vision in his portfolio so much so that I want to impress him with MY artistic vision for the energizing warmth of approval from someone better than you. Its probably a bit of everything but the main reason is definitely that beautiful beard.

This will probably include less ice breaker abuse.

Well well well, if it isn’t that successful, freshly shaven, efficient staff member again. Look at you being all responsible reviewing my bloated blog again. I hope I was not too harsh in the last one and If so, I’m sorry. In this blog I will try to be more like a sweet ripe orange rather than its sour citrus brother, the lemon. A little FYI though, I do love lemons. So much so I eat them whole, including the rind. And not just for attention either, like I genuinely would eat a whole lemon if I was completely alone in a room with one… When I write it out like that it sounds so romantic. I’m imagining me sitting at a small table in a dimly lit french restaurant, piano playing softly and the Eiffel tower reflecting off the expensive glass of wine in my hand as I smooth talk a nicely dressed lemon across the table. God I would love to see whats under that rind. OK LETS MOVE ON TO MORE ACADEMIC THINGS. Week 2 was a lot better than week 1. I got to meet Eric who seems super cool and am beginning to make friends with some of my classmates. Eric is from Mexico but has been living in LA prior to London. We chatted a bit about the contrast of those two places as I was planning on going to LA too before changing to London. Eric also relieved that his brother is getting his masters degree at Penn State. That’s where I live in Pennsylvania! Out of all the places his brother could be, he just happened to go to school in my town. I was so amazed I texted my mom and dad to which everyone said the same thing “small world”. My mom then said something like “Let him know if his brother needs people to spend time with around the holidays, or just wants to have a meal, we would love to have him!”. Shes always trying to meet new people and go out of her way to help. Sometimes to a fault but I think its a good fault to have. Pierre showed us our new immersive assignment. It’s supposed to be like the Black Mirror Bandersnatch episode but all in 360. Right away my mind was running with the idea. I had a whole story line already unfolding and was eager to explore more. It was going to be based off a classic Friday night of partying. The first decision was what shirt you would wear. If you picked the first shirt the story would progress like normal, but if you picked the second shirt, something would get spilled on your shirt and you’d have to end up wearing the first one anyway. This would create the illusion of choice for the viewer without having to film every future scene 2 times, 1 in each shirt. Anyway I had a lot more ideas like this and even planned on having a super weird abstract path that was somewhat of an easter egg to find. Wellllllllllllll Pierre then went on further to explain the guidelines for the assignment and they were a lot less ambitious. Apparently we were supposed to film something as if its a tour of LCC and it must all be filmed on LCC campus. Boy is that a creative killer, I guess it wouldn’t be school without putting me in a box though. I asked Pierre if I could do a different idea and he said yes but it still needs to be filmed on campus. Soooooo disappointing… Well I guess its alright because I like my group. Kelvin started teaching Maya and a few people missed which basically means they are screwed. He also went fairly fast so even those who didn’t miss are still going to struggle with the homework. Hell, even I struggled with the homework and I have 5 months of experience. Luckily Marie also has some experience with Maya so she can help people too.

Trying to recall what happened the first week because no one showed us how to use the blog until the third week.

Well hello there you cute little reader. Greetings, welcome and bonjour. This blog is about the first week of class. SIT BACK AND ENJOY YOURSELF PLEASE. It was a brisk morning on February 26th, this date had been on my mind for awhile as it was the day my new VR classes started. I was worried I may not be allowed into class as I was not yet enrolled… To be fair I did send all the information but apparently it takes the school two weeks to process it. I had emailed support asking if I would be able to go to class anyway even if my enrollment hadn’t been processed yet, but multiple times they said no. I didn’t want to miss class so I came in anyway. It was pretty easy to get through the security gates without my pass, actually, many other kids didn’t have their passes either. Now all I had to do was find my room. After walking up what felt like 62 flights of stairs I finally came to a group of students standing outside a room as an older man fiddled with the lock. He picked the lock with experience which sparked my imagination as to what this mystery man has done for past occupation. This gives me an idea… Its a VR heist game where you break into things. Whether thats picking locks or thinking outside of the box. Im just imagining a giant vault that you have to twist certain levers while also moving your head to listen to the safe ticking as it gets closer. Well class started and I soon found that the mystery man was named David, and he would be our course leader for VR. The first week of classes was incredibly boring and full of ice breakers. Ice breakers… what an inaccurate name for the activity. Breaking ice is fun and satisfying, something I could do for hours, something I would risk frostbite for. Ice breakers however are something that no one wants to do, something that new teachers feel they should do because their old teachers did. A vicious cycle that I fear might never end. Well I guess I don’t blame the teacher for wanting to build a relationship with their students I just wish they did it in a more creative way. I feel like the classic ice breaker formula lacks sincerity. Kelvin had a more creative ice breaker but what stood out the most was how present he was while we each spoke. It seemed like he was genuinely interested in what we had to say. That stood out to me. Eric also made me feel this way but technically that was week 2 so I’ll touch on that more in the next post. I tried to be optimistic about the course as it was only the first week but my honest raw emotions were a bit negative. I understand most of the students are younger than me and that I need to be more patient in that regard but damn the acting felt unnecessary. It felt like back in the day when I would have to act out bible stories at the local church. I’m hoping this blunt honesty isn’t too much. please let me know if it is. Tune in next time to hear about my secret love for Eric and the chaos of learning Maya.