Month: February 2014
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Adding Interactivity to Narrative: Beyond Branching Paths [Part 1]
Feb 28, 2014 5:30pm | by admin
Branching paths have always been one of the pillars of interactive storytelling. The premise is compelling: give the reader or viewer agency over the narrative’s path. Let the audience choose where the story will go next. It sounds like the perfect solution to storytelling in the digital age. The trouble is, while it’s an interesting […]
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Less Is More: Opting For An Easy Interface
Feb 25, 2014 5:21pm | by admin
Our love of technology and our desire to be loved are natural. We are born with the instinct to reach out for our mother’s hand. Just as a baby will use an iPad with the same ease as a trained technologist… these things seem, well, easy. Our relationship to narrative is equally intuitive: we engage […]
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Transmedia in 2014: Deep Vs Wide
Feb 13, 2014 10:00am | by admin
In our media saturated world, creative platforms abound. If you have a story to tell, there is no shortage of places to tell it: on television, in theatres, in print, via mobile devices, and across social media. This increase over the last decade has led to the explosion of “transmedia, ” the potential to tell […]
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Valentine’s Day Is A Few Days Away: Love Stories In WoW
Feb 12, 2014 1:24pm | by admin
Tinder has taken over. You’re hot or you’re not, and with that, your romantic fate has been sealed. Algorithms are playing an ever active role in sorting, matching, and maybe even filtering out your future love. Technology has taken away the mystery of romance, the anticipation of getting to know the object of your affection, clue […]
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Tiffany Shlain
Feb 10, 2014 12:16pm | by Julie Giles
“I sometimes imagine that every post, tweet, and text is flooding the planet with oxytocin, making us more empathetic and more inclined to share and collaborate. Maybe this is why collaboration is on the rise.” — Tiffany Shlain, The Harvard Business Review Tiffany Shlain is an American filmmaker, artist, founder of the Webby Awards, and […]
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Why iPad? Touch Screens and Diving Deeper with the Z-Axis
Feb 6, 2014 1:01pm | by admin
From the outset, Avatar Secrets was always going to be a digital project – in content, and in form. For starters, it’s 2014. How can you really explore a story about our hybrid digital lives in a purely linear format? The theme called for an innovative approach. Secondly, there was so much that needed to […]
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The Fountain Scene: Q&A With The Creative Team – Ramona Pringle, Michaele Jordana & Olney Atwell
Feb 5, 2014 9:00am | by Julie Giles
In this instalment of Avatar Secrets ‘Making Of’, we’re examining one of the first scenes to be rendered in full — The Fountain Scene. The scene begins with a live action sequence of Ramona in her room and quickly morphs into an elaborate animated landscape as the viewer transitions from the real into the virtual […]
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In Conversation With Illustrator Michael Derrah
Feb 5, 2014 8:55am | by Julie Giles
Director Ramona Pringle chatted with Avatar Secrets illustrator Michael Derrah about developing the project’s hand-drawn style and a “2.5D” feeling of depth, created out of flat assets. They talk about how the Fountain Scene — the first scene that was rendered for the project’s prototype came to life, and how Mike worked with the rest […]
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The Fountain Scene: An Early Animatic Rendering
Feb 1, 2014 8:13pm | by Julie Giles
The decision about how this scene would look, and move, was a collaborative one, taking into account visual style and composition, animation, and narrative. We knew that we wanted photorealistic elements in the scene, and that those elements should be chosen and placed purposefully. The fountain is the focal piece of the scene both visually […]
