By Travis Johnson
A veteran of the Australian film industry, Martin Brown has worked extensively with Baz Luhrmann, starting as art director on Strictly Ballroom and working up to producing Moulin Rouge. He now consults on Storytelling and Innovation, and works with the University of Sydney as a Curriculum Designer. We caught up with him at the Global Mobile Internet Conference at Sydey’s ICC, where he delivered a keynote address on Storytelling and Innovation in the Digital Age.
Coming from a traditional film narrative background, how do you see screen narrative changing to take advantage of the possibilities afforded by digital technology?
I’ve worked with Baz Luhrmann for years so I come from old school storytelling. I’m interested in that space, really, and what storytelling is. I’m going to talk about that and how it is, in my opinion, a fundamental human act – we are storytellers and have been for millennia. That’s an ancient way we have of making meaning out of the world, out of sensory experience, in my view, but we’re talking about telling stories with technology. I’m interested in the way technologies appear and that lag from the appearance of the tech until it’s used to service this very fundamental need we have to relate to each other through the medium of stories. My proposal is that stories are the most effective way we have of communicating and understanding information and the world. That’s interesting to me.
And we’re at such a rapid tipping point, I suppose, and a transitional period, with new, highly sophisticated technologies arriving all the time, and the way they’re being used for many things, for commerce, for social media interaction, for hardcore information sharing and so on, but I’m interested in that part of it which has to do with using emerging technologies for the act of storytelling, and how that interaction occurs.
While I was at AFTRS we worked to see if we could tell a story in a Virtual Reality space, and that was a very interesting project because it’s still very early days in attempts to use the environment of Virtual Reality and combining it with traditional narrative structures. It was fantastic to be in a space where a lot of our understanding of how narrative operates in film were no longer applicable. So that’s the area I’m interested in – how as human beings we have a desire and, I think, a need for story, but we all have one of these super-powerful devices in our pocket and that’s the way in which we’re interacting with the world.
The challenge would be, arguably, how do we direct attention and withold or deploy information in a space where the audience member can look where they want, and engage with the narrative space from infinite angles.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about. I think Virtual Reality is great for reproducing environment, and a lot of studies indicate that we accept in many ways – although not all – that what we are witnessing and experiencing in a Virtual Reality environment is close enough for us to be entirely convinced by the reality of it. It’s great for doing that, and I think that’s why the early adopters have used it for documentary experiences – all they want to achieve is to reposition us into a foreign land, and it does that very well.
But we still have to process that raw data that we’re getting, we still have to understand it, we still have to comprehend it, in the same way that we do in the real world. So I believe in the notion that we can then bring art or artifice to contriving the experiences that people are going to have in a Virtual Reality space in the way that we do so exquisitely well in filmmaking. That’s still early days – we’re still taking baby steps in that space, and there are a lot of practitioners now talking about zones of attention and how you can edit in that space and how you can create a manufactured experience, a contrived experience in the way that film is contrived in a Virtual Reality space. But how do you make it so that it doesn’t disrupt the experience of being in a completely new sensory environment? I’ve seen that work. I think it is possible to be in a space and to transition – to have your universe whisked away and to have a new one placed in front of you and to be seamless, if your focus of attention, if you like, is attached to a certain idea or position or object and then that is replaced with a fair degree of skill in the next environment. You will psychologically go with it. But we’re sort of back to the experiments that filmmakers were doing in the 1910s and 1920s in terms of what was possible in the filmmaking medium. That’s the sort of experimentation we’re doing in terms of what is possible in mixed reality, augmented reality, virtual reality – it’s a fascinating area, but it always seems to be that we develop the tech and then it takes a while to work out what its boundaries are in terms of storytelling.
Surely the technology must come first – we get the new technological innovation and then we play with it to figure out its boundaries,and to work out the language and grammar of its storytelling possibilities.
I think you’re right, I think it is a language, and through the history of cinema it is a developing language and it’s fascinating that, if you work as a filmmaker, you can rely on the audience to speak the language of cinema, because it’s an evolving artform – as all artforms are. There’s a currency that we can expect people to have in cinema literacy, certain ideas and even the simple metric of rates of cutting – if you look at films from two decades ago, they’re more languid and we’re used to a faster cutting style now. So the language emerges and develops, and I think grammar is a good word to describe it.
I’m also interested in longer form narratives – that’s an emerging place where people are experimenting. They used to say you couldn’t stand Virtual Reality for longer than 10 minutes, but now there are very successful pieces that are half an hour long and people certainly aren’t struggling with it, and I think that’s because people are finding techniques that enable you to be attached to the story and engrossed in the story and not notice that you’ve got a headset on.
I’m also interested in how we interact with that space, because I think that the technology now enables us to operate in a more game-like space. Gaming is obviously a massively established industry, but in the virtual space there’s all sorts of potential there, and even in that space I think it’s all about storytelling, because you’re in a sequence of micro-narratives, so what the environment that that’s happening in and how do you transition from one to another? I think it’s possible now to monitor the participant in the environment and, depending on what cues you’re getting from them – physiologically in terms of eye tracking and so on – you can then adapt the micro-narrative journey even beneath their consciousness, so they’re participating in the story in a way that may be subliminal to them. I find that really, really interesting, the idea that it’s an adaptive environment and we’re not really pressing Button A as we do in a game, we’re causing the narrative to unfold because of our physiological engagement with the narrative that we’re immersed in. It’s very early days, a lot of this, and everybody is looking for the boundaries of what is possible.
For more on the GMIC, hit the official site. Martin Brown’s official site can be found here.
