, by Rory Fellowes | Eventcoverage
And so to work
Some of my District 9 Morning Team © Rory Fellowes 2014
Our work had been carefully and strictly planned for us. We were presented with game play items, much as in a board game, a book entitled Timeline Reference, which set out the social conditions prevailing in a particular year, at intervals from 1930 to 2055. This gave us the historical context within which we were to make our deliberations. There was a stack of cards like a Monopoly set, which gave us a locale, as might be the catacombs, or Government Centre; a second pack of cards which defined an item, a person’s status, a child or a soldier, jewellery, or a tool of some sort; and the last pack provided a theme, religion, politics, family and such, hedged about by the carefully worked out limitations of the world of Rilao and the Rilaoans as established in the Timeline Reference.
The Game Play Items Completed Vision Cards © Susan Karlin 2014
Armed with these we were given what were called Vision Cards, on which we were to write an idea, a story perhaps, or an incident, or we might describe an artefact, or in fact, anything our fertile minds could come up with to add to the sum of knowledge we have of life in Rilao.
Our first duty was to elect one of our number as project leader for each round of the game (we settled on going around the table, as in any board game). This person would call the time on the various stages of the game.
The rule book said that the project leader would then arbitrate the efforts of the other members of the team’s submissions for that round, choosing one of the three or four alternatives as the best and fixing that in the timeline book (with the paperclip provided. They thought of everything) in readiness for Stage 2 of the day’s process.
However, in his initial briefing Professor McDowell had said “There are going to be a lot of rules and parameters laid out in front of you. Most of those are made to be broken. We expect you to have an avid interest in breaking as many rules as you can,” so in our team we decided that the project leader would write an amalgamation of the best ideas, and we would sign each final submission with a name that was itself an amalgamation of the participating members’ names. This was an idea I put forward, based on an association that began back when I was twelve, and has lasted ever since, a group who have worked on the creation of a fictional international trading company and its associates and rivals, so well represented by physical and narrative proof of its existence that it is no longer possible to prove it never existed.
Another District 9 Team © Susan Karlin 2014
Ritual and the making of society
When everything was ready, we were in our seats, introduced and equipped for the task at hand, we were instructed to perform a ritual as the official opening of each round or session. This was a very New Age Califor-ni-a moment for the European minds present at our table, one we all greeted with sardonic acquiescence, though I suspect the American was more at ease with it though she chuckled amiably along with us. But the effect of ritual is always surprising and this detail in the plan is an excellent illustration of the accuracy of the World Building Lab’s conclusions about how cultures come into being and develop, their close study of the human condition, the formation of society and its functions, and how every society’s essence is to be found in its laws and its rituals. Ritual lies at the heart of all human social life, it is the herald of the design of society’s mechanisms, and this two minute exercise in contemplation of our task did indeed put us “in the zone”, as we say these days.
So we held hands and silently meditated on the proposition that the book and the cards had put before us. The project leader called time, with the given proviso that they should “feel” it rather than time it (with the recommendation they aim for two minutes), and we set to work on our cards. This phase was strictly timed, with a sand valve, a three minute egg timer. We scribbled away, pitched into creativity by everything that had led to this moment, from the first cup of coffee outside the theatre to the filling in of the headers on our Vision Cards. I was reminded of a story about Tchaikovsky. At a dinner party a fawning fan asked him if he had to await the arrival of his muse before he could begin to compose. “Yes indeed, I do,” he replied, “but I find that if I sit at my piano at nine o’clock in the morning, my muse arrives at five minutes past.”
We had a lot of fun and we covered a lot of ground as we got into the task, a result repeated, as we later discovered, in every group of every team engaged in the exercise, each of us in our designated university study room, with tables and comfortable chairs, and all the equipment we could possibly need. These needs rose exponentially in the afternoon’s round.
The Food Of Rilao
We broke for lunch. We went upstairs and out into the blazing midday sun and heat of a clear sky over Los Angeles. We found ourselves outside in the broad grass covered quadrangle encompassed by the building that housed the rooms we occupied and three more blocks to close the space.
Lunch in the Quadrangle Of USC © Rory Fellowes 2014
Lunch had been set up in a buffet in the far corner. We strolled over. The programme promised that this would be our opportunity to taste the food of Rilao, but I have to say, if that is so then I pity the poor Rilaoans. The food was, at best, indifferent, perhaps victim to the blazing sun under which it had been set out. For my own lunch I got overcooked rice with a blandly spiced, pork stew-like dollop of brown victuals on top, with a sprinkling of a few salad ingredients. This was described as High Coral Haute Cuisine (the meat alternative). Perhaps the Laogunan Catch Of The Day (fish) or the Muka Tree Forest Fare (vegetarian) choices would have been better, but I’m a carnivore to the bone. It wasn’t bad, just not good either. It was also ludicrously overpriced, which never helps. In a nearly perfect day of invention, planning, organisation and control, this was the only let-down, but only a slight one at that.
After all, it was food, fuel for the afternoon’s work ahead, and besides, it provided an opportunity to sit with Glen Matlock, a most entertaining and thoughtful man, and eat it, before skipping outside the quadrangle gate together to smoke a cigarette or two. I felt like a schoolkid behind the bike sheds, such was the high academic atmosphere in which the Festival and the imposing surroundings of the University of Southern California had immersed us.
We’ve used our heads, now for the hands and eyes
Reassembled at our tables after lunch, we were given the Vision Cards from other teams in the other Districts (except District 10, the children’s group, of which more later) and told to create illustrations of the ideas presented, with the freedom to use whatever media we liked, but with our eyes drawn to the beckoning table at the back of the room, covered in pens and paper and modelling materials. We were rearranged into different teams for this phase of the project.
My District 9 Afternoon Team © Rory Fellowes 2014
At the time and still, I feel the team to which I belonged rather failed in its work, and in large part I was to blame for our failure even to fully complete the one task we set ourselves.
To start with, we got off on the wrong foot as regards the Festival’s intentions, and perhaps some primitive Rilaoan hex was put upon us by that act, who can say. It’s a strange society in many ways, out there in the middle of the ocean with no outside world influence until the 21st Century. It would be a surprise if there were no witchcraft somewhere in the religious mix.
In any case, for what at the time seemed to us good reasons, and in a way inevitable, we unanimously agreed to confine our efforts to only one of the ideas presented to us. Inevitable, frankly, because we could only make any sense of that one. None of us had an idea, visual or otherwise, of what might be created from the descriptions on the other three Vision Cards.
Mind you, the one we chose was a lovely idea, and a work of considerable imagination, given the time restrictions put upon its creator that morning, as was put on all of us. The concept was that there is a breed of birds nurtured by the Rilaoans as a form of living jewellery. The birds are decorated with precious stones and worn as a sort of free flying jewellery, like a falcon, but small, delicate and proportionate, flying off from time to time, but always returning to one or other of the perches that are placed around the body according to the wearer’s tastes and desires.
Looking back I suspect that what we should have come up with would be to create a number of Photoshop images of a variety of these exotic birds, being worn in various places about the persons of the team. A simple and expansive task we could have completed to some satisfaction.
Instead, I let it be decided that we would make a few animated frames of one such bird landing on our American student’s wrist. I say I let this decision happen because I was the animator who made the idea possible. I began my career in stop motion before going through my personal technological disruption when I switched to CG back in the mid 1990s. I should have known and, more to the point, I should have said at the outset that we could not make any sort of useful film in the time allotted. All things considered, I think we probably needed three days at least, and long ones at that.
But we were all swept away by the array of materials provided, plasticised modelling clay, pipe-cleaner wires, coloured beads, plastic bottles, paper and scissors and such. All the stuff of a Blue Peter exercise (for the non-British among you, Blue Peter is a long-standing BBC programme for children in which the enthusiastic audience is shown how to make a model battleship out of two egg boxes, a box of pens, sellotape, and a ball of string (or something like that).
One of our number is a Professor of Palaeontology in London, and he dove into constructing the body and head of the bird, while I twisted pipe-cleaners and someone else made wings and feathers. We had lots of laughs and childlike pride of achievement as each inadequately constructed part of our projected model was completed. With minutes to go I hurriedly (and horribly crudely) animated the last few flaps of the wings as the bird settled on its wearer’s wrist, while another of us held his iPhone steady as he could (which was very steady, the one faultlessly performed part of the task).
But, and not withstanding that this amounted to about a second and a half’s worth of frames at most, I messed up processing the film. I forgot to scale the images down before editing, and so what little we managed to cobble together as a film could not be uploaded to the website where the Festival was assembling the materials produced around the whole event. When it came to it, we presented one still image. It was a poor showing, and barely if adequately hidden behind the more prolific productions of the other teams in our District.
But what the heck, in the greater scheme of the Festival, it didn’t matter. We were, after all, merely one small faction in the outstandingly prolific whole.
The Final Showdown
When the bell tolled at the end of the afternoon, we once again assembled in the Eileen Norris Cinema Theatre for the presentation of the combined efforts of the District groups.
The Final Presentation – District 10 on stage © Susan Karlin 2014
First on stage were the children’s group, working together in the strictly speaking non-existent Rilao District 10.
When we were talking Professor McDowell gave me his opinion of this particular grouping in our society, its children. “I think it is absolutely crucial, tapping into that liberated imagination space, that space where the children are still building an entire world in a sandbox, or with three sticks, a couple of leaves and a stream, or whatever it is, whose minds are instinctively, intuitively tuned to narrative. I think it is important to focus on that time space, where children exist in a kind of pure form of imagination before they get their own narratives beaten out of them by the education system.
I should mention here that Professor McDowell is the product of an English public school, which is what the British call their extremely private, expensive schools, as indeed am I, and where indeed, they used to beat stuff out of us (and into us) literally. Here, in these punishment free days of education, I assume he means merely driven out, by the pressure of the system and the desire of educationists to hold up unattainable targets and make us all feel ignorant so as to motivate us to learn – which, of course, we all are, of something, probably many things, in particular of the case in point, the deeper secrets and meanings of life in Rilao.
The Children’s Group District 10 at work © Susan Karlin 2014
The children proved to be everything Professor McDowell had predicted and hoped for. Their tireless energy made the rest of us look like sloths. They produced a plethora of ideas, some of them excellent, some of them bonkers, some of them unsurprisingly violent in intent, and all of them executed with panache and a lot of delight. This is an aside, but don’t you feel encouraged and comforted by the current generations of children? Whatever mess this world is in, it could not be passing on to better hands than theirs.
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District 10 was followed by a parade of all the Districts 1 through 9. If we’d known how long this process would be before they got to us, we could have re-sized the images, set up the six frame mix assembly we planned, and had something to show for our efforts. Such is life, as Ned Kelly once said, before they put the rope around his neck. The rope was round ours, but as said before, there was such a plethora of clever ideas well executed at the breakneck speed required that day. I won’t try to describe them all, but point you instead to this link:
The Explorers Assembled © 5D Institute 2014
Suffice to say here that the 250 or so people present came up with over a thousand concepts, realised to lesser or greater degrees, and all of them, mystically, except for the extraordinary game design by the 5D Institute that made this result an inevitability, rooted firmly in the culture and society of Rilao.
In Retrospect
A couple of weeks after the event they sent out an email asking for feedback. I always try to do these things as soon and as quickly as possible, before they disappear in my ever mounting list of Unread emails, so it should come as no surprise to learn that I have since had further thoughts. I did have one good idea then though, which I entered on the form. Clearly, Rilao has existed for hundreds, perhaps thousands, millions of years, yet remained undiscovered until the 21st Century. I imagine it was finally spotted by a Geostatic Satellite compiling our marvellous GPS map of the world, thanks to the Pentagon, but surely before then someone must have come across it. So I suggested next time we have access to a Bathysphere of some sort, or scuba diving equipment, or a 3D virtual environment would do fine, so we can go searching for shipwrecks (or in part 2 of the day, dredge up some images of them). There must have been ships wrecked there. The ocean is big but not infinite, surely one shipwreck at least, in all the millennia of Mankind, for one reason or another never reported, nor any survivor returned to tell the tale.
Since then it has occurred to me that Rilao might have been discovered by other South Pacific islanders, but lost in their myths and never reported to Western interests. Perhaps a correspondence could be entered into, with Government offices and anthropologists in those nations. At the very least, one might obtain vague and inconclusive evidence of the existence of Rilao, or something much like it. In any case, viable hints of a lost archipelago in the middle of that vast and mysterious ocean. It all adds to the reality, meaning, it makes it that much harder to prove that Rilao never existed.
I also want to add that, because I was part of the exploration of Rilao at the Science of Fiction Festival 2014, in this article I have focused mainly on the events of those fabulous days beneath the glowing Los Angeles skies, and on the game we played. I am aware that much of the article has concerned the 5D Institute’s work form the point of view of its relevance to 21st Century entertainment media. One thing the Institute is demonstrating is a method, let us admit the bottom line, for the Hollywood film industry to develop new franchises. The Box Set audience is growing, the ability to follow a prolonged series of films, for cinema or TV, is spreading through them, and the audience as a whole is also broadening. Downton Abbey is the most watched television programme in China. Avatar has been seen on 11,925 screens in 111 markets, and who hasn’t seen at least one of the Batman movies?
Visually splendid, fantasy worlds and fantastic stories. These new world builders at 5D Institute are indeed looking at this future.
But there is a much more significant and effective way in which their thinking is being taken up and studied for the benefit of society as a whole.
Rilao and the Real World
I have said there was a wide selection of disciplines among the participants. One sector of society that was very well represented is urban planning, the architects, engineers, local government officials, and the businessmen and women and other masters of the skills required for the successful creation of future cities were all there, and on the final day of the Festival, the Sunday, there was a special meeting where this group gathered to discuss the practical and financial implications of the kinds of future societies the World Building Labs are envisaging. I wasn’t privy to this meeting, but it is clear that the work of the 5D Institute and its associates isn’t just about the movies. They are looking at the world we live in or are going to be living in within the next, ten, twenty or fifty years.
Alex McDowell’s Concept for “Minority Report” – the City of DC © 5D Institute 2014
This is what the Rilaoans have created, a future culture, incorporating their highly advanced technology (how did they hack the internet, how do they build those tetrahedral structures?) and their shared freedom to evolve new traditions and unique forms of social association.
Rilao Tetraform Process © 5D Institute 2014
But let Professor McDowell have the last word. This is the man. He should get an Oscar for Lifetime Services to the Visual Media Industry.
“I think this kind of procedural crowd building, asset building, environment building, and then having this very delicate set of controls that you can shift all of these components around, so that it’s a constantly active space where you can create the front end of performance, the directing of the space, has completely changed the game, in the way that virtual cameras completely changed the game, the way virtual production is changing the game.
“Up until now, the VFX, post-production industry has been designed to finish the process of making a film. They are generally reactive, they take the elements provided and stitch them all together. I’ve worked with many major international post-production companies, and they need content to work with. At the front end, we discover and develop content. The front end is where you set the conditions of the world, interrogate the world to make the story come to life, create as experiential an environment around the creative team as possible, so that the development of the narrative flows organically out of all of the conditions.
“The story impetus lies alongside the environment, alongside the viewpoint, the intent of the story and the director’s eye, and what this procedural development capability gives us is the ability to launch content, to develop content. It’s not a Visual Effects conversation. The idea that one component of the narrative media process can be siloed from another is, in the fluid non-linear capability of the available tool- and mind-sets, quite frankly a ridiculous and archaic notion. It is instead essential that we create a completely new kind of fluid dynamic between the front end and the back end, that now fold into one another.
“But I think that central to the conversation we were having at FMX 2014, that day of discussion of the future of the animation industry, is really about the future of all film making workflow, and the idea that the creative space is where all these things should happen. Just because it is dealing so directly with the digital it really is not about the backend any more. It’s about how we launch the asset space in such a way, so that it can flow to the back end. But it has to start being owned by the front end again.
“Directors are now complaining about Pre-Viz, acknowledging that it has effectively handed over control of the creative process to low level computer animators. I think we’re in the middle of a very temporary set of constraints, when there are still a lot of people in my profession [Production Design] who still don’t know how to work in the digital space, in the design space. Many cinematographers don’t know how to create cinematography in the digital space, and a lot of directors are not comfortable there. And so, because they are thought to be the experts in digital media, we’ve deferred responsibility for the digital space to the people who are in charge of finishing and not the people who are in charge of creating, and the end result has been a real disconnect between the creative space and its execution in the virtual and the digital.”
With the advanced research and future guidance of the 5D Institute and its gallant legions of fellow explorers, all that is going to change. A New World is on the horizon.
Related links
RILAO WEBSITE FROM THE SCIENCE OF FICTION EVENT
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