DVD & Narrative Production : art122/MAT203 : W&S 2002 : Legrady/Budgett

Narrative & DVD Production : art122/MAT203 : W&S 2001 : Graham Budgett

Our conceptual intent will be to reconstrue narrative structure for the nature of the DVD medium, while expanding its technological and 'cinematic' repertoire.

Production: With DVD Studio Pro, Final Cut Pro, Quicktime, ProTools, Photoshop, Fireworks & Flash, we will prepare video, stills, audio, text, & graphics for 'multiplexing' - or compilation, linkage, and authoring - as an interactive DVD [Digital Versatile Disk].

Technical Instruction will include digital video & audio editing & compositing using Final Cut Pro & ProTools, interactive menu production using Photoshop, Final Cut Pro & Flash, and DVD encoding, structuring & multiplexing using DVD Studio Pro & Quicktime.

The DVD disk medium stores large amounts of high resolution video, audio, or other digital data. It constitutes an archive accessed by an audience through interaction with hardware/software configurations, or interface. It is structured so as to allow relatively fast access to a selection of video-'chapters', angle-tracks, audio-tracks, language-tracks, subtitle-tracks, hyperlinks, 'stories', etc. Its interactivity is scriptable through its internal programming language.

Interface design is all-important in a medium which occupies a 'space' like an archive. The interface of such media should be more like a terrain map than the familiar guided-tour through space & time of conventional narrative media - mapping the territory to be explored without prescribing an individual experience.

The differences of audience experience of DVD [computer or TV, personal interaction or communal consumption?] will need to be accounted for in respect of the actual technological convergence of the various types of screen which we presently either interact with or else passively watch. Alongside the art, we will also need to consider the present state of the technology.

The Language of New Media* our suggested course text by Lev Manovich, points out that alternative Modernist treatments of Film & Photography were possible - and in place - early in their histories. However, conventions of storytelling, form, technical reference, etc., carried through from older technologies and affected not only the [then] new media, but also - through them - humans and our perceptions. DVD is already showing such tendencies - locked into Hollywood values and present TV/DVD-player standards - it is already somewhat conventionalised and conventionalising. [*sic. - there never is just one language.]

Class research takes into account all of the considerations above and looks at present possibilities for cataloguing and expanding the capabilities of interactive video early in its history - much as Manovich suggests Dziga Vertov did with Man with a Movie Camera early in the history of Film. The premise is that – as with Bertolt Brecht's concept of 'Epic Theatre' and ' Verfremdungseffekt' the structure of DVD, its conventions, its assumptions, can be examined and turned inside-out by innovation and experiment, to beneficial effect for the medium & its audience. This is also seen as an acknowledgement and affirmation of the Duchampian principle that ultimately an audience must 'complete the artwork', thus playing a key role in the production of meaning. Appropriate issues of authorship will be raised as reading and discussion topics.

The Cinematic aspect of the Medium. DVD has an internal scripting language which can be put into the service of enhanced interactivity. DVD is network-aware and jumps readily from the local to the global. This medium is open to intervention, development, and to non-mainstream, non-linear, independent cultural production. Still, by recognising its role as a continuation of the whole experience that Peter Greenaway has termed Cinema - that is the entire spectrum of screened productions always - we affirm that DVD has the potential to reshape our experience of the world and its 'telling'. Just as Film refocused vision for an earlier audience versed in the codes of staged performance, one way or another, DVD and new media in general will effect our perceptions and our behaviour.

We will: brainstorm and work in groups; divide jobs according to expertise; share skills and aquire new ones; pursue critical theoretical issues parallel to production.

What are the possibilities, if any, for group interaction? How should the medium be enhanced? What kind of experience will an audience engage as they explore the navigable database that is a DVD disk?