Chris Hales (UK)
Interacting with
moving images
- rethinking the interactive movie
In his lecture, Chris Hales presented views to rethinking the interactive movie. Instead of placing emphasis on the narrative storyline or importing dramatic ideas from Hollywood-type cinema, as is so often the caseChris stresses the importance of finding those visual and spatiotemporal methods that are relevant to the type of story being told, or to the sensations of the depicted environment.
The movie is the interface
You're in my place!
Spatiotemporal linking
The malevolent user?
Working by sketching
Chris Hales' lecture at UIAH, Helsinki 23.11.2001. Notes by Minna Tarkka.
The movie is the interface: the question is about staging events, of making a mise-en-scene for interaction. Instead of focusing on the narrative or importing dramatic ideas from Hollywood-type cinema, the interaction designer should find those visual methods that are relevant to the type of story being told.
In Chris' own work, this involves looking at the dramatic features in ordinary everyday life situations. The environment, objects, and people depicted on screen have a lot of inherent interactive qualities and behaviours ' one only has to present them as triggers to the user, who can start affecting the depicted world.
Audience engagement is important: the user has expectations, wants things to happen in the movie, and can make them happen through his/her interactions.
Chris presented a short review of the various platforms and applications of interactive movies, including some historical examples. The approach to these was to look at how different roles of the production ' of the director, writer, actor or editor ' are partly delegated to the audience of interactive cinema.
Audience as director
The Czech One Man and His World presented in the Montreal World Expo (1967) involved a technology called the kinoautomat. At key moments, the film was stopped and by pressing the green or red button the audience could vote for the direction the story would take. The red and green lights around the screen indicated the results, and the lead actor performed live at the intervals, prompting the audience to choose: "you're in my place!"
Audience as scriptwriter
Running time marketed as the worlds first "truly interactive movie" (2000) framed the audience in the role of scriptwriter. Between each broadcast piece, the audience could propose ideas on the continuation of the story, which were developed by the scriptwriting team in producing the next sequences.
Audience as actor
X-files the game is one example of interactive movie, where the user is positioned as actor through the use of 1st person point of view and direct dialogue with the actors.
Audience as editor
In his own movies, Chris likes to put the audience in the place of the editor. The user triggers video clips that introduce new viewpoints, jump to new places and lead to further actions in the movie.
The approach is very much like the interlinked text structure of hypertext. But here the material is video, a time-based medium. Chris refers to "spatiotemporal linking" as the key concept in interacting with moving images. Put simply, spatiotemporal linking means "to click in the right place in the right time" there are certain moments that are crucial to the action, and if the user misses them, the outcome will be different.
This of course makes the user alert and engaged with the work. But when can we interact, and how do we know where to click on a movie? Illustrating the question with examples from his work, Chris pointed out different ways to build places and times for interaction.
Jinxed utilizes an effect for hot spots in the movie: a slight bulge appears on the protagonist's nose or the slippery soap, and if the user clicks on the bulge, slapstick action is to be expected. In Messed up, a red frame appears for a time around the movie, indicating that interaction is possible, and the user will have to find the right places to mess the character's home up. If the user stops interfering with the movie, the protagonist starts dutifully cleaning up the mess.
12 loveliest things I know, based on interviews with children, explores more subtle ways of linking. Chris wanted to test whether colour and movement of the objects could hint at how to proceed to the next clips. In this associative piece, the approach works very well. Small movements as triggers for small events and sensations are also used in the landscape pieces Sketchbook and kesä.
In Bliss and Grandad, Chris uses the split-screen with parallel video streams. The 9 squares represent a house where a variety of things take place simultaneously, and the user can affect the goings-on by preventing or directing the process.
In the Tallinn people's orchestra, the users often try to keep the screen empty by "shooting up" people. In producing The Square, Chris tried to reverse this so that the users could only invite the people to appear.
Besides being educated into shoot-em-up action, it seems that the interactive audience is malevolent in a more general way. In voting-type interactive movies, the majority of the audience usually press the red button which directs the story towards tragedies and catastrophes.
Some people, however, have criticized Jinxedfor not including "positive" interactions which would help the poor protagonist to survive. But that would not be funny: in Jinxed and some other works the harmful actions offered for the user relate to the genre of slapstick comedy. But there is also a deeper meaning to Chris' movies, where things just don’t seem to behave. Bliss, based on Katherine Mansfield's novel, depicts howdifficult it is to keep the world together. The frustration of constant clicking may also be at the heart of interactive media.
Chris works by making small demo-like or sketchy pieces and tests them with users, often in public festival and gallery settings, where he prefers installing them in a touch-screen set-up which invites a tactile engagement with the world depicted.
The production approach is low-tech ' a lot of the material is shot in hi8 and the grainy and home-movie style seems to be an integral element in engaging with the user. Jinxed was once remade by a production team with high-quality technology, but it turned out not being funny anymore.
Chris is himself responsible for shooting, directing, editing and programming of the pieces, with Director and AfterEffects as main tools. This one-man production team makes it possible to tune all parts of the presentation into a coherent whole. It is also a low-budget way of working. Since more advanced technical platforms for interactive audiovisuality are still on their way, the work is distributed in CD-rom format.
Chris himself is not into making big fancy productions, but his extensive teaching activity has already inspired some generations of European interactive media designers, who apply his ideas also in larger scale and commercial projects.
Chris' work is thus a kind of fundamental research into the interactive aspects of moving images ' and besides producing the pieces he is also preparing a PhD project on the topic.
Chris Hales (UK)
Juha Huuskonen (FIN)
Turkka Keinonen (FIN)
Casey Reas (USA/IT)
Bill Gaver (UK)