this week's topic is Audience and Context

Bodysong by Simon Pummell (UK 2002)

Bodysong is a cross-media project combining a feature film and a website as equally weighted partners. It was released in December 2003, running for 6 weeks in the West-End of London and continues to run in selected cinemas around the UK.

The project tells the story of the stages of an archetypal human life, through highly diverse moving images collected from around the world.

From newsreel to home movies, from births to deaths, footage taken from across the last 100 years of cinema is cut to a score by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead.

The effect of the website and the film is not simply a mutually reinforcing one. It is rather the forcing of two different ways of seeing the world into conflict and impact with each other and so forcing each viewer to forge their own relationship between the two ways of seeing.

The quickest most informal way to get an over view of the ideas behind Bodysong as a project is to go to:

www.pathefilms.co.uk/bodysong/

Then explore:

www.bodysong.com

Those interested in the process can browse the following menu:

• Some questions about movies that would not go away.
• How does the website relate to the movie?

Or explore earlier iterations of the idea of spreading a continuous time-based narrative out in space so it becomes a browsable space.

• Previous Work _01: StoryBrowser (Snow White) (2001)
• Previous Work _02: BODYSONG Early Prototype (2001)

SUB_MENU ONE:

Some questions that would not go away.

If you were able to look back from the vantage point of 500 years in the future, what would movies have captured that was really profound, exciting, still worth looking at?

Is it possible to make films that have a mythic scale? And yet show ordinary people living recognisable human lives. The things we have in common.

Big epic movies and personal home movies - could these poles meet?

Writing this film was about trying to really use the basic magic of the most powerful medium of the last 100 years. Trying to take the 'magic of the movies' seriously, asking what is it? What is it good for?

These questions started the project.

And these are the three quotes that ended up pinned to my wall while writing Bodysong, a pope from 1400 years ago, a professor of ancient mythology, and a science fiction writer:

"It is one thing to worship a picture. It is another thing to learn in depth, by the means of pictures, a venerable story." Pope Gregory the Great. Circa 600 AD.

"Mythology is song. It is the song of the imagination, inspired by the energies of the body... ...And the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these particular people, but the planet and everybody on it." Joseph Campbell

"Digital Cinema has the potential to be the eyes of the extended nervous system we've been extruding as a species for the past century. We are building ourselves mirrors that remember - public mirrors that wander around and remember what they've seen. That is basic magic." William Gibson

I wrote this project because I do not believe that any of us as individuals are ever alone. We are the least alone when we introspect, look into ourselves in our most private moments. The cast of archetypes and memories who crowd our mental stage are basically the dead. And in the 21st Century some of these dead are in the movies around us, trying to speak to us. Because a movie is always the ghost of a past moment, even if the individual is still alive. Making Bodysong was about trying to listen to these ghosts.

One thing became clearer and clearer for me, as we made this film, is that big close ups of the human face are always beautiful, if the emotion is true. It's seeing emotion written so clearly on a massive screen that is a great magic of cinema - that's how the ghosts speak to us.

SUB_MENU TWO:

How does the website relate to the movie?

In the movie the image is left to speak, the website provides the particular background and setting of each shot. The movie is interested in what we derive from images when we are not insulated by the normal immediate context of "anthropological information" or television voice-over. Many of the shots in we used in Bodysong had extremely directive voice-over etc, which ascribed immediate value and 'meaning to the shot. Remove this and the viewer is forced to look more freshly at the shot. Rather than diminish the dignity of the people depicted in the shots, such a process seemed to create a world were the basic structure of the activity became clearer. For example, for whatever reasons crowds mass together, they behave in very similar ways. The activity "being in a crowd" might actually be more significant than the nominal reason for the crowd's gathering.

The website www.bodysong.com is created to cut directly against that perception. The website creates a 3D space where the story of the movie, every shot, hangs in space. You can fly along the time line of the whole movie, see the shots in the film and if you click on a shot it opens and tells you the story of that individual shot.

If the movie's big mythic single story is the trunk of the tree; then the individual stories behind each of the hundreds of shots are the branches. The project contains hundreds of stories and the site allows you to explore them. The stories typical tell wherever possible, who created the shot and why, as well as who is depicted in the shot.

The site also has another version of the film's music as sets of samples and loops, which play as you move through the film. So you can really 'surf' the film - move through it as a datascape and explore the areas that grab you. The interface is designed to enhance the feel of moving through a story as an architectural space. To create a spatial representation of the metaphor 'surfing'.

SUB_MENU: THREE

For anyone interested here are notes on the first of earlier iterations of the idea of spreading a continuous time-based narrative out in space so it becomes a browsable space.

Previous Work Context_01.

Story-Browser (Snow White) (2001)

• Concept and Design by Simon Pummell
• Modelling and Coding by Filip Cremers
• Sound by Joris Cool

This project was initially created for a gallery in Brussels in 2000

It is a digital 3d immersive environment that the viewer actively navigates: a custom 3d browser to allow you to wander into the structure of a story in three dimensions, and sample a few of the almost infinite variations of its telling.

The central core of the shape represents the time line of the story.

Key moments in the story, in nine stages, were strung out along the central armature like knots in a rope, each labelled with a caption.

As you approached each knot, a voice whispers the stage of the story,

The ring of yellow spheres orbiting each captioned node represent different versions of that stage of the story.

You can travel through the story in 3d space. Fly down the knots representing the key stages of the story and click on each yellow node ringing that stage to see a different telling of that moment of the tale. (E.g. a yellow node might activate a Disney version of Snow White, or an early Betty Boop version etc.)

By browsing among very different versions of the story, you are closer to the original form of the oral storyteller than any single version will ever be.

You are dipping your toe into the pool of versions of 'Snow-White'. By visiting each stage you discover the whole story in a skeletal form that gives you a flexible basis for telling a version of the story yourself.

Technical Notes

This project is the first of a number of immersive story browsers planned. Originally created for a VRML-kiosk, it was modelled in 3-d Studio Max and then ported into VRML. This version had beautiful translucent effects and motion but was unstable and buggy. A later version was coded in Shockwave 8.5 to make a much more stable and smaller size version. A Dvd-Rom using TK-3 Software was created to demo this project and act as a catalogue to the show.

Future Developments

Story-Browser (2004)

Apart from its role in developing the concept of Bodysong there are plans to develop the Story-Browser project further in its own right.

Storybrowser.001 is in its current form a piece of software (a program) that builds a structure in a virtual 3d world, based on a database that holds a storyline (the main axis of the structure) with different story elements (branches of the main axis) for each plot point. These story elements can be text, pictures or video clips.

Obvious limitations in storybrowser.001 are:

- the storyline has to be linear and non cascading,

- the shape of the elements (only three).

So now what? Story-Browser .002

The next step is to develop the project into an authoring program that allows the user to build the database in a drag & drop-interface, so it can then be exported to a standalone player in the form of a website or a cross-platform cd-rom.

The linear structure of the story has to be ready. The program first asks how many plot points there are. Then, for every plot point asks how many branches there are. Finally it needs to know to what file every branch should link to. The program functions as either an analysis tool for existing stories, or an authoring tool for developing new stories.

In itself a pretty basic application. The complexity of making it, on the other hand should not be underestimated. The user should always be able to return on its steps, so the authoring program should be more than just a series of questions and "Select file"-dialogues. There should constantly be a preview-mode available so the user can see how the structure is shaping up and test it, in its not finished form. The possibility should be there to change the amount of plot points or story elements while working on it. Change their order, without having to import all the files again...etc.

Off course other nice little details should be added to the possibilities. The user should be, for example, able to change the colors of the objects the structure is made out of, or choose and export its own fonts of the letters inside the plot points...etc.

And then?

Story-Browser .003

The basic idea of the .003 app would still be pretty much the same: it builds a structure in a virtual 3d world, based on a database that holds a storyline with different story elements for each plot point. The possibilities for the form of the story elements would be endless though.

Because storybrowser.003 we intend Story-Browser .003 be an open-source lingo project (possibly a unique undertaking?).

Storybrowser.003 would be in this way accessible to and enhanced by all levels of users:

- The normal user who uses it as a general application, by just importing its prepared media.

- The multimedia developer who creates in Macromedia Flash or Director with simple or more advanced scripting.

- The hardcore coder who develops in real programming languages.

SUB_MENU FOUR:

For anyone interested here are notes on the second of earlier iterations of the idea of spreading a continuous time-based narrative out in space so it becomes a browsable space.

Previous Work Context_02.

BODYSONG Prototype (2001) The history of the website interface.

From the very first this project was designed to cross platforms as a Feature film, a Website and a Gallery Show.

It was always intended that the site www.bodysong.com would give the stories of the people portrayed in each single shot of the narrative feature, and that the user would experience this in a way that really felt like 'flying through the film'. The aim was that the user's power to sift and select images would be embodied in a very simple spatial metaphor.

So in the initial 3D interface, the viewer literally flew down a static timeline of the film and enters any shot.

Simple icons would mark 'chapters' and themes.

These examples show the prototype I conceived and was coded by Filip Cremers, which was developed substantially in the final design process.

In the final version, the www.bodysong.com interface designed by James Stone at Engage created different interface solutions in response to problems that became apparent once we had the massive database of differently sourced shots the final film contains. Simple issues off dealing with the mass of images for both user and computer memory. What remains consistent is the aim to unpack time based experiences into space.

And it is this interest, stated most simply on my website in the INTRO section of www.pummell.com in several simple optical toys coded by Filip Cremers, that all my projects past, present and future have in common.