Immersion

This book is about Storytelling, which is to say it's about memory, imagination and sharing. [Introduction]

The best opening line to a book? I think so.

The invention of the motion picture camera around 1890 set off an era of feverish experimentation that let to the development of feature films by 1910. Television, invented around 1925, gave rise to a quarter-century later to I love Lucy and the highly stylised form of comedy that became known as the sitcom. As each of these media achieved production and distribution on an industrial scale, we saw the emergence of the twentieth-century mass media -- newspapers, magazines, movies, music, TV. And with that, there was no role left for the consumer except to consume. pg 2

We Know this much: people want to be immersed. They want to get involved in a story, to carve out a role for themselves, to make it their own. But how is the author supposed to accommodate them? What if the audience runs away with the story? And how do we handle the blur- not just between fiction and fact but between author and audience, entertainment and advertising, story and game?  pg8

Pandora Bay: http://img01.deviantart.net/87d2/i/2011/102/e/c/pandora_bay_by_hardyguardy-d3dtdgb.jpg by Christopher Colomb.

In September, 2006, I stood next to James Cameron  as he discussed what he was about to take on with Avatar. "It's an epic," he said. "It's an entire world that's got it's own ground rules, it's own ecology. It's the kind of fantasy that, as a geek fan, you can hurl yourself into. And even though it not a sword and sorcery type fantasy, it's like Lord of the Rings in that it's immersive." pg 47

LOTR Matte Painting by Laurent Ben-Mimoun
http://www.blueman.ws/images/matte_painting/gallery1/14.jpg

"I love science fiction," he said. "I love the idea of creating another world - another ecosystem of amazing creatures." Yet of the animals he made up, only eight or so seemed likely to make it into the finished film. "That's just the limitations of movies." pg 48

Cameron put the idea in a draw until he saw the humanoid Gollum brought to life in Peter Jackson's film.

Gollum: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e0/Gollum.PNG

Cameron and Landau were already talking with video game developers about turning the world of Avatar to a console game. "Why do you people turn to entertainment? Escapism." Landau said. "To get away from whatever it is in the world they want to get away from. And if you give them a unique universe, they will seek that out beyond just the cinema experience." pg 54

Basically Cameron had Ubisoft technicians live in a bunker each with a second computer without the internet creating the alternate reality, whilst he had the two main actors running around in motion graphics. How does this relate to matte painting I hear you ask? Well I'm not sure yet, but it's bloody interesting.

'By getting video closeups of the actors' eyes and features and mapping them to their characters' faces, Cameron hoped to avoid the "uncanny valley" - the creepy sense that the computer-generated humanoids aren't as real as they seem.

If the screen plane was an impediment to the immersiveness Cameron wanted to achieve, the uncanny valley was a roadblock.' pg 60

- when discussing on why the eyes and facial expressions needed to be real unlike that of the animation Polar Bear Express.

Polar Bear Express: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ib3Hn188Jwc/maxresdefault.jpg

-This chapter was labelled deeper and was all about exploring the world of avatar and the world of star wars, this is what matte paintings do they they take the world the film is trying to transport the audience to into a deeper more descriptive environment to express said story.

The next chapter covers the twitter accounts of the characters from mad men and how average obsessed fans were running them and Weiner didn't like it and had the accounts shut down for twenty four hours, but really he wasn't right to control them in this manner because it was getting the show free publicity. But this control was much wanted. The control in matte painting is in the composition and the direction of the director because at the end of the day the artist's have to answer to them. Without the control there wouldn't be the same flow in all the matte paintings and this would distract from the narrative and the immersion.

If a story is meaningful enough, a superficial encounter won't leave them satisfied. They'll want to go deeper. They'll want to imagine themselves in it, retell it, make it their own. And the more powerful the connection, the less likely they'll be to submit to a demand that they cease and desist. pg 97

The book then goes on to discuss interactivity and games, so it mentioned advertising and riddles and games used to advertise big films (i.e Heath Ledger's Batman) but also the few films that came with controls to decide what the hero should do next in crucial moments, but also the development of games and those with stories that took you on different paths or through different worlds. It's interesting but not right for this dissertation.

The next chapter goes on about how TV Game Shows are the next big immersion activity, whilst your eating tea at 5pm there always on blahblah, and then how the internet and social emdia has changed people storytelling of there lives and how we have this new way of immersing our connections into how we want them to see our life through social media, which is quite interesting but again not relevant.  Is it ironic that I feel quite immersed in this book on the art of immersion?

Then the book went on to describe why games / riddles and puzzles etc are the best form of immersion, because when you achieve something you feel rewarded and it explains the experiment some guys in london did with me in a PET scan machine playing a game called battlezone. I don't really think that was necessary, I think the fact you feel rewarded from achieving a level is common sense, it's escapism from how shit adulting is if you're in a dead end job, and people get addicted to it.

I'd just really like a nice quote on why people turn to films and entertainment to escape there shit life but in a poetic way.

This one almost seemed promising:

We forage, too, for an emotional connection - the kind that stories provide. Fiction is a simulation that gives us a feeling of empathy with characters that seem real, even though we know they're not. .... Movies, novels, television shows - it doesn't really matter what form the story takes. But games are different. 

Ohh frank you came so close then!

ooo the next chapter: How to build a universe that doesn't fall apart:

"I ask in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust there motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing" Philip K. Dick pg 291
... a fictional universe ultimately remains, well . . . fictional. A pretend space. An escape.
 That's why we like them. That's why we want to immerse ourselves in Stars Wars or Lost or The Super Dimension Fortress Macross. But the lure of that fictional worlds exert is balanced by the fear they engender. We are attracted, we are repulsed. pg 291

The author then goes on to discuss Disney's first Tron film, on another note, check these matte's out of the Tron Legacy Film came across these this week:

Matte for Tron Legacy by Romain Bayle: http://www.romainbayle.com/matte/films/tron/tron_main.htm
He did an amazing sky panorama I'll look at with my practical work, but all of his work is amazing so I might share some more in a seperate blog post. Look how "immersive" those blue lights are spoooky.

And how John Lasseter was fired because he started making his own film and the same time and this offended the company but little did they know they'd buy pixar and he'd be back! It mentions that the effects were too fake. But he doesn't really elaborate on this which is a shame because that ruins the immersion and that could have been good quote. This guy's really obsessed with the TV show Lost, it's really not that good. I think this book would be super super useful if I was doing advertising. It's really well written, I think as well I have a really short attention span if I'm not into something, and this guy has written the book in such a fast paced manner it's such an easy read. I think you know it's a good book when you stay up all night to read it, even though you know it's probably not completely useful. Immersed in the The art of Immersion book, how ironic.


He goes on to discuss about how disneyland is the ultimate form of immersion, it's weird about how he was so obsessed with please everyone he made a world where everything is controlled to a T so you go to be happy. And then he goes on to say but actually we are equally immersed in worlds that fall apart, we fear it but we love it. (i.e Walking Dead, obviously this book was written before Walking Dead but it's a perfect example, he uses Lost again.)


This is the conclusion? What these last three pages I just summed up, he could of given me a decent quote:

We live in a high-speed, always on world in which identity is always suspect, and technology gives us the wherewithal to demand it - if that's what we really want.
  Except, of course, that's not what we want. It's what we think we want. What we really want [I tell you what I want what I really really want...] - many of us, anyways - is the holodeck. We want to be sucked inside the computer like Jeff Bridges in Tron. We want to be immersed in something that's not real at all. pg 316

Rose, F. (2012). The Art of Immersion. W. W. Norton and Company LTD. New York.