Remediation in Films and other media

Remediation is not a hard concept to grasp. Essentially it means that you would be taking elements from one form of media and then using those elements in another, for example; taking elements from games and putting them into films.

This is why Rob had us watch Run Lola Run in our last session with him, although I did not enjoy the film itself I found it easier to understand the concept of remediation.

The film borrowed many aspects from video games, such as when Lola dies and then is reborn at the start of the film, it’s as if she had spare lives, the fact that she does some things differently and so changes the outcome of some peoples’ lives shows that there are RPG elements of decision making that might influence the ending of something. Stuff like that.

A little bit after the session, and me complaining about how I didn’t think the film was good I started thinking about the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ music video for Californication. That music video has some very blatant inspirations from Video games. Mostly free-roam, sandbox games such as Grand Theft Auto and one particular scene reminded me of the game Crazy Taxi and another of a snowboarding game SSX Tricky.

But for some reason I was a little bit confused, did it count as remediation if it was so blatant? I mean, they weren’t actually running through, it was as though they were scenes from the game. Maybe it was inspired by games but not quite remediation yet.

Then I was confused further because I started thinking if Machinima would count as Remediation of a whole different nature, applying film elements to video games? I don’t even know. But I feel like I have grasped the concept to a certain extent.

Californication 

London Trip

Back in February we went on a field trip to London and payed a visit to it's British Museum. Me and my peers were walking around the Museum for quite a while before we caught up with Rob and the lot at the actual thing we were actually supposed to look at. And the things we were supposed to look at looked quite good.

Now, for me what was more interesting rather than the game was the craftsmanship of the pieces, they all looked really good! I am somewhat of an artist but it's still not often that I start getting worked up about some little statues, but still this is my sort of thing. Screw all the massive sculptures that are obviously a little impressive. It's the small things that matter, the hand must be crazy steady to add a lot of detail to something that small.

Working on a big canvas with small tools is always easier but working with small tools on a small canvas is so much harder, this is what art should look like. Not like that weird modern “Art” where it's just a picture of the loo and it's labelled something stupid like “Impressionistic everyday items.”, I refuse to believe that a toilet is a piece of art. Well, at one point it might have been artistic, but now it's just somewhere you defecate.

Anyway... I gone of track a little bit. The point of that was that I was really impressed with the little sculptures.

Later we encountered something that we thought could have been game pieces for something like an old version of drafts.

Well... They weren't pieces for a game but they were a part of a cremation ceremony. But they could have been game pieces? You never know, maybe it was some famous guy getting burned with his favourite game stuff? Either way discovering these things was an exciting experience for me.

Unfortunately once we've finished pretending to have sword fights next to the exhibit of swords like really responsible students we got bored and moved on to the museum of Science which was quite fun as well.

Johnny Ingram and Machinima

A few months back Johnny Ingram from moviestorm came in for a lecture about Machinima. He talked to us a little bit about the history of Machinima, what Machinima, Moviestorm and himself.

Johnny Ingram is a man who made his way up to the top of Moviestorm however he is of humble beginnings, which is what he told us. He started off like any average Joe and then somehow by a twist of fate he bounced into the Machinima world with Moviestorm.

The evening started off by him defining what Machinima is. He defined Machinima as a movie created in a digital world. Later he went on to tell us about the history of machinima. He showed us the first machinima made in Quake called “Diary of a Camper”, that is the video that started the whole machinima scene. Unfortunately it was in such a video file format that was very hard to share  and so it was hard to kickstart the machinima scene off on it's own.

Later he went on to show us some Machinima, one of those was a World of Warcraft Machinima describing the dream of the journey of a Tauran warriors quest to save a lady Shaman. The other one was a noir half life film made in Gary's Mod in Half Life 2. Either way the two films showed greater quality and displayed how far Machinima has come along since the first video ever. It was a good display of what current Machinima is capable with the right software and the right director.

Later a demonstration of Moviestorm came on where Johnny gave us a brief tutorial, to be honest I was quite surprised with how easy the interface was and what sort of extents the software could take your Machinima, while it is still hard to control the actions of the character on the stage it is much easier to make the character move and speak than I would have first anticipated.

I found Moviestorm to be a great piece of software for storyboarding rather than creating movies in, although that is still very much possible. It is much easier to manipulate every element inside the stage to make it into a storyboard.