Affective Narrative Design in complex cinematic systems.
Narrative media and Design, namely in its visual and interactive fields, are reaching a maturation point of intersection where the complexity of their taxonomies, and the growth in their respective semantic repositories, were exponentially increased by digital information systems.
The change of the medium produced a change not at the level of the object but in the way it comes together, it is shaped and perceived. Recalling Burnham in his seminal Systems Esthetics (1968) “In the past our technologically-conceived artifacts structured living patterns. We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done. (…) For systems, information, in whatever form conveyed, becomes a viable esthetic consideration”.
The “aesthetics of intelligent systems” could be considered a dialogue where two systems gather and exchange information so as to change constantly the states of each other - Burnham, J. (1970)
Considering here the specific field of cinematic aesthetics, and its contemporary digital expressions, complexity became one of the main characteristics and challenges both for professionals and researchers. It’s in this complexity and the challenge that it brings for the production of artifacts, but also for its experience by the audience, that we can observe the intense interdependence between the aspects of Narrative, Design and the Digital Systems that support their fabrication and convey the experience with the media content.
Complexity in cinema become a central topic of research reflecting the contemporary digital culture and the tensions surrounding its epistemology. What kind of object is a film today? In what form should it be better expressed to address the digital media environment experience? Poulaki (2015) argues that:
the framework of complex systems theory, which developed through computation, might offer such a new epistemology and ontology for film analysis
Manovich’s databased movies (Soft Cinema, 2002) provided a clear mind-frame for a cinematic digital system based aesthetics:
it is a kind of cinema where all kind of constants of traditional film become variable (2002)
Soft Cinema OS explores 4 concepts that can be considered the basis for an Artificial Cinematic Aesthetics:
1“Algorithmic Cinema.” Using systems of rules, software controls both the layout of the screen (number and positions of frames) and the sequences of media elements which appear in these frames.
2 “Database Cinema.” The media elements are automatically selected from a large database to construct a potentially unlimited number of different narrative and non-narrative films.
3 “Macro-cinema.” Soft Cinema OS imagines how moving images may look when the Net will mature, and when unlimited bandwidth and very high resolution displays would become the norm.
4 “Multimedia cinema.” In Soft Cinema OS video is used as only one type of representation among others: 2D animation, motion graphics, 3D scenes, diagrams, etc.
______
Manovich, Lev (2003). Soft Cinema OS. Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowships, Retrieved from https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/3915
This encounter between natural antagonists, the database, the senseless list of data items, and narrative, the sense making structure, comes together as computer software narratives structured by a design process. The question then, as Manovich (2001) states it, is “how can a narrative take into account the fact that its elements are organized in a database?”
Figuring answers to this question its leading the way to find new kinds of narrative and, most of all, understanding how digital media based narratives can fully empower the atoms at the base of the system by working together with data structures to form a new human aware language.
Designing for a new Artificial Cinematic Language System
The field of interactive narrative, in its different genres, has been recombining elements, decomposing structures of narrative and experimenting with procedural formats that are becoming progressively more “human” and bio-culturally aware. Therefore taking a step further from the initial concepts defined in Soft Cinema OS (2003). Natural language and biofeedback are in this regard the most evident fields of development. The result is a transformation of the human-computer interaction in a seemingly pervasive and naturally perceived experience.
The immersion of the user in the experience, namely in cinematographic experiences, still looks for a better design of the narrative interaction in order to overcame the cognitive disruption of choice and maintain the levels of emotional engagement.
To address this need for a cinematic language, that can combine the digital infrastructure and the human individual experience, a narrative design solution must be organized as a digital design system. One that can be structured as a language of networked patterns and include the affective layer.
Building on Alexander, C. (1977) classic concept where
each pattern describes a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use the solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.
This is a vision we can relate with contemporary approaches to digital design systems and their structural languages.
Brad Frost’s foundational Atomic Design semantics embodies an hierarchy of natural matter. This naturally perceived complexity can easily project the human analogical experience into digital systems construction. The language it’s structured in a way that allows for endless recombination and constant vocabulary expansion.
Other classic examples such as LEGO gives us further tangible experience and proof of this atomization concept and its intrinsic natural recombinatoric plasticity.
The Affective Layer in the system’s patterns
The language patterns of this type of design system needs to integrate bio-cultural levels, and individual expressions of affect and emotion, in order to augment the cinematographic experience. Parameters that combined with classic cinematographic forms and algorithmic rules can enable the language vocabulary and guide the flow of feeling.
Plantiga’s (2009) taxonomy of 4 parameters for Affective Trajectories provide the 1st level of affective components for pattern definition:
Kind(s) of emotions and affects that are intended
Strength in affective moments, normally dramatic arc related
Valence, affective pleasure or displeasure associated with particular affects
Value it represents for the spectator
A 2nd level, more structural and hierarchically precise, is proposed by the narrative components and patterns derived from Hogan (2011), in his Affective Narratology classification. Two main themes emerge in his organization:
Emotional Geography derived from the human need for spatial related organization of the world along the axes of normalcy and attachment
Emotional History/Memory as the need for time based hierarchical units tied to the emotional flow of causal interconnected events:
The conceptual system derived from these inputs can be summarized by the mainframe model represented in the following scheme:
• Building Blocks/Layer Components
• Affective Database/Algorithmic Theater
In the end, the main goal is to design a more cohesive and fluid narrative system that connects with the users emotional profile and integrates their choice with relatable emotional events built in the design of the narrative system.
Immersion and agency, paramount characteristics in today’s game cinematics, will be able to integrate as well in interactive cinematographic formats.
Production challenges, in the development of these cinematographic formats, still need to be addressed with a realistic and cost effective production model. Albeit objects like Bandersnatch-Black Mirror, Telling Lies and LateShift already have proved that another kind of cinematographic experience is industrially possible. But also, regarding that concern, the consolidation of a language for artificial cinematic systems can help overcame the complexity and cost of generative storylines and the multiplication of on-set film scene shooting.
