[thequality-update] What's the Story?

[Michela Ledwidge]

thequality-update 2004/02

Update on thequality.com's projects and converging media issues.
http://thequality.com

NEWS

- What's the Story? 
- Wednesday, February 18, 3pm, BAFTA, 195 Piccadilly London UK

Kicking off the year is "What's The Story?", an event we are producing
for the BAFTA Interactive Festival, a three-day bash starting on
February 17. The aim of What’s The Story? is to examine why the idea of
interactive story has refused to die. We've invited game-makers to sit
around a table with film-makers and let rip on how they see new
developments impacting their craft. There will be sneak previews of
upcoming interactive titles including Peter Molyneux's new game "The
Movies", some specially commissioned machinima (if you don't know what
machinima is, this will be a great opportunity to see it in action), a
VJ set and a host of other goodies.

BAFTA Members Free
Non Members £10

http://www.bafta.org/events/eventscalendar_ifestival.htm


-- MOD Films
-- films designed for re-use, starting now...

This month is the launch of our new venture - MOD Films - a company
aimed at helping film-makers manage their assets and manage their
relationships with interactive companies. Re-use has never been a focus
of film-making but this is changing, especially as more and more film
productions and game productions have to work in tandem. 

http://modfilms.com


FOOD FOR THOUGHT

It has been over two years since our last update (this was always meant
to be semi-regular!) and no news has been good news. It's been eleven
years since this little dotcom started and with the benefit of a little
bit more hindsight, it doesn't seem like many things have changed
online.

There is still a shortage of good plumbers. There are still plenty of
opportunities to lose money. There are still lots of virtually clueless
consultants. There are still plenty of opportunities to do something and
achieve wide-scale recognition. Content still has a ridiculously short
life-span. Links still break and services still slip regularly into
obsolescence. Business plans and storage mechanisms still fail, domains
still expire, and backwards and forwards compatibility is still viewed
by many as a luxury. The digital age could still easily end up as an
embarrassing black hole in recorded human history. "It doesn't work now
of course but it was pretty cool."

Depressing? Not at all! The good news is that the experience of the
builders, the plumbers, and their respective tools are all steadily
improving without much hype, for the benefit of those generating it.
Online distribution has never been as efficient as it is today, to the
horror and delight of several industries. Sustainable systems design is
no longer simply a nice-to-have but a cost imperative. The Internet has
never been a more effective medium through which to publish material and
the likelihood of substantial content becoming widely accessible is
improving. If you're into rubbish, there's plenty of that as well, which
is maybe not a bad thing. It is hard to set culture against culture when
either can readily poke through the other's trash. Empathise with your
enemy, they say. File-share and share alike.

The explosion of interconnected weblogs (or blogs) has been fun to
watch, as an illustration of how quickly the Internet can evolve.
Content management starts to get complicated and suddenly, for many
people, it becomes irrelevant. The Web throws another googly. A new
paradigm takes hold. Regardless of what content is actually being
produced, copied and linked to, the sheer scale and vigour of all this
personal publishing is doing wonders for the overall readability of the
Web - our glorified global filing cabinet. Semantic information is
soaking in at a rate that will be increasingly hard to remove quickly -
handy stuff if anyone wants to hide the drawers marked "Dissent".

I still find it ironic how much the whole system relies on text. Simple
labels. Simple protocols. No degree in rocket science required. Despite
the debut of photo-real CG humans, despite the sonic realism of digital
reverb, literacy still counts. Readability is what counts. You don't
have to go to great expense to make online stuff readable but if you are
serious you do need to share something. Which is not to say that you
can't protect assets, guard crown jewels, but if your public content
isn't machine-readable, it may be time to question why.

ABOUT 

thequality.com is Michela Ledwidge's interactive production company. The
company was founded in Sydney in 1993 and moved to London in 1998.

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