Media, education and culture, a programme of the EU

Developing Interactive Narrative Content Seminar 2007
Prelimary Timetable

Sunday, April 29 2007
7.30 pm Meet + Greet
Monday, April 30 2007
9.15 am –
9.20 am

Studio A
Opening Session
Brunhild Bushoff, sagasnet

9.20 am – 10.15 am

Studio A
Sibylle Kurz, D
How to Pitch Successfully
Lecture

10.30 am –
11.30 am

Studio A
Frank Boyd, UK
Pitching as Part of the Development Process
Lecture

11.40 am –
12.10 am

Studio A
Lee Sheldon, Game Designer / Writer
The Emotional Divide
This talk will focus on what movies and games have in common when we want to create emotion, and where the two part company. Understanding both mediums is necessary for those of us who cross the emotional divide that appears to stand between them.

1.30 pm – 5.00 pm Studio A
Sibylle Kurz & Frank Boyd
Hands - On Pitching Training
Tuesday, May 1 2007
9.15  am –
10.15 am

Studio A
Inga von Staden, D
Hunting for Public Funds
You have this great idea? And now you are looking for public funding? Before you get yourself a European directory and start calling all the institutions vaguely associated with media or funding, you should have all the necessary parameters sorted out. We will take a look at what those are and the funding tools available to help you find and address the right programmes.

10.30 am –
1.00 pm

Studio A
Frank Boyd, UK
Understanding your User - Personas as Design Tools
Lecture and Exercises

2.00 pm –
3.00 pm

fmx/Meidinger Saal
Inga von Staden,
Web2.0 – Where The Mass Meets
The internet was hyped then dropped like a hot potatoe by venture capitalists in the crash. Today the internet community has reinvented itself and presents Web2.0 scaring investors into a frenzy. What makes the “new internet” so hot and what does the future hold for us – Web3.0?

3.00 pm – 4.00 pm

fmx/Meidinger Saal
Teut Weidemann, Managing Director, CDV Software Entertainment AG
Wb n00bs, u roxxor! Imba! Welcome to the new virtual state of World of Warcraft.
World of Warcraft is more than a game. It is a social economy and a virtual space which has grown far beyond the game environment itself. This lecture will show some of the effects on people beyond the game and will extrapolate what this all means for the future of gaming and the internet.

4.00 pm – 5.00 pm

fmx/Meidinger Saal
Florian Schmidt
Creating Tools for Conviviality future challenges for virtual world designers
Over the last few years, virtual worlds have become a new medium.
Though they have their roots in game industry, platforms such as
"Second Life" are actually not games anymore. Therefore, the development of virtual worlds demands a completely new approach from the designers perspective. While traditional game-design is mostly about creating obstacles that the user has to overcome, a social metaverse has to provide tools for individual expression. Here, the designer has to share control with the user that has become a creator of content as well. This lecture will be about the future challenges for the designers of such worlds.

5.00 pm

6.00pm

fmx/Meidinger Saal
Michael Rueger,
Second Life Rocks / Second Life Sucks: Options, Vexations, Visions
Second Life! Second Life Rocks, but to be honest Second Life Sucks, too. Michaels (in SL call him RFORCE1 XI) lecture is about both sides of the story. A lecture about places, ideas, possibilites and visions, especially (but not only) for people who heard about SL, tried it or are going to try a second life.

Wednesday, May 2 2007
9.15 am – 11.30 am

Studio A
Raimo Lang, YLE
Interactive Narratives and Communities - designing content & context, Part 1

11.45 am – 1.00 pm

Studio A
Ingo Wolf, Grid-TV
IPTV - Challenges and Opportunities

2.00 pm – 3.00 pm

fmx/ Raum Mannheim/
Max Wolf, and Sebastian Oschatz
Digital Rooms with VVVV - Realtime Programming and Realtime Graphics
The presentation will show various projects by meso digital interiors and gives some glances on their implementation with the graphical programming language vvvv (http://vvvv.org)

3.00 pm – 4.00 pm

fmx/ Meidinger Saal/
Ken Perlin
The Illusion of Life - Revisited
Walt Disney spoke of the quest to create the "Illusion of Life". Computers have made it possible to create this illusion interactively. But what makes us care about an interactive character? Recent techniques breathe life into interactive characters, going beyond
traditional animation toward new forms of interactive and on-line narrative storytelling. And we're going to show waltzing sheep.

5.00 pm – 6.00 pm

fmx/Raum Mannheim
Friedrich Kirschner and Klaus Neumann,
The Machinima Circus
The talk will outline the basic what, why and how of machinima moviemaking while demonstrating some of its technical and creative aspects. The audience will take part in an improvised live-show and get a glance at contemporary production technologies, research topics and new interfaces and do-it-yourself tools for the ambitious virtual 3D realtime filmmaker. Eventually, the session will give hints at future developments and spread out into adjacent fields by looking into interactivity, realtime animation and narrative.

Thursday, May 3 2007
9,15 am –
11.00 am

Studio A
Raimo Lang, YLE
Interactive Narratives and Communities designing content & context, Part 2

11.15 am – 12.30 am

Studio A
Peter Olaf Looms, DR
How Television Viewing is Changing -
From the user perspective: what are the market opportunities for new media based on television?

3.00 pm
–-
4.00 pm

fmx/Meidinger Saal
Lee Sheldon, Game Designer / Writer
Word into Action: Adapting other Media
In 1934 Agatha Christie wrote one of the most famous mystery novels of all time, "Murder on the Orient Express". Forty years later it was adapted into a hit movie by Paul Dehn and Sidney Lumet. Thirty-six years after that it was adapted into a hit video game. This talk will examine what it takes to adapt material from one medium into others, focusing on "Murder on the Orient Express", as well as looking at the first Agatha Christie video game, "And Then There Were None", and the video game adaptations of the film "Wild Wild West" and the animated film "Once upon a Forest", all adapted by the speaker.

4.00 pm

5.00 pm

fmx/Meidinger Saal
Gilles Monteil, Ubisoft
We all want Emotions in Games!
In his presentation Gilles Monteil will talk about the confusion around what we call “emotion” in games. He will present why and how we sometime succeed or miss our objectives in this area. He will go through every aspect that affects emotion content in games in order to determine where animation technologies should provide solutions.

6.00 pm

7.00 pm

fmx/Meidinger Saal
Philippe Quéau, Directeur du Bureau, Unesco
Intermediary Bodies and Virtual Worlds
High quality virtual immersion, computer generated actors, digital manipulation of video archives, augmented reality, persistent virtual communities, retinal scanning, nano-presence with force feedback interaction, bionic bodies, are only many symptoms of a lingering revolution of our common reality. Intermediary between the world of abstraction and the world of tangible reality, they create the building blocks for a virtual world, a sort of 3rd world, animated by “second lives”. The classic distinction between screen and reality and between presence and representation is now being definitely fuzzed. On top of this, geopolitics of virtuality acquire strategic importance, from the control of the governance of the Net and its norms, to the invisible presence of trapdoors, the commercial ownership of keywords, and the “total surveillance” networks that do constantly compile each of our moves in the grid. As always, a human mind is running behind its own creation. A new political philosophy of virtuality must be brought to bear, in order to rethink the classic concepts of freedom and power, of democracy and common good.

Friday, May 4 2007
9.15 am – 9.45 am

Studio A
Greg Childs, Childseye
Five Myths about Interactive Media for Children

9.45 am –
10.45 pm

Studio A
Chris Hales, Interactive Filmmaker
Movie as Interface: Rethinking the Interactive Movie
Show & Tell

11.00 am –
12.00 am

fmx/ Room Karlsruhe
Nathan Shedroff, www.nathan.com
Creating Meaningful Interaction Experiences
It's no longer enough to create novel interactions. Our increasingly busy, crowded world demands appropriate experiences that are truly interactive and connect us in meaningful ways with others. The most successful offerings are those that allow us to create meaningful stories for ourselves, share them with others, and participate in the stories of others.

12.00 am –
1.00 pm
fmx/Room Karlsruhe
Mark Stephen Meadows, bore.com/
Emotional User Interfaces
This presentation is about autonomous avatars and virtual worlds and discusses how emotions need to be applied as an interface with data. We then consider systems for Emotional User Interfaces which will allow a game or other interactive system to keep track of how a player is emotionally responding, thereby increasing narrative capacities.
2.00 pm –
4.00 pm

Studio A/Kepler Saal
Networking
& fmx visit

4.00 pm – 5.00 pm

fmx/Raum Mannheim
Marcos Weskamp, Marumushi
Experience Information - Dissecting a real world AS3 project for a real world client
From start to finish, Marcos will dissect the process of conceptualizing, building and deploying a large scale Interactive Information Visualization Application for a real world client. From rough pencil sketches to design, architecture, coding and deployment, he will outline the importance of keeping focus on the people who will be interacting with the piece throughout the entire process.

5.00 pm
-
5.30 pm
Brunhild Bushoff, sagasnet, D
Closing Session with an Introduction
of the MEDIA Development Funding Scheme.
Saturday, May 5 2007
Departure