BUILDING NARRATIVE WORLDS

Digital Design for Cinema

Timeless design

  • Shekhar Kapur , one of our speakers from PLAY as PROCESS in 2011 and Alex McDowell have started the conversation on Worldbuilding and storytelling. And we will share it with you and encourage you to participate of this discussion!
  • Shekhar Kapur: Its' been a year ! How can time not be relative ? I saw our pic on your latest e mail on BTC and said, but that was yesterday.  And so I thought - what is timelessness in story telling, and beyond that, how does timelessness go into world building and design , what does it mean ?
  • Alex McDowell: That's great - in a time-based narrative, what is timeless process?
  • We evolve a non-linear process which assumes access to all aspects of the narrative simultaneously. So if 'traditional' narrative is linear, what are the storytelling possibilities of a non-linear world? We shall ponder this further in Berlin.
  • Shekhar Kapur: In a linear film narrative its what lies between the cuts that makes it timeless. Its what you don't tell but crash the narrative together in a way that the audience needs to make an imaginative leap to connect the narrative dots.  If well done, this 'subtext', an instant exploration of the subconscious disconnecting for a moment form the conscious, tells a story that is not obvious in the painting.
  • So each time you re visit the film (or any other art) your subconscious finds something new in those 'hidden caves of subtext' based on who you are at that moment of time, not who you were when you last visited.
  • What can design then do to make the story timeless, for in that way the design of film becomes timeless too. For example in Paani, asking audiences to imagine what connects the Upper and Lower City is a way to provoke their personal guilt on a world they see but they don't look at. Blind themselves to.
  • Add to that, what you do so is a tangle of chaos, wires, pillars etc - representing the confusion of our relationship with human angst.
  • Am I making sense.  What does not exist apparently makes design timeless too ?