Hacking Story
Lots of stories are relevant to the creation of Stray Cinema.
Michelle and I first started talking about this film sometime last year. That was when it was just a regular, common-or-garden short film - a good idea for a short film, a well-planned short film with talent working on it whose abilities are borne out in the footage you see on the site, but, still, a short film like any other. At that stage all I was able to do was suggest ways in which Michelle might realise the film she wanted to make. I was at Film School, geeking out on Michael Mann, Michael Winterbottom and the usual Film School fodder, so most of my suggestions were probably geared toward making the movie look somewhere between Code 46, Collateral and 2046.
Flash forward to early 2006, and Michelle and I started talking about what to do with the footage. (Actually, first we caught up for beer at Matterhorn, and being as I hadn't seen her for about three years, that was in itself damned pleasant. And then we got to talking about the movie). It was mentioned (probably by me, seeings as I was reservedly recommending a book to Michelle) that Pattern Recognition, William Gibson's seminal book on media and trendspotting and all that good stuff, was somewhat overrated (oohh look, she ends up with the boy, it must be a happy ending), but that there was definitely something there.
Which led to thinking about storytelling. And storytelling as the core programming language of the human experience engine. And what might happen if you took story and ran it through the Hive - what would happen, basically, if you applied the this-minute-once-again-trendy hacker ethic to storytelling. If you told Hiro Protagonist he had to streamline your story code.
Of course this is far from new. I mean, I feel like I'm insulting you fine people just by clarifying that this isn't new. Those old-time figures, the shamans and firelit poets you hear so much about when we're talking about the roots of story, were basically - in the oh-so-po-mo analogy we seem to be building - a series of successive refiners of the source code of the first stories. Gilgamesh, Beowulf, the usual suspects - these were open-source narratives refined by the community which used them. For our purposes, Seamus Heaney's lyrical retelling of Beowulf is just vx.1 of a piece of code whose core routines have been refined ad infinitum but also cribbed and used in other programs until the core components are far too entropised to trace.
Story is story, across the board. But in our time, the way most people get their story, the frame of reference that hits the most bases, is cinema. And cinema, while communal, is far indeed from open. The program code for cinema goes through very private phases and very communal phases; but it must, in all the traditional models, end up closed. You can Bubble this; you can shoot first; you can even attempt to rid this goddamn debate of motherfucking snakes. Whichever way you cut it, cinema is collaborative, but not communal - in the sense that movies made outside of the traditional hierarchical framework just plain don't work.
So at what point might we be able to hack cinema? Wellsir, how about if we go back to those beers at the Matterhorn, and one of us or the other - let's say it was our indefagitable director - says, "or we could post the footage online"?
So the story, the footage, the performamce - all these things are performed by trained professionals under controlled conditions. And then we open the whole thing wide open, and the world gets to cut it. And we see what happens.
The last story I'll invoke is that of the Little Red Hen. Because while Michelle and I met with professionals and designers and coders and so forth in the path to bringing Stray Cinema online, at some point I decided, y'know what, that wheat ain't gonna be no bread soon enough for my liking. Having injected my thoughts and principles and so forth into the discussion, I took my leave of the project. And don't I feel like a fool now!
Because Michelle has got the thing up and running, and it's gathering steam, and people are pulling me up out of nowhere and asking, "have you heard about that chick who's put the movie online?" And I get to say, "um, yeah, I co-founded that site. I don't have much to do with it now, though. Michelle did all the impressive stuff".
So hopefully little jags like this will be a nice opportunity for me to return to spouting psuedo-philosophy regarding the motives of Stray Cinema. What a good idea!
By homage, 5 years, 6 months ago