Thursday, September 20, 2012

Google Glass and the Advancement of the Subjective Lens



The recent video (above) created by the partnership between Fashion designer Diane von Furstenburg and Google using Google's new Google Glass augmented reality glasses, suggests that this emerging convergence technology has the potential to transform how movies are made. This transformation appears to not just be about the extreme portability and non-intrusive nature of the technology, which are in themselves great advances, but this new wearable camera may very well bring us into the realm of experiencing a much more powerful subjective lens experience...bringing the subjective eye-line closer into alignment. Time will tell...but this tech looks to be full of potential in both the personal and professional movie-making and viewing space.

In addition to the potential shift in the movie making and viewing experience, there is the added dimension here of how having technology closer to our being, both physically and perceptually will effect our consciousness. The convergence of human and technology spaces has been and continues to be a topic of both inspiration and trepidation...are we evolving into a new form...the transhuman....and heading toward a new age marked by a profound techno-human shift that Ray Kurzweil calls the Singularity...or are we creating further distance and disassociation between our selves, each other and the world...for me, I see this movement as an advance like all other advances, filled with both potential blessings and challenges...for now...this looks like fun...


Sunday, September 9, 2012

Integral Cinema Project Receives Donation of Write Brothers Software



The Integral Cinema Project has received the generous donation of Movie Magic Screenwriter, Dramatica Pro, and Outline 4D cinematic story creation software programs from Write Brothers, Inc.

Movie Magic Screenwriter is one of the film industry’s most highly regarded screenwriting software programs, Dramatica Pro is an award-winning story creation program, and Outline 4D is a story outlining and timeline building program.

The Integral Cinema Project is using these three software programs to help study the development process of the textual dimension of cinematic creation.

Our initial testing of these programs suggests that they can be used a valuable tools in the creation of integrally-informed cinematic works by offering the integrally-informed cinematic creator and creative team a wide range of story creation methodologies and dimension-perspectives.

Dramatica Pro offers a powerful story creation methodology based on a unique and integrally-informed story development theory and approach, which uses a four-quadrant approach to story structure. Like Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, Dramatica’s quadratic approach is based on an expansion of the big three domains of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person dimension-perspectives. While Wilber’s model adds the 3rd person plural as the fourth quadrant, Dramatica uses the addition of the 1st person plural dimension-perspective.

Outline 4D extends this integrally-informed story creation process by adding the ability to view the created story from in-depth and overview vertical-outline and horizontal-timeline perspectives, offering the capacity to move through the individual and collective dimensions of a story with varying depth and span.

Movie Magic Screenwriter integrates these developed multi-dimensional story elements and assists in the further development of the created story into a screenplay (teleplay, etc.) format, while also offering tools to help take the elements of the screenplay into the next pre-production and production phases of script breakdown, storyboarding, scheduling and budgeting.

We are deeply grateful for the contribution of these software programs, and for the support and inspiration of the creators of Write Brothers software.