Story Beats: Bastion is Live!
Added 2016-04-15 14:05:33 +0000 UTCThe final installment of Story Beats is now public, so you can share it with your friends and neighbors! This version is ever so slightly tweaked.
Alrighty, let's talk shop:
You may notice this video is 14 minutes long. The promise of this Patreon is that I aim to release one video of at least 10 minutes most months out of the year, or two videos of less than 10 minutes. Story Beats was pitched as 4 videos of 5-10 minutes released over one month. The first 3 videos were a lot closer to 10 than 5, and now this last one is 14. And they took 6 weeks.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The old (tentative) plan was to release 2 videos in April to play catch up, but I think rather than "2 in April, 1 in May," let's aim for "3 videos between April and May." And, again, we'll see if we need to adjust that target as the videos are produced.
Since one installment of Story Beats ended up being over 10 minutes, one of those 3 videos may be less than 10. We shall see!
Cheers,
-I
Comments
To clarify. Directing is unique. But it often feels more like an impediment than something in the service of the medium. Also, while you can experience emotions while directing. These are your emotions, and not the characters, and it only opens a window to the possibility of feeling something disconnected from what the character is exhibiting (which is touched on in this video.)
Michael
2016-04-15 20:42:45 +0000 UTC[I am pasting this into a 60 character box without spellcheck. Patreon's most impressive usablity snafu to date. Edited: Okay. Don't use the home page. It must be experimental.] This is the most interesting question to me: How will this medium reconcile itself with storytelling? Or can it even. I think the jury is still out. But storytelling is the traditional form of media, and I am not convinced that a game as such is media. Is Monopoly media? I am not convinced that it is. So this medium is second-class until then. This discussion happens somewhere. It's happening here in a fashion that is not veiled. Good job. Still my personal psychological experience differs. "Games" or something like VR (headset or no) is visceral no doubt. There is a sense of presence, being in the thick of it, and perhaps forgetting about your body. But still, and maybe it's because I am a media purist, I am always in a critical mode. I am directing, not embodying the character-or-party; not unlike in the "old" media formats. This medium just feels like an evolution, an embellishment, and not fundamentally different; only intriguing, and a new frontier. You go there, because it's the frontier. No other reason. There is certainly nothing intrinsically compelling about this medium so far to draw you to it, other than its newness. I believe it's impossible to feel what the characters feel. That would require a technology that induces a state like dreaming. We can say that we do, but it's like saying we are genuinely frightened by something on a flat-screen. Instead we observe them, and imagine what it would be like. And in truly emotional moments, it's not sympathy, or empathy, as much as it's merely sentimentality--we are being reminded of something we've experienced before; not something new. It's sentimental when we are emotional, not sympathetic. My mental makeup may just be different. But it's easy to make an argument, that if you've never felt anything, then you could not be induced to an emotion by a fictional scenario. And anyway, I do not believe this sentimentality is embodied, and I so it follows that "being" an avatar would not alter this dynamic. I suspect the virtues of this medium are only slight. How to not be distracted by its manifold dilemmas is the more pressing question I think. My instinct is to develop a standard interface, so that game-aspect is able to wither away. And so storytellers do not have to continue to grapple with the technical challenges, and are not expected to produce novel forms of play, only to accompany stories--esthetic, thought provoking, experiences. (Also, damn if Bastion's character art style is not the most unsettling thing I've ever laid eyes on!)
Michael
2016-04-15 20:33:02 +0000 UTCI don't know if I'm speaking for anyone else than me but really, patreon is about trust. I give you money to produce beautiful things. Their length is more technicality than I care about, if you could say something in 5 minutes, or tell a story or an idea that is short, I would not want you to go "oh this is not worth it my patrons won't want that" or fill up the video with empty content just to reach the right length… Same thing : if you were to create a video some day that's 30 minutes long, I would kinda feel bad about spending 3 month without anything from you because you met your time goals.
Oscar Barda
2016-04-15 16:20:42 +0000 UTC
