Reflections on OFFF Barcelona

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your project is to walk away from it for a while and come back with fresh eyes. Travelling to the OFFF festival in Barcelona was a opportunity to do this.  I went to over 10 different talks mostly about interactivity and how story telling works within this frame work. I came away with new knowledge and I reflected on how I miss the collaboration side of film making as I try to fill many roles in my graduation project. The conference being in one of the most beautiful and creative cities of the world I have been too also gave me a big injection of inspiration and encouragement to achieve my creative goals.

Some of the companies whose talks were of great interest were B-reel, UNIT 9 and on a individual basis Brendan Dawes who really stood out for his originality, playfulness and his passion for experimentation.

B-reel have a great philosophy on working with people from different back grounds which they believe helps creative thinking and has a huge influence on their work. While a lot of their work is interactive and design they are expanding and have just opened a documentary part of company. The company recognises that every body is a entrepreneur and also have room in their company for experimentation between projects which ones again feeds their creative environment. They often spoke about collaboration and I will be very interested to follow more work from this company. 

One of their large scale projects was weblab which was a collaboration between the London Science Museum (who provided the exhibition space and expertise in working with children), Tellart (who build the machines), B-reel, Universal design studio and Biblioteque (who did the interior design)  to make a experiment using HMTL5 where users from all over the world and visiters to the museum could interact exploring the web.

UNIT 9 started their talk with an interesting reflection on how web design has changed over the last 10 years. They looked at traditional menus, how we interact with the browser and scrolling with 2 fingers. It was interesting and revalent to me as I am in the middle or designing the interactivity side of What Love Sounded Like. They showed projects that tease the users to learn how to interact with the interface and reflected on how technology has changed now video works better then all the key frames that one had to do back to the 90s. They also talked about how we now view content on some many different devices and the challenge of making projects work across all devices.

I later spoke with Robert Bader from UNIT 9 for some advice on my project. First I asked him if he thought interactive films on the web was a good idea. He said it depends on what you are trying to do  and if I was doing more than asking people to press play?

I told him that I wanted to included extra material that does not fit in the film and to create a frame work for the film to be shown. I dont think I am re-inventing the wheel but what I am doing is similar to making a DVD menu with extras and that the added advantage of being on the web gives me access to a broader audience and he agreed this was a good reason to experiment with the medium.

Another helpful idea was that he asked me also to think about the effects of people holding your film on a device and what that means physically to your project and what a smaller picture and potentially less sound quality might mean to the way the film is perceived on the web. I was also encouraged that some of their big projects are not aimed at all devices but just to work well on a browser and as I am working on this alone and with not much time I think that if it works on a browser I am happy with that for now with scope to adding hand held devices later.

Brendan Dawe's is a dynamic member of the information visualization community. His talk was fun and enageing. He aims for people to love or hate his work and thinks the worst thing is have no reaction. He has a passion for collecting things and that incudes data. I think the beauty in his work is the way he manages to add a narrative to his projects as he says "data by itself is not enough, data needs poetry". He shared his experiments and side projects which eventually seem to trickle into his contracts and paid commissions. He has a curious mind and likes to experiment. Some of his experiments included controlling video play back by manipulating playdoh (I am not sure if this was a joke!), building a machine which collects and prints tweets where people are tweeting about being happy, a small box which shows the weather in symbols and the iphone peg. I found him interesting because he works both in software and in hardware. Essentially in ideas and concrete things that you can hold in your hand.

He was able to show the path of his interests and how they feed his work. How he worked out the mathematics of the sunflower in an early experiment that later was used in his work with a telco in the UK as they launched the 3G network. This project collected tweeted data over a 3 day period and acted like a stamp in time. The data was represented in spiral shapes of the sunflower and useing colour to show the grouped themes such us when hurrican Sandy occurred or when Obama was visiting London.  It had an eerie effect as well by showing that while people tweeted about big events a day later no body talks about it. I am fascinated as how you can tell stories with data in a visual and creative way. I am not sure what it means for my work in editing and animation except that it is another way of visualizing story and meaning and I am attracted to the way these data visualisers show us another way of looking at the world. 

A common tips from serveral people including Brendan at the conference was making wire frames or sketching in grayscale. This helps to get to the essence of the composition or the work flow in interactive design and is also a great way to communicate to clients with out the distractions of colour or other details. 

Some of Brendans references included the legend title designer Saul Bass and also a scene from Vertigo where the characters are looking at a ancient 2000 yr old tree which had markers in it showing major historical events. He used Saul Bass as inspiration in visual design and the Vertigo clip as a intellectual idea about marking time and how this can be translated to collecting data from rss feeds and APIS on the net which gives you are snap shot of what is happening in the world at any given moment.

He began and ended his talk with his love for collecting music and sounds. Closing the talk by showing how he made a 3D print of the data of a Daft punk song. Why? because "it was fun, to see what would happen and because nobody would die".

Reflecting on listening to the company talks and visiting a animation studio I remembered how much I love collaborating and working in a creative space with other makers and how I would like this as a later goal having moved to Holland and closed my studio in Sydney. Reflecting on the animation festivals I have been to this year also makes it clear to me where my interests lie and where I feel I fit creatively in the Film and TV industry and that is as an editor/animator film maker within a strong leaning to the field of documentary.

sketching the inspiring La Pedrera designed by Catalan Antoni Gaudí