In June of 2006, Will Wright & Brian Eno gave a seminar for the Long Now Foundation (which is an interesting org that deserves its own thread) where they talked about generative systems and they used them, Will Wright with his game Spore & Brian Eno with 77 Million Paintings. The mp3 can be found here if you scroll down.
If you are a fan of art, you really should check out 77 million paintings. I saw the exhibit when it came to San Francisco and it was great, but I actually liked it much more when I got the DVD home and threw it on my plasma. Basically he painted 350 slides, then used an algorithm to layer different slides and morph them into each other. The result is an organic painting, constantly shifting over time, and never showing the same thing twice. I have it on every night, I think it is amazing.
But the real interesting thing about the talk to me was the concept of generative systems and how they relate to the creative process. Eno talked very eloquently about using them to create music, less like an architect & more like a gardener planting seeds. The idea being rather than having a concept in your head and laying it out piece by piece, you set up a framework and some simple rules and just let it run, and the creator is just as surprised by the results as the viewer. Essentially, it’s the Game of Life extrapolated to art.
I find this talk fascinating, and am trying to think of other mediums this might work for. Could you film a movie this way? Stage a musical? Anyone else digging generative systems?
Interesting concepts, though Will Wright is still the world’s biggest tease in my book (when can I finally play Spore, Will! WHEN!!).
I would say that a full-length film would get a little bit tiresome if filmed this way.
Maybe a short film, where you give actors basic motivation, and set a scene for them, in the same way you do with improv comedy, and let it go on for 30 minutes.
Ya improv is the first thing I thought of, but really there isn’t a lot of structure to improv other than the Rule of Yes. Im thinking something where people’s movements and dialog are subject to some simple rules - like no two people on the same z-plane on front of the camera, no one can face the person to which they are speaking, etc. Much more restrictive than improv, but I wonder if we might see some interesting developments if you play it out.
This sort of thing has been used in movies at least as far back as Batman Returns. In the scenes where you’re seeing the entire army of penguins, the movements were not preprogrammed, but generated according to a simple set of rules. I’m pretty sure that similar technology was used for the orc army at Helm’s Deep in LotR.
I’m pretty sure they were both commercial packages, so you probably wouldn’t be able to get much info on how they work. I think the engine used for the Helm’s Deep scene is known as Massive, but I’m not 100% sure on that.
I vaguely recall reading in White Dwarf (Games Workshop’s house magazine that promotes their games including LotR), that the first time they ran the Helm’s Deep battle, the defenders fled due to being so strongly outmatched.