See, Hear, Feel, Understand.  These are the first four things I ask students to articulate when they look at a film.  What do you see?  What do you hear?  What do you feel? What do you understand?  This method of developing filmmaking skills through screen studies is based in a cognitive/phenomenological approach.  It asks about perception, affect, and cognition - in other words: how does a film impact on your body, your emotions and your thinking?   When students get used to articulating their insights through this approach (my acronym for it is SHFUA: see-hear-feel-understand-articulate)  they are able to articulate something about how a given film works; how films in general might work as active processes that invite audiences to make meaning; and, importantly, how their own films might work. 

But 'see hear, feel and understand' just don't quite describe all of the activities of mind and body that interactivity offers.  One could add 'participate' or even the obvious, 'interact'  but for purposes of analysis and creating work, these become specific to the mechanics of the property one is talking about.  They are about how you participate and interact, not why.   So, I'd like to kick it up a level and introduce: CONATION. 

Here is what wikipedia says the word 'conation' means:

"Conation is a term that stems from the Latin conatus, meaning any natural tendency, impulse, striving, or directed effort.[1] It is one of three parts of the mind, along with the affective and cognitive. In short, the cognitive part of the brain measures intelligence, the affective deals with emotions and the conative drives how one acts on those thoughts and feelings"
 
Although "The term conation is no longer widely known—it is in "The 1,000 Most Obscure Words in the English Language," it is highly relevant to interactive screen based entertainment and I think it should be brought back into common usage for studying and creating interactive properties. 

Mike Jones and I have been teaching interactivity in a series of workshops for the [imi] project and AFTRS students.  The workshop starts with asking: "what does an interactive screen story or experience need in order to get people involved?" 

The answer proposed in the workshop is:
 - motivation
 - action
 - reward

What motivates an audience to participate?  What action do they do or role do they have to play?  What is their reward?

What I realised when I learned the word 'conation'  is that these three things  - motivation, action, and reward - speak to the CONATIVE aspects of mind.

Put together with cognition and affection (understanding and feeling) conation adds volition, will to act, or, colloquially: an itch to scratch. 

This notion of an 'itch to scratch' is immediately recognsiable in puzzle games like Tetris.  When I see an unfinished line up of squares in Tetris I just want to line the squares up.  I have no emotional feeling about them, I don't get any any insight from lining them up, I simply scratch the itch - satisfy my conative urging. 

The conative becomes more complex in story driven interactive entertainments like Dear Esther where the aesthetics make you feel haunted,  and the story makes you want to uncover the mystery.  In this case the affective and the cognitive drive the conative.  Your 'itch to scratch'  - your will to act - is integrated with dramatic questions and sophisticated feelings states.

The Physical TV Company, Richard James Allen, Mike Jones, Nathan Anderson and I are developing a new interactive property called More Lies based on a book by Richard.  In this "interactive book/movie experience"  the conative is driven by a direct audience relationship with the central character - a charming but unreliable narrator who needs your help...  But when is he telling you the truth?  The interactivity of the proposition offers you a way to scratch the itch of wanting to know: what is a crazy, compelling lie he is telling and what is a crazy, compelling truth?   Creating More Lies will be an action research experiment in embedding the word 'conative' as a consideration in a creative process.  Since it is a story based interactive experience we'll be asking, at each stage: how does an element make you feel?  what does it offer to understanding? what conative response does it incite?  Watch this space for notes on the process. 

(p.s. AFTRS students can expect to be discussing the conative in upcoming workshops, because I'm changing my acronym to: SHFUCA - see-hear-feel-understand-conate-articulate - Shall I paraphrase the now famous line from the movie ARGO?  ARGO SHFUCA...)

Not what they do, but what they could do

The conversation in a film school always seems to come round to whether directors understand what others on their creative teams do sufficiently well to collaborate.  I suggest that If setting up classes wherein the directors learn what others do, it is important to teach their actions in relation to drama and story, not in relation to production. 

·       Design creates the image of character and culture or ‘world’, and sets up the cinematographer to reveal visual tone and metaphor

·       The cinematographer reveals the drama, articulates perspective visually, and creates the visual expression of tone, metaphor, power relationships, time, and space, as set up by the designer.

·       The editor structures the audience experience of the drama over time.  They shape time, energy and movement of events, emotions and images to reveal the drama.

·       The sound designer further shapes the experience with perspective, tone, energy (dynamics) mood and specificity of aural world and texture.

·       The composer reinforces and articulates the structure of the experience, expressing all of the above (character, world, tone, time, energy, emotions, mood etc.) in an abstract form that binds all of the elements into a whole and complete expression of the drama.

·       The director interprets the script, articulating what, in their view the drama is, and how the characters reveal it through their actions.  He or she then has the task of conveying what the drama is, what the power relationships are, the perspective the production has on the events in the plot, and therefore the idea for culture or world, tone, metaphor, time, space, energy and movement to all collaborators.

·       The writer instigates the cinematic revelation of drama by designing and expressing plot, and the action of characters, culture or world through it. 

·       The producer elicits an articulation of the drama and perspective (commonly referred to as vision) from the director and watches over the process for consistency of articulation and interpretation.  Budgets and schedules are expressions of the ‘vision’ in numbers and the producer allocates the numbers through their coherent understanding of the drama and perspective. 

The topics of common study between all disciplines, therefore are (or should be) character, culture or world, tone, metaphor, revelation, power, time, space, energy, movement and dramaturgy.

In screen studies we look for how these manifest in a range of productions, genres, time periods, cultures, industries, and particular creative teams.   We ask the students to become fluent with these ideas through identifying and articulating them in existing works, and expect them to synthesize this learning by applying it, as a capacity for articulation, to their own work.  We do not distinguish between disciplines in our expectations for their capacities to identify, articulate and synthesise.