cowbite.org

Joshua Foer: Step Outside Your Comfort Zone and Study Yourself Failing :: Videos :: The 99 Percent

2012-05-23T15:10:03+01:00

Interesting talk from Joshua Foer on how to get beyond being "good enough" at a skill or field of expertise, to become expert. His four principles seem to be:

Practice the bits that are really hard
Study the people who are better at this than you
Get regular and immediate feedback
Treat it like a science - collect and analyse data (feedback), develop theories and test them, log your progress

Joshua Foer: Step Outside Your Comfort Zone and Study Yourself Failing :: Videos :: The 99 Percent

BAFTA noms for Misfits and Dreams of Your Life

2012-04-17T17:45:07+01:00

Yesterday two projects I'm very proud of were nominated for a BAFTA Craft award in the Digital Creativity category: Misfits and Dreams of Your Life.

Misfits is a gift to work with; the energy, creativity and downright filthy humour of the show give us lots of opportunities to bring it to life online. More importantly, the show's creators at Clerkenwell Films have embraced the notion of "doing multiplatform", creating a dedicated team who are on board from the outset. For the last season we also launched Misfits: Community Service, a mobile game developed by the very talented Mobile Pie team, with consultant support from Nicholas Lovell. There's a ton of Misfits multiplatform stuff out there, but you can start exploring on E4.com, FB and Twitter, and the game is on iTunes.

Dreams of Your Life was an entirely different project. Developed to be an online response to Carol Morley's documentary Dreams of a Life, it was developed by the clever folks at Hide&Seek in collaboration with A.L. Kennedy and Lottie Davies. I am most definitely understating it when I say that trying to distill the essence of a challenging story into something that isn't a game has been a challenge. Margaret Robertson has written and spoken about the process eloquently, and I think it's always better to hear from the people who actually made the thing rather than the hand-wavy commissioning ed, so have a read of her posts part 1, 2 and 3. I think that the team delivered something beautiful and haunting. It is unlike anything else I've commissioned so far and I'm very proud of it.

Of course I'd love both projects to win - a big heavy mask would be an appropriate reward for all their hard work. But in my eyes a nomination is already a tip of the hat to good work well done, and an excuse to break out the champagne early.

The Wire's visual style in detail

2012-04-17T16:27:13+01:00

Norwegian academic Erlend Lavik has created a video essay on The Wire's detailed visual style. It's a fascinating watch:

Via Teressa Iezzi at Fastcocreate.

Books as Data

2011-11-02T13:34:21+00:00

I've been enjoying this from James Bridle. In the accompanying post he makes his definition of books very clear;

And so when I talk about “books”, I don’t mean ‘ebooks’ or ‘bound books’ or any division thereof: I’m talking about something written down and transmitted. When we talk about how we feel about and interact with music now we don’t have to specify whether it’s MP3 or vinyl in most contexts. That’s not really what the discussion is about.

The reason this needs to be clear is because when we ask what is different about digital books, what we are asking is what existing qualities of the book digital enhances.

I'm doing a lot of thinking about TV Drama at the moment - wrestling with what multiplatform drama is, and what it should/could be. James' talk resonates.

links for 2011-08-03

2011-08-03T13:03:13+01:00

Everybody Is A Game Designer

"Children will turn anything into a toy, any toy into a game and any game into a story. Adults do just the same thing, they just don’t do the noises. At least not when anyone’s looking."

(tags: games play storytelling)