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"We are doing something with Black Diamond that no one has ever done before...have talked about doing but no one has really, really been able to succeed at doing." John Sanborn, award-winning video artist and director, is talking about The Psychic Detective, Black Diamond, the full length, live action, interactive motion picture CDi, created by Electronic Arts Studios, headquartered in San Mateo, California, and Colossal Pictures of San Francisco. The project was helmed by the team of Sanborn, Jim Simmons, producer of interactive entertainment, and Michael Kaplan, screenwriter.
While the CD industry wavers between producing games, educational material or reference, the forward thinking people at Electronic Arts have put together a creative team to produce a work of interactive fiction bound to become a benchmark in CDi production.
"It's almost like a cinematic pinball machine. And you are just aware of the fact that all these different choices are really going to change the movie. This puts the viewer right in the flow of a wildly paced narrative." said Sanborn.
The production for the CDi was shot in San Francisco, using Hollywood style filming. Jim Simmons relates the story of how the project came to be. "It was at an industry party and Sanborn thought he was talking to William Gibson and came straight up to me to chat me up. But by the time he realized his mistake, he was stuck and couldn't get away from me. I drilled him with enough questions to realize that this was someone I wanted to work with."
GS. That was it?
JimS. "I called him a week later and invited him to the office to look at three potential projects so we could find one we both wanted to work on."
The concept of a fictional psychic detective provides the foundation for a story that allows maximum user interaction. Eric Fox, the detective who has spectacular psychic abilities, is able to penetrate the minds of the other characters and in this way enables the user/player the freedom to choose. When I asked John Sanborn about the choice he said:
JohnS. It's the focus on the function of interactivity that makes the all the difference. The potential for interactivity is primary and everything else revolves around that.
GS. How do you approach it in the beginning? Is it from theme or story or characters or how do you begin?
JohnS. Start with the principle of interaction. Of course, the concept must be right for the use of interactivity. Just simply adopting a classic story line into the new format won't support the kind of movement that is necessary to fully develop the potential of CDi. It is a mistake to consider that a CD is simply a book on disc.
GS. I agree with that.
JohnS. For people approaching this form for the first time, particularly people who are writing, that the important thing is to consider that the interactivity is primary and if they are going to get into the classic three act format, they are just putting books on tape.
You are still dealing with a theme, a premise, a conflict, crisis and resolution. All the classic elements of storytelling haven't changed.
GS. Whichever route you take, the essential path to the denouement is to defeat the bad guy? All the various nodes, then, are contingent upon the primary goal. Is that right?
JohnS. Well, you can have many different goals.
GS. They're the same, but different, eh? In what ways?
JohnS. The format for a CDi is richer than other formats. It enables you to explore the many facets involved; the characters, the situations, the locations, and even the goals,... and a new one is added, the time frame. Instead of one story line, there are many. We could have explored many more avenues, but we had to work within the limitations of the production schedules.
GS. Given an unlimited budget, you are saying, you would still be there?
JohnS. We could have given the players more options to build on.
GS. So the players are actually co-creators at a certain level? This is a different form and not many have experience with it. It seems it would require some kind of support for the actors and technical people and that would fall to the director. In what way did you handle this situation? How did the personnel take it?
JohnS. Well, the actors loved it. It gave them a chance to develop a more fully rounded character and to explore all the facets of the role. That's an opportunity that they would not get under any other circumstances.
GS. So they liked it. And what about the technical people?
JohnS. The technical people were intimidated at first, but once they understood the principle, for the most part, they enjoyed the challenge.
I asked John the meaning of a line in his resume: "John Sanborn searches for clues to visual humming".
He explained that it has to do with a lingering awareness. "When you hear a piece of music that is memorable, you make it your own by humming it." It is that impression that comes to the surface. Visual humming is the process whereby an image is recognized as familiar and meaningful.
Starting such a project must have brought with it some formidible limitations. Being a writer myself and curious about how such a task is approached, I asked Michael Kaplan, the project's writer, about the "givens" they had to work with.
MK. There was one creative given, and that was the concept that our producer, Jim Simmons, had devised: a main character who has the psychic ability to jump into people's heads and see what they see and hear what they hear. Using that as our leaping off point, Jim and John Sanborn (director) and I concocted a full set of interactive licks and story points.
There were no technical givens at the outset, because no one was sure just how much we could accomplish with video streaming. As the story took shape, we learned that -- beyond our wildest expectations -- we could make the entire project digital video. At which point, there was no looking back.
An exhilarating aspect of the development/production process was how the creative elements drove the programming (if you've ever experienced the reverse, you'll understand why this was so exhilarating). We did our best to create a whole-cloth concept for an interactive film, then handed it off to the engineers at Electronic Arts. To that end, the screenplay became a blueprint that both the film crew and the programmers could follow every step of the way.
I should add that we were very concerned that the experience have more going on than simple psychic voyeurism. Along with transmitting, the Player can have Eric Fox touch objects and receive the history embedded within; have him take a variety of actions and change the direction of a scene (or eventually, the whole story); and, once the psychic collector (our maguffin) is unearthed, have Eric throw thoughts at people as well as read their psyches (uncovering personal history, fears, terrible secrets, etc.).
We call the ability to jump into the heads of other characters "transmitting," and it is the cornerstone of our interactivity. This not only required a parallel structure, but made it imperative that everyone was always doing something INTERESTING -- whether it directly impacted the mystery, or was simply weird, sexy, funny, what have you.
GS. Were there bound to be some hurdles at the onset...
MK. My god, everything you could possibly imagine! I had never attempted anything like this before, and I just plowed straight into the muck, hoping to beat it into coherent shape. I was making flow-charts on butcher paper, concocting a cross-referenced labelling system AND trying to write entertaining characters and dialogue.
GS. Was it really plowing totally new ground or did you find any sort of guideposts in place? Where does one go for help or guidance in creating a workable format?
MK. I think what made the experience so much fun was the complete absence of rules or precedents. A.S. Byatt's novel, Possession, provided some structural inspiration. The theatrical experience Tamara served as a model for our opening chapter. I am a huge fan of Dennis Potter and Robert Altman, both of whom layer their linear work with incredible complexity and, for lack of a more erudite term, horizontal diversions.
In the end, Sanborn and I tried to conceive of an interactive experience that would please us (poor Jim had to worry about actually selling the thing). We don't like games, and we didn't care for any of the interactive movies that were already out there. So we just started from scratch.
There are two moves that we made in Psychic Detective which make it unique from other interactive story experiences.
First: If you sit back and do nothing, Psychic Detective will play like a movie or TV show. No premature deaths, no dead ends. No being stuck in a room trying to decipher some riddle that's tattooed on a dog's butt. The thing moves forward with or without you, and every time, there's a sense of closure.
Second: the interface is directly tied to the drama. Opportunities knock... opportunities go away. Depending on where you are, who's in the room, what's being said, where you've been: the graphic prompts pop on and off. It's all about context and the fleeting moment. You snooze, you lose.
From a structural standpoint, this made it imperative that I treat certain parts of the story as physical landscape. At any given moment, half a dozen actions were happening concurrently, and I had to develop a structure that would embrace the horizontal possibilities, and allow the Player to explore (or psychically channel-surf) while time raced forward. This led to a screenplay which, in certain ways, behaved like a Rubik's cube.
There is an overarching sense of time that keeps pushing forward and governs all the characters caught up in the story. While Moki is off blackmailing Max Mirage, Sylvia is breaking into the mansion where Madame Tikunov lies helplessly, and Laina is searching for...well, you get the picture. At the same time, I had to manage the math through storytelling craft. If you've set up 6 crucial options for the Player, followed soon after by 4 more, and then 3, you would find yourself having to account for 72 unique permutations.
Obviously, you've got to pare it down to a number that is both generous and feasible. Let's say it's 10 separate outcomes. From a story and character standpoint, you have to identify which are the truly unique combinations. Which are similar enough to dovetail into the same resolution? What are the loose ends you're left with? What are the likely expectations of the Player?
GS. In structuring The Psychic Detective did you get any clues (pardon the pun) from games?
MK. No, I was never much for games. In fact, I wrote Psychic from the decided bias of someone who didn't care for games and wanted a new kind of experience. You seem to think I had this all figured out before I started. I only arrived at "cross-over points" through trial and error; absolutely, they're integral. But I'm not sure how much they can be contrived at the outset, and how much you have to dig for them in the story.
I'm being really stubborn about this, I guess; I would hate to see my structure and design broken down into a formula, because I didn't begin with a formula. Nor am I using one now. I'm still figuring out what worked, what didn't, and what I want to build on.
Every time I scripted a chapter, I would create an accompanying flow chart in MacFlow. It would give a visual representation of all the little scenes as they related to one another horizontally and vertically. Each horizontal line was called a tier. Each tier usually had about a dozen scenes. Thus, a scene I labelled 3.2C told everyone it was Chapter 3, second tier, scene C.
Here's a representative example: Eric Fox is working for Laina, a mysterious woman who has hired him to keep an eye on her younger sister. Eric follows Monica, the sister, to a nightclub. He has the opportunity to transmit six different characters, witnessing lots of tell-tale action within the set piece. Now he goes to see Laina and barges into her apartment. He catches her with some mysterious guy, she starts freaking out. The Player is faced with a number of options: there are objects within the apartment to touch (possible secrets?), and there are ways of handling Laina that range from tender sympathy to hostile grilling to quitting the case outright. All of which leads us to the next tier where Eric and Laina face off meaningfully and the numbers threaten to explode: one would have to write many more scenes than would be workable -- or pleasurable. You would have to combine all the bits of information Eric is holding with all the emotional states of Laina...and let's not forget about including that mysterious guy lurking in the corner. You see where this is going? At all times you want to keep things wide, you want to offer scads of choices, but you must find clever ways to keep the resulting number of permutations both "generous and feasible."
GS. With all that complexity, which comes first, the characters or the plot?
MK. Let's say for the sake of argument, I concoct characters first. I've got about a dozen, and they're all going to be doing something different in the first chapter. Now I'm structuring that chapter, making a rough diagram that tells me what actions occur parallel to each other. It slowly dawns on me that the piece is getting too big, and that it's also feeling a little thin. Every character has ONE thing to accomplish, and the rest of the time I'm trying to find ways to vamp for them. I start to consolidate; I whittle it down to 7 characters. As one character is cut, a surviving character inherits that person's juicy chunk of backstory. Another surviving character suddenly has 3 things going on, and 2 of them conflict in a really interesting way. So I've made my cast of characters more complex and much more involved in the story, but not because I WAS WORKING ON THE CHARACTERS. It started with me attacking the interactive structure (or sausages). And that's what I mean by simultaneous. It's possible to lock into a rigid linking structure and then try to fill it up with story beats and characters, but it's just not the way I work. I go back and forth, trying to make all the elements complement each other as best I can.
GS. So, what do you think will be the impact of the Psychic Detective?
MK. I think the biggest impulse people will have playing an interactive film like Psychic is to create the "perfect" play. Like Bill Murray at the end of Groundhog Day: in the right place at the right time every moment of the experience. En route to that, I hope they become intrigued by the other endings and versions they create. So that they acquire the impulse to piece together the entire backstory, or to see all 15 conclusions, or to see all the scenes with a particular character they like, or...
GS. Or back to Rubik's Cube?
Copyright Gloria Stern N Hollywood 1996
