Creative Tools for Screen Media

the computer is a medium and a tool

Albrecht Dürer, 1525 Woodcut

I have written elsewhere about Authoring Tools and Idea Drawing. This presentation makes use of these and other earlier pieces.

Chris Jennings - PageToScreen

Computer as Medium

• The outcome of all our work seems to be on screen
• The computer screen
• The TV Screen
• The little screens that we carry around
• The cinema
• What is a screen?
  • Page
  • Slide
  • Frame
  • Canvas
    
  • Window (see Scroll-on Jan 2003)
    

On a Screen Near You

The main differences are:

• size
• context
• passive or interactive
  • but is a screen a window or is a screen a page?
• Google Maps
• Google Earth
  

Tools

• Paper
  • Drawing / Sketching
    
  • Storyboards
  • Prototyping
    
  • Proposing
  • Index Cards
  • Post-it Notes
    
• Computer
  • Tools for thinking
  • Tools for drawing
  • Tools for making
    
  • Tools for Project management
    

Using Paper

I wrote this article in 2003. There are some useful links.

In art school, students have to use sketchbooks. These need to be carried around at all times, so that ideas can be sketched, wherever the person happens to be. Have you noticed that ideas come at all times!

• For film makers: do sketches of scenes, do drawings of camera angles and lighting
• For interactive authors: do structural drawing for Information Architecture
  
• For film or Interactive: do storyboards

Computer as Tool

Most software developed for a computer is a tool and computers help us get things done (see GTD) 

• Photoshop for prototypes / screens
• Flash for time-based media
• Outliner for script / storyboard
  • Inspiration Examples
    
• Mindmapping / brainstorming / diagramming
  
• Scriptwriting - Final Draft, TotallyWrite, Final Draft AV

Project Management

• Microsoft Project
• Using Excel
• Dependency Planning
• Gantt Charts
  
• Collaboration
  
  • Word can be used for Change tracking
  • PDFs can be annotated
• Budgeting, Scheduling and Time Management
  

The Web as Tool

• Collaborative writing
• Network Book (see The Institute for the Future of the Book)
  
• Collaborative Film (A Swarm of Angels)
  
• Project management (see BaseCamp)
• Wikis

Metaphors

• Timeline (see Simile Project, Google's own, US History, Islomania)
  
• Stage
• Milestones
• Keyframes
• Onion Skinning
  
• Layers
• Windows again!
• Pan and Zoom
  

Text Editing or Drag and Drop

• Tools like Dreamweaver are great but...
• Try to understand the basics of the underlying code, logic and structure
  
• Template driven
• database / dynamic 

Time-based or Time-warp?

Will passive film converge with interactive?

• Interactive Fiction (Inform)
  
• Multibranching storylines (liquid narrative)
• Computer games are branching (see Myst)
• Cinema has some examples: eg Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run
  

Communicating the Idea

Tools are not just for gettings things done but…

For showing off the idea before the idea gets built.

You need strategies to communicate the idea (possibly in a presentation) but also when you are not present