
I had the great pleasure of attending two of the three evenings in the recent 5D Flux series on Worldbuilding held at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts this week (March 13-15, 2012).
To quote the 5D philosophy, worldbuilding is a “metaphor for the design and iteration process, creating and actualizing the story space in digital narrative media. It addresses the design thinking, the process, and the experience of creating new worlds for storytelling.”
The conference opened with a fantastic talk by Tom Wujec (Fellow, Autodesk), who posed an interesting question regarding the effects of exponential technological growth on creativity. If I’d been worried about work keeping me too busy to be in touch with major advancements, his mind-blowing examples confirmed it. A LOT has been changing incredibly rapidly and we all need to ponder his astute question.
Tom also quoted that creativity is the set of skills and processes that carry us from a moment of epiphany (ah-ha!) to the end result of innovative expression. So how does technology effect and enhance our creative process? Does its exponential growth allow us to be more creative, more efficient in our creativity, or simply result in us being more overwhelmed? Probably all three. But being an optimist, I prefer to see the whole as a positive, growing trend.
To quote another panelist, Rick Carter (Production Designer: Avatar), being overwhelmed is not necessarily a bad thing. He brought to mind the image from Pinocchio, of the fairy emerging out of whiteness, out of a nothing which is everything, to create the manifestation of a wish, of a dream in tangible, conscience-driven form. As filmmakers, imagemakers, storytellers, don’t we do that every day? And doesn’t the state of being overwhelmed sometimes lead us to a blankness that contains everything, inspiring new thought, innovation, and spectacular opportunity for creativity?
The first evening in the series dealt with inception, or how ideas are born and how we spark our creativity, with a lively and philosophical conversation between panelists Rick Carter, Michael Wilkinson (Costume Designer: Man of Steel, 300), Tom Wujec, and Rick Jaffa (Screenwriter, Rise of the Planet of the Apes).
What resonated most for me was that starting from character and story, we have the opportunity to develop an elemental metaphor that expresses the story’s main theme or the main character’s journey. This metaphor or core image then becomes something that can guide the cinematic design, exploring its expression through every creative voice in the film—colour, movement, composition, space, texture, light, editorial pacing, sound, silence, dialogue, music, gesture, expression, etc. This cinematic design provides a framework for collaboration, creative play, and unified vision between the director, production designer, cinematographer, editor, writer, and other creative keys as the film evolves.
I joined fellow panelists Alex McDowell (Production Designer: Man of Steel, 300), Jim Bissell (Production Designer: E.T., Mission Impossible: Ghost-Protocol), and Tom Meyer (Production Designer: Real Steel, Fantastic Voyage) lead by skilled and well-informed moderator Henry Jenkins (Author, Professor at USC) to discuss the prototyping of ideas, generally through the use of digital, rapid-revision technologies.
Ultimately, we all agreed on several key points—that world building provides a rich and evolving source of inspiration for story and narrative, often spanning much more than the film or creative vision that initially motivated its creation, that cinematic design allows the director to guide the overall vision in service of story and final expression through collaboration with all of the creative keys within that world, and that the future of narrative story-telling based in any given well-developed world has the potential to be expressed through a wide variety of media and products, from films, to television shows, to games, to books, social media installations, and beyond.
Practically speaking, I find this all incredibly exciting, and I feel that previsualization (or visualization or prototyping) is a perfect space in which to exercise this creativity and enable it to flourish. It gives us a common ground to play in, concrete imagery to respond to, and context to work within while supporting change, organic evolution of ideas, and progressive refinement of the vision. The future of compelling and strongly unified storytelling is bright!
To read more about 5D, please visit: http://5dconference.com/
To learn more about World Building, please visit: http://5dconference.com/about
For another perspective on the 5D | Flux Worldbuilding conference on, please read Bill Desowitz’s articles:
- http://www.billdesowitz.com/?p=4797
- http://www.billdesowitz.com/?p=4830
- http://www.billdesowitz.com/?p=4819

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