 Artistic Development here at Willie Nana. If you can make out the giant charcuterie chart behind me, I'm standing on the set for Civilization All You Can Eat by Jason Grove, which is our current production. We hope that you all will come back and join us for the 8 p.m. show tonight and a co-show discussion with our artistic director and the director of the show, Howard Chalice. If you haven't already gotten your tickets, there should be a ticket discount in your packet. Before we get started, I'd like just to say a couple things. First of all, we are all so happy that you all could be here in person. We're also gonna thank our friends at the American Voices New Play Institute for live-streaming this event as well. So please be aware that it is being live-streamed, so be on your best behavior. We want to encourage you to follow on the conversation on Twitter. It's hashtag cybernair with two r's. We've had a slight change to the schedule, unfortunately, Don there, Nellie was not able to be here, but the good news is we have a third cybernarrative to share with you today in development in addition to the plays by The Knowledge and Christopher Diaz. We're also gonna be able to show you a little bit of the development for Harrison River's play with The Haunter Lowliness. So that's a great third edition. Lastly, I just wanna say that the folks that you're gonna be hearing from today began to shed some new light on digital media for us here at William and Anna at a pretty critical time. When we and some of our colleagues were invited to participate in this project, we felt like we were sort of beginning to ascend a pretty steep learning curve about digital media. We knew that it was gonna be essential for us to respond that digital media was transforming the landscape, but at the same time it sort of felt like we were going in without a map. We couldn't always predict the expectations that artists would bring to projects that involve technology. We couldn't always predict the expectations that patrons would bring in. And in some ways we felt like we were sort of doing all of this learning on our feet in a very public and exposed way because of course digital media very often affords a degree of transparency that we don't usually experience in our work here at the theater. So one of the things that I really admire about this project is that the Black Women Playwrights Group always conceived it as a public learning opportunity for the field. And that's why we've invited you all to come and start to learn a little bit about the projects that these extraordinary playwrights and students have been beginning. We're gonna talk a little bit about the questions and the challenges that we've started to encounter as we start this very new work. And we're also very, very eager to hear questions and reflections from you all about the implications of this work for the field and for possible collaborations between artists and technologists moving forward. So thank you all so much. You're a really important part of this process. Now I'd like to introduce the founder and president of the Black Women Playwrights Group, Karen Ebb. And I'm pleased to welcome all of you today to the launch of the Cyber Narrative Project. BWPG is a service and advocacy group and we've been a service and advocacy group for women writers of color for 22 years. We actually ironically got our start at Marina's age in 1989 at a symposium for African-American women playwrights. We've been serving the Washington DC community for most of those 22 years, but as you know, somewhere along there in those 22 years, the internet was born. And we realized we could actually be a national group and a local group because the internet was this marvelous thing that linked playwrights and dramaters and theaters and everybody else together without the usual boundaries of is it a local phone call or is it a long distance phone call? So we began to think about how do we become a national organization? Our first national project was in 2008 and in Chicago, we gathered 100 women writers of color from across the country. We asked them, what do you need to have a better career and to make your professional career as a playwright work more for you to work more for your plays to be more produced to reach more audiences. And they listed three things. They needed more access to university productions and residencies because every playwright is looking for a home somewhere to rest for a minute to get that first draft of that next play. And that's often what a university residency can do for you. The second thing that they needed was more information about the world of presenters. The world of presenters is very, very complicated and the world of presenters for women writers of color is particularly important because women writers of color tend to write one-woman shows and they often will perform them themselves. So having a way to take that one-woman show and launch it out into the world was very important and that's why the world of presenters is ultimately very important to my membership. The third thing that they were sort of vaguely, like a twinkle in the eye talking about was digital media. What's going on online? Can this help us reach more people? And the answer absolutely wasn't there but we decided we're going to ask the question. We're gonna forge ahead and begin to ask how can digital media help us widen the audience for theater and of course still let theater be theater? So in April 2010, we held the second smaller conference in Chicago, linking platforms, theater and digital media and at that conference we bought together playwrights. We bought together theaters and lucky for us we also bought together bought in Don Maranelli of ETC and we spent two exciting days talking about the possibilities and BWPG put those possibilities into a basket and came up with a design for this project. The first part of the project involved the central idea of starting with the art. Since we are playwrights, we thought how can we create a project that's artist centered? What was the most exciting thing to us was the idea of playwrights returning to the center of their plays, that impulse, that pulse, that made their hearts beat fast and made them sit down and write that play. And next we thought about theaters. And the theaters we went to first were the theaters who had an amazing reputation of being at the vanguard of supporting new playwrights and supporting new plays. So we reached out and we were welcomed by about face theater, intersection for the arts, penumbra theater, the movement theater, Dallas Theater Center, Victory Gardens, Gaffrey Playhouse, the Goodman Theater and Willie Mammoth Theater. We asked the theaters to do two things. First, find a partner within that group who doesn't live near you. So we could produce the same play twice and therefore gather information about how audiences in different parts of the country would react to online content written by playwrights who had a play being produced in their season. Second, after they found a partner, they had to choose a play that they both wanted to produce by a playwright that they felt had the creativity and the skill to write the additional online content. And as those of us who have dated know, finding the right partner and making it work can be really daunting. And after many discussions among the theaters about what comes first, it's not the chicken or the egg, but in our case it was the partner or the play. After lots of talking over summer of last year, they came up with these four or five playwrights and it was really an amazing learning process which is the most exciting thing, as Miriam said, at every step we have learned. We have learned, they have learned, oh, I've learned too, who we are artistically, what matters to us and who's my kindred spirit. And I'd like to take a moment to especially thank Howard Schellwoods and Miriam Weisfeld for providing fearless leadership process and again, welcoming us here too early. So here we are today and these are the playwrights that we are going to welcome today. We're going to welcome Christopher Diaz, Lynn Nottage and Harrison Rivers today to talk about their projects in process. And we're also delighted that playwrights, Christina Anderson and Chinaka Hodge will have projects in the 13, 14 season. The second part of our cybernetic project is 12 Tweets at 12 New. And that is a Twitter series that you can receive on your phones or your desktops, which at noon, three days a week, you will receive a complete scene in 12 lines. Let me tell you, it's really challenging and very intense to really get to the matter within 12 lines. So we'll be launching that series in April and you'll see in your program our Twitter name and please follow us and then you will receive 12 Tweets at 12 New. This is a research and development project and we're focused on building models. This model came together, we think that there are other models. We think that what this particular model that came together, which was theaters who loved playwrights and educational institution that loved drama and computer science, we think that this may be one model, but because this is a research and development project, we think there are lots of models out there and what we want to do is, Miriam said, is ask questions because we're all trying to take the magic that happens in a darkened room that we call theater and figure out how to share it. So we're here today to ask questions. So thank you for coming and helping us ask these questions and frame the discussion of what theater can look like in the 21st century. Thank you. I'd like to now introduce Chris Toome from Carnegie Mellon ETC Global. Chris has an extraordinary career in theater as a designer and as a writer as well and for so many, many years in writing game designs and many, many honors for his game design and his writing. And he has been, ETC really has sort of been a great organization and a great educational institution to find because they, my favorite thing I've learned recently is the Venn diagram and the two circles and that space in between, well ETC lives in that space in between where the world of theater and the world of technology blend, so. Chris. Okay, probably been 30 years when I stood at the downstate senate, so this is kind of an interesting experience for me. The history of the ETC is really a working example of the way we educate our students every day. The idea for the center came out of the mid 90s when the Carnegie Mellon Drama Department alums were encouraging the drama department to broaden their educational vision. Work was being done in the digital domains in film especially at that time and the nowhere at Carnegie Mellon where the art department's yet ready to embrace this idea, the storytelling was gonna be revolutionized over the next 10, 15 years to bring us to where we are today. Don Maranelli was associate dean of the drama department at the time. He had known a colleague in the computer science department, the late Randy Poush and they conceived of this idea to try to, as the tagline goes to the program, bring the left brain and the right brain together in a single program. Part of the inciting incident for that was the computer science department actually had reached out to drama to help them with an interactive question and answer virtual interview with, I think it was Albert Einstein at the time, they had written artificial intelligence to choose Albert Einstein's answers to the questions and they were allowing guests to come up and type text into the computer and ask him essentially anything and the AI would match the question to the library of potential answers. And they realized that the way they had put the project together, Einstein was sort of wooden and they knew they needed a little juice from the drama department to bring the character alive. So they called over, Don walked across campus and that really began a collaboration. As Don began to work with the computer science department, he realized that they had more in common than they really had differences and especially with this edict coming from Los Angeles that the drama department needed to figure out a way to get its students into the mainstream of the technology world. Don and Randy conceived this plan to create a graduate program in which they would intentionally mix artists and technologists on sort of a 50-50 ratio to begin to open up the possibilities for when the two sides communicate. Don and Randy toured Walt Disney, they toured Pixar and they asked companies that were embracing the technological revolution in an artistic way what they most wanted graduates from this program to be able to do upon graduation and the answer came back to collaborate and communicate. That if you could get the technologists and the artists to work together and understand each other's vocabulary, you had chances for great things to happen. And so we created, well, Randy and Don created a program that's still even to this day sort of unique and that's partly facilitated by the deal with the devil that Don made with the university which was to leave the ETC alone. Anyone who's ever worked in academia knows that there's this labyrinth of deans and reporting structures and agendas that sometimes even in the best universities can be monolithic in their inertia, right? And so Don made this deal where he said, we'll make it on our own, we'll sink or swim on our own as long as we don't have to answer to either the drama department or the computer science department but we forge and create our own new center. And the D, the provost was like, sure, if it doesn't cost me any money, what the heck? And so that was, it turned out to be that decision made possibly, I wasn't a rat at the time, out of necessity is really what facilitates our process because we could invent ourselves whole claw and I was still working in the video game industry at the time but once I got into academia and I talked to colleagues struggling with the same issues that the ETC struggles with, I began to understand the wisdom of that because if the college has a computer science department and the computer science department wants to start an interactive media division, well they're gonna look at the problem like a computer scientist would look at it and their entire curriculum is gonna be driven by the needs of the computer science department. Even though they might invite artists to join them, it's gonna be a computer science tinged idea. Same thing with the fine art department, right? The same thing will happen on the other side of the fence but because Randy and Don could make decisions out of the good of the program itself not worrying about anybody else's vested interest, we have a curriculum that seems very odd when you look at it. The first year students mixed together Randy's famous class building virtual worlds with improvisational acting, with an introduction to film and storytelling along with like a fundamentals of ETC course where they're taught how to do things like give presentations in public and looking at it from the outside in when you sort of look at those courses some people have remarked where is the meat in that process, right? Well all of the courses are really kind of headaches to teach the students to collaborate, iterate quickly and communicate with each other and that's what the students learn over their two years. Because of Don's love and passion for theater he had been in the drama department of CMU for oh Lord 20 plus years. The department has a heavy change of drama in it. There's Don, Brenda Harbour who teaches improvisational acting and me interestingly enough when Don met me he sort of exclaimed that I was in some ways the poster child for the ETC because even before Don got to CMU I had gone through the drama department. I was a work and set lighting and costume designer in New York for a number of years and I had resisted the pull of going to Los Angeles like many of my classmates, John Wells and Holly Hunter among them and I stayed in New York and did theater because I love theater, I still love theater to this day and when I made the transition which is a longer story than you have time for into the game industry I realized that the theater aesthetic informed every decision I made on a daily basis when I designed games. It seems sort of odd if you look at it again from the outside but those inside the industry understand exactly what I mean and so a career in video games developed out of that career change Don met me and I was standing in front of him when he visited my game studio saying you're a drama guy who works in video games that's exactly what we're about. The students at the ETC end up in three main areas they end up in the gaming industry they end up in feature films driven by animation computer animation and they end up in places like Disney where theme parks today are so technologically driven that you can't really build a new ride without computers sitting behind the scene sort of making all the decisions and driving all the technology and so what you end up with is this interesting fascinating hybrid of the arts and the sciences sort of in one place worked on collaboratively by the students every day of the year. It's an exhilarating place to work made more so by the amazingly wonderful students that come our way and you know as the video game industry and the animation industry has grown we have an alumni base working in the industry that's pretty astounding. There's rarely a major film release in the animated space or a video game that's a hit but doesn't have one of our alums working on it in some capacity so we feel I think justifiably proud of the fact that the students come out of our program having learned this art of collaboration. So when Karen and Don met at that conference this is kind of like a softball of Don's alley because to be able to bring a little of what he's learned about the way interactive narrative and the internet works and hopefully get the drama and theater world to embrace this new environment rather than being sort of a little skeptical and maybe a little afraid of it it really answers that call that he was given in the mid 90s by the CMU alumni network in LA to get the drama people more involved in this space because it really is the future. So the project for us was a welcome opportunity to really bring to bear everything we stand for and it's been for me personally a great experience to work with the playwrights and to be involved from the ground up which Karen was so generous inviting me over the summer she talked about where we sort of worked through a lot of these ideas I did some workshops and we had a really great time doing it. So that's sort of the summary of how the ETC got involved. Next up here is one of the playwrights and let me just mention before we move on that one of the real joys of this experience for myself and there's a dramaturg students from the drama department that you'll meet later who's here with us was this collaboration with the playwrights and how giving and generous they were with their precious babies and allowed us to sort of play in their backyard with them with these works. So I really wanted to just give a shout out to the playwrights for being really a wonderful part of this process for us. The first playwright we're gonna talk to is Christopher Diaz. Chris, come on up. I think a teacher is that you always feel unprepared for class. These are my notes. But the reason why I'm sort of stammering a little bit is that I was gonna say something and then I saw this and I sort of struck by it because role-playing epic stories, vivid characters this leads directly into the play that I wrote which is about professional wrestling and this is how I spent probably the first 16 to 17 years of my life before girls entered the picture watching professional wrestling and thinking about following the vivid characters and epic stories and then role-playing and playing wrestling. What I used to do all the time with my best friend Evan Hoisman who lived in the building, my apartment building is we had wrestling action figures and we just sort of played with them constantly. We created stories and we wrote down in our notebook who was fighting who and all that kind of stuff and I had been watching wrestling at that point for, I don't know, since just before the first WrestleMania I would ask how many of you are wrestling fans but almost nobody admits to it and I do play TV folks. I know there's wrestling fans watching on the TV. You play TV. So I've been watching since the first WrestleMania since a little bit before the first WrestleMania and at the same which is 1985, so how old is your, how old are you? 1985, 1985. And while I had also been a big wrestling fan my dad would take me to Madison Square Garden or the Westchester County Center to go see wrestling and on other weekends my mom would bring me into Manhattan and we'd go to see theater. We'd go to see all kinds of different stuff. As I got older I started to see more theater, a little bit less wrestling live but I watched two of them together and the reason that I mentioned them both is that growing up that way, growing up a sports fan and a wrestling fan and a theater fan, high and low culture distinctions did not mean a whole lot to me from a very early age. They felt all sort of like the same thing. Storytelling. And again, ideally, that's it, right? So for me it was already a pretty blurry line. The other thing that factored into it which I didn't realize until I was just sitting here and sort of obvious is that I played hours and hours of Mario Brothers. My mom bought me a Legend of Zelda and then I almost never got to play it because she was always in my room playing it. That's true. And then I played a bunch of video games and some of those video games that I played were wrestling games including pro wrestling for the NES system which we've talked about a little bit. I'll tell you more about that later on. So anyway, so I did all this stuff that was always about brightness and loudness and colorfulness but at its heart you were always looking for a story that was being told in wrestling just like in all professional sports. In any sport there's person, usually two people but you're usually following one person who wants something very badly and goes through a process of going ahead and try to get it. And then I would go see a play and it was the exact same thing and it sort of didn't really separate in my mind the way that I would understand that it separated other people's minds later on. I went through the whole process of becoming a graduate student and learning how to write plays and pretending that I like Shakespeare. And all that kind of stuff that you're supposed to do when you're learning about high culture and it's not good having the students out there in the lab. Oh, good. But you go through all that and you start to think I'm gonna write these great plays about big ideal, big topics and things that you know in large topics like that. Over time I realized that the thing that I knew better than anything else in my life and probably better than most people in the world with professional wrestling. And I realized while I was doing, while I was starting to think about maybe writing about that was that there were a lot of similarities between my understanding of the world of professional wrestling and my understanding of the world of professional theater and my understanding of the world of the politics, political situation particularly in the United States. They seemed disparate but to me again these boundaries and distinctions were not drawn very clearly. So I decided to start writing play about big, dumb, silly entertainment that is professional wrestling but finding the sort of deeper ideas that would satisfy the high culture, quote unquote high culture part of my brain. So I wrote this play called The Elaborant Entrance of Chad deity. I was produced in Chicago and produced a couple of times. From then on that's not the point of the story and the point of the story is that about a year ago you had the great opportunity to talk to Miriam and Howard and everybody here at Wally about the possibility of doing the show here. And I'm not supposed to say the word too. We're thinking about doing that. It's under consideration. And also under consideration at Dallas Theater Center right here. So at this point a couple of theaters were thinking about potentially doing the show and Miriam contacted me about this incredible project that was going on and thought that the play might be a good fit for it. Me as somebody who's always on Twitter playing video games, whatever might be a fit for this kind of cyber narrative project. I was like totally, I'm in. Dallas seemed like a natural partner at that point. So the theater that is more technologically advanced. Theater space is more technologically advanced than just about anybody. And the possibilities of bringing things together were sort of amazing and sort of remarkable. So fast forward trying to figure out what the heck we're gonna do for a cyber narrative or a cyber component, an online component that would work with the play. And my mind first goes to the play itself. And if folks know the play or I'll tell you about the play, there's a huge video component. And again it goes to professional wrestling. There's always this big video screens and there's always a lot of stuff and flash that goes into production of this play. And so we tried to figure out a way is that that could be integrated into this process. And we realized pretty quickly that there are too many variables in that equation to create something that could move from production to production. You can't create a chat DAD video entrance package that can move from production to production because it's always gonna be played by a different actor. It's always gonna be different designers or different directorial take. So we had to sort of scrap the idea we had thought about putting together sort of a virtual toolkit that any theater who was gonna produce the play could have access to to create sort of a unified sound and style and feel to their production. That felt, we decided against that for a bunch of different reasons. And then we came to the idea of the problem that always seems to exist is that you're going into a theater, a high, you know, a high brow kind of location and you're trying to get people to understand yes, the topic is professional wrestling, yes, that's kind of silly, but it's not necessarily just a silly play. There are themes, there are ideas, there's all that kind of good stuff going on. So in talking to Miriam, talking to me, we talked a lot about how do you prepare an audience to come see the show, particularly an audience that isn't professional wrestling fans or professional wrestling staff. So we decided to come up with a game of some sort. And at first, again, the idea, the first idea that pops into your mind is to create a wrestling game. Wrestling games tend to all look the same and you tend to run into the same problem with the wrestling game. How do you represent the main characters of your play when they're always gonna change and be different? Also, how do you get across the sort of themes that are going into play? How do you prepare an audience for what they're going to come see through playing a game where they play a character and wrestle and throw somebody else around, particularly when you're dealing with audiences that may not be interested in playing a game at all, to begin with. My mind, my mind, of course, went to WWE, SmackDown versus Raw and how do you create the same kind of experience so that people who like video games will then wanna play theater. The A, constraints of time, that seemed like a little bit of a crazy idea, and B, it didn't seem to speak to the real issue here. And so what we decided to come up with was a way to prepare an audience, especially non-gamers and non-wrestling fans, to come in and understand the play that they were gonna see. So we wanted to talk about the themes in the play and there's a bunch of different themes in this play. It's about race and ethnicity and capitalism and consumerism, but in talking, particularly talking to Miriam, we realized that what we wanted an audience to know before they came in was that there was this fundamental idea behind if there's a winner particularly in the United States but if there's a winner anywhere, there's a loser involved. And oftentimes for there to be a really great narrative and you have a really strong winner, you need to have an equally strong, if not more compelling loser. And that's really sort of at the core of this play. To backtrack a bit, just talk about what the play is about, it's a play that you're gonna hear a monologue later on from a character called Mace, who's what's known as a jobber, who's a guy who loses to the big stars. Everybody thinks that he's the worst at everything but he's actually the most talented guy in the ring because his job is to make the other guys look good. So we wanted to really focus on telling that story and getting that theme across. So we decided to come up with sort of a puzzle platformy kind of game. I'm gonna throw a lot of terms, I would throw a lot of terms out there that these guys know way better than I do but instead of a wrestling game where you're fighting more of a game where you're trying to solve some sort of problem and you're doing it by utilizing this idea of a loser putting himself into position to make it look as if the winner is doing all of the work. So I think these guys will talk about that a little bit more but basically the idea again, going back to the Super Mario sort of video game, what would, if folks have played Super Mario and you basically start a Super Mario on the side of the screen and you had to get across to this side of the screen. What if you think that you're playing a Super Mario but in fact you're actually playing as Bowser and you have to move this way instead. It's a super oversimplification. But the idea of either the bad guy or the prize that's happening at one end moving towards the hero instead of vice versa. And so in talks, Chris mentioned the dramaturgist student before but I want to shout her out specifically. Dana Shaw was sitting up here in the front. We talked a lot about how do you get to this conclusion? How do you get these ideas across? What kind of look and format and field do you want to come across with at the end of that process? Chris and Dana and I were able to sort of create, or I would feedback from Chris and Dana was able to sort of create this large, overly large 20 level video game experience where the game mechanics changed between third level and the fourth level and there's 18 different kinds of game mechanics happening in the final level until Brad told me that I couldn't do that. And then we started shaking it out together. Now in the last couple of weeks we've been able to get online in a Google plus hangout session where I'm used to feeling like the youngest person in the room in the theater conversation and I feel 20 years older than the students. And significantly less knowledgeable about what we're doing. But we're starting to narrow it down. I think these guys will be showing this later but the animations have been created. There's a little Chadidi character and a little Mace character who's sort of involved in the mix and the game sort of starting to take hold in a much more manageable form and I think what we're going to do with that, again I don't know how much these guys are going to say about this, but I think what we're going to do about that is take it to both of the theaters who are considering doing this play, take it out particularly to their student groups that they work with, younger folks that they work with but also finding ways to make it available just to general patrons, subscribers, folks who are otherwise connected to the theater and start to mess around with what has turned into a pretty simple to follow game and start to get a little bit of a hang of what we're doing, what they're going to see when they come in and see it on stage. So I think that that's a little bit of what we're talking about here. I'm going to stop talking and I'm going to let somebody else come up and talk. J.D. Perez is coming to the stage. He's going to read a flipping series of monologues from the beginning of the play, and I'm going to give him some chat to you. Thanks. So every time I'm about to get in the ring, I think back to 1986. I'm six years old, my younger brother's five, my older brother's eight, we're sitting on cold hardwood floors on Kruger Avenue in the Bronx on Saturday mornings eating frosted flakes that are really just generic flakes of corn, generic spoons of sugar sprinkled on top with a little drop of milk to give the impression that shit is going to get soggy like you're rounding at our poor Puerto Rican asses from the front of that box. But still, we ate it and we drank a quarter of water right along with it. No soda in our house. I'm healthy. So it's 11am, Saturday morning on the roofs, fake flakes, my brother clothes lining my brother and my brother setting up my brother to try to body slam him, and that's when my grandpa would walk in already dressed, always dressed, so he's looking down his nose and my brother and my brother and they stop in a second and he doesn't have to say nothing because the body slamming ain't going to happen when he's in the room. And a cup of coffee, the TV, and he looks at me and he laughs and he says it takes most people a long time to know what they love in life, grandson. But I think you already know. So I got a job doing exactly what I love. I am one of the wrestlers. I'm one of the really fucking good the wrestlers. And that means unlike other jobs when you get really good you become a boss or a star or you get paid more. In wrestling, being really fucking good like really fucking better than like how good you think I'm going to be from me telling you that I'm really fucking good. When you get really good at the wrestling part of the wrestling business, you're not rewarded. You're unrewarded, de-rewarded. Dewarded? Being really good at the wrestling part of the wrestling business means you make the other guy in the ring with you look better than he is. So you get in the ring with some guy who sucks and he looks like he's kicking your ass. The audience wants to see guys who kick guys asses so then that guy gets the applause and that guy gets the credit. Then the boss loves the job he did making that guy look like he didn't suck so then you get to make the next guy who sucks look like he doesn't suck because the more guys who don't suck, the better for the wrestling because guys who don't suck sell t-shirts. Is that while you're getting your ass kicked by guys who only look like they don't suck because you're the one making them look like they don't suck the audience starts to think Guess what? You're the one who sucks. So then and let's drop the metaphor here because I'm not really talking about you but thank you for playing along. So then I go to the bottom of the minds of the boss because I'm losing so much and as bad as I want to walk into his corporate office and remind him that wrestling it's sporting event and that I am losing because he's writing the scripts that tell me to lose and as bad as I want to tell my boss that because it's actually a good job a dream job, an underroof and bootleg frosted flakes on the floor day dream job and I'm happy to lose and I'm happy for the audience to tell me that I suck because when I wake up in the mornings I don't even need an alarm clock and I don't mind that my knees hurt and my hands hurt and my everything's hurt I don't mind because I'm going to be wrestling and I'm in love with who I am. They spend the rest of their two year program is a project can come from three sources one is a client the project is a client is Karen and her organization another way that a project can happen is the students themselves can come up with an idea and the third way which almost never happens is how the faculty can come up with an idea and the faculty can do that. The idea here is that these projects this is a relatively large size team, consist of the exact mix that we've espoused in our philosophy artists and engineers working together to create some sort of artifact. Most projects take one semester so they're 14 weeks the students all take usually one elected while they're taking the project so 80% of their work day is spent working on a project. One of the unique things about our projects is that they aren't really classes in the traditional sense I'm the advisor of this project, Brenda Harger who teaches improv is the other advisor and our job mainly is to make sure that the students stay on course they manage themselves on a day-to-day basis they communicate out status they handle the relationships with in this case the playwrights they schedule themselves they portion out the tasks for the project and they have managers within their student group. The idea is to give them a case they never had it about what building a software project is like in the real world 14 weeks in the software world is an instant most software projects take much, much longer than that but the idea is that in those 14 weeks they'll go through a typical software development process where they will come up with an idea they'll early prototype the idea they'll hone the prototype they'll test it with users and they'll deliver the artifact at the end of the semester and through that process they learn how to make it happen how to schedule themselves how to not leave everything for the end of the semester and crunch to get it done and all those things that they really need to know before they get out in the real world. Another important thing is that they learn how to typically the advisors in most projects stay out of the picture we only interject ourselves if for some reason the client is having a hard time articulating maybe what they want typically that often happens with big corporations because behind the couple of representatives that the students are interacting with is many people that those two or three representatives report to and it's often hard to navigate that political space so the message gets watered down by the time the students get to it but typically only if communication is an issue or the students or the client is frustrated do we step in and act in more or less a parent role we try to avoid that totally because really it's important for the students to do things to learn by them this partly comes out of both the software engineering school at CMU as well as the drama department drama department is pretty typical right people built sets they they act in plays because unless you do that you don't really learn anything well it's the same sort of paradigm here at the ETC the this student team has two of what we call producers in the software engineering world producer is more or less a project manager and what I'd like to do is hand it over to the two producers on the team who will introduce the students Brad Cannon and Josephine stand up introduce yourself well Brad and Josephine but if you could talk a little bit about what a producer does and if you could just give us a snippet of what your background was before you came to the ETC and that sort of goes for everybody so that everyone can understand the broad base of the people that we bring to the ETC and you can introduce yourself I'm Brad Buchanan I'm the lead producer on the project this semester my background is computer science but I'm coming in with an opportunity to try and learn how to use my communication skills and to guide a team to produce this on time and high quality so I'm Josephine so I'm the creative producer so what that means I work mostly with the creative team that we have here which I'll introduce in just a minute so my background before coming into the engineering technology center I was in online advertising so a lot of my experience if you guys want to check it out and so I guess if you want to right here is Evan he's one of our artists so Hi everybody I'm Evan Brown before coming to the ETC I was actually a mechanical engineer I changed careers very quickly into computer graphics got a degree in Pittsburgh and then I joined the ETC to help out with making projects I specialize in illustrations but also 3DR as well and I love it every minute but I'm Dana Shaw I am actually not a part of the ETC but I've been working closely with them I am a drama chart from the school drama and so I have been doing that for the past 4 years now and yeah, you all know what a drama chart does Thank you So as you'll see we have 3 artists and as a typical artist I'm very bad at math but there's 6 of us on the team and half of us are artists Hi my name is Raya Brown right no relation to Evan my background is in traditional animation and you could say I was a professional comic book seller for a very long time before I came to the ETC and learning to work with very left brain people so much in my right brain that I was very proud and happy to be a part of this pursuit Next to Raya we have Lee who's one of our technologists Hi everyone, my name is Lee and my background is software engineer working in ETC and I'm very interested in computer graphics and ETC was focusing on making video games so Last but not least we have Emmanuel who is also a technologist and a writer My undergrad is in English and Drama and I was hoping to well write but I always worked as a programmer and here I get to do hopefully both Actually the first day we get to the ETC something Don Marinelli tells us his look around you at each other everyone here always does something and something else and I'm very excited for that stuff The first project we're going to talk about is Chris's project on the elaborate entrance of chat beauty we're really thrilled about this project and as Chris said it's an online action puzzle game that is supposed to introduce the online audience to the world of chat beauty and while it's introducing them to the world of chat beauty it's managing to convey some of the same themes that the play is we've called our project beyond the stage because our goal is to take live theater experiences find the heart of those experiences and convey them online outside of the theater hopefully with the goal that we will eventually bring it full circle and build an appreciation for live theater and audiences that haven't been reached yet In the case of Chris's play in particular we are absolutely thrilled to be working with Chris I in particular have really enjoyed this so far because as somebody at the ETC as somebody with computer science background I've come in and been studying game design and trying to learn about how meeting shows up in games how you express things through interactive media and to me it feels like a really hard problem and it's something that felt risky to say you know let's bring in the playwrights and have them design our game because I thought this is what we've been training for but Chris came to us and he had this document of a design for an online game that would be this Chad V.A.D. experience and on the first read through I was just astounded it did everything I had been studying it explains the meaning behind Chad V.A.D. through the actions of the player and the actions of the audience and I thought that's so hard how does this work but then after a little reflection I thought that makes perfect sense you understand how actions create meaning that's something that's been hard for me to ask but here it's natural it's what you do and so the opportunity for me to learn that directly from people who work and live in the theater has been so valuable there are several gameplay influences for the game that we're creating Chris brought some of these to us and some of them we brought to the table as well after we heard what his vision was a lot of these are online flash games that exist already they're small compact experiences that create just a bite of meaning with a hand over to the audience some of these we can talk about are there's the one and one story which is a short experience in which you control two characters at the same time and the story is all about reuniting those characters but the way in which you do it creates the story of their romance and their relationship another is this Karoshi Suicide salaryman game which sounds a little bit crazy and it is a little bit crazy but one of the things that the game does really well is it produces a set of rules that the audience is supposed to understand and then it repeatedly breaks those rules level after level to try and keep the audience on their toes that does two things, the first thing that it does is it causes the audience to stop and think and if you're going to convey meaning to an audience in a game it's important to make them stop and think because if they're just going non-stop there's no opportunity for them to process the meaning that you're trying to create is that it causes them to think laterally and realize that maybe the rules aren't really what they thought they are and one of the themes that we found in the elaborate entrance of Chad Beauty was this message about the world of pro wrestling that sometimes can be applied to the real world as well where in pro wrestling there are these rules that are understood like you don't climb out of the ring but they break them over and over because it's what puts on a good show and if we can do the same thing in gameplay that's important Next, Evan Brown is going to tell us about the ascetic who chose him So, you guys got to hear from Chris Diaz and if you didn't notice he kind of geeked out about old school games because so I latched on to that and luckily he chose this kind of thing to use as an example because just like in all artistic communities there are movements and right now in gaming there is the indie movement towards 8-bit, 16-bit also known as retro gaming so what's happened is a lot of us as gamers are getting older and we're starting to get nostalgic about games we want to play the games that we used to play at home so when I got to talk with Chris we started to look at old games and how can we make this idea, this chat deity character and his companion and how can we make these to live in a world that feels like the old school game and so here is a concept art board these are things that we have to prepare for our clients so that they can get an idea of what we're thinking because the hardest part as an artist is matching the client's vision with our own and making sure that the game is what they want so this is a sample concept art board which is all different things sprite demonstrations what would these characters look like today high res vectors or what would they look like say in the NES version when they have limited color palettes limited pixel sizes that kind of thing and I know this is all very technical but it does come down to the visual quality of the game and if you really want these old WWE games from the NES era to come through then we have to try to stay true to the faux hardware limitations behind it it also helped us solve a lot of problems that Chris mentioned earlier so chat deity is a production that's going to be represented by different actors I don't know can you guys identify these sprites do you see the faces not really it helps us keep the characters though they're identifiable they're also a little how would you say impersonal you can project a face on these little sprites and make it your own so when you do go see the production which we hope you do you'll be able to recognize them immediately not by the features also here just little animation sprites that kind of thing and to talk more about the technology behind getting all this art into the hands of users, Emmanuel hello one of the first things we thought of was flash Chris suggested flash but flash has its downsides I love open source and flash is not open and also flash doesn't work on mobile devices so we looked at what was available and we decided on the impact engine and maybe get a little technical here HTML5 and JavaScript it works on pretty much every modern browser without anything else you just open the web page and you can play the game that includes Windows, Mac, Linux Android, iOS and impact also comes with a level editor that means that maybe in some distant future if all this gets very popular it'll be relatively easy to add them and so so far we have a lot of the impact engine what Chris was talking to us about with these different levels was a way to establish the arc of chat deity in terms of figuring out a way to convey the theme so we are looking at starting with a level that basically shows chat deity doing what he does best power bombing so he pretty much will be able to go up to Mace and power bomb him easy, simple you can understand what the basic ten of the game is through that which is where you realize that chat deity can't do much else chat deity can only pretty much power bomb so we need to actually move Mace we need to move Mace to chat deity so that chat deity can power bomb him so now it's a new understanding of what the game is level three introduces objects so that we can figure out how Mace can move objects so that chat deity can power bomb him now that we've established the rules of the game we go to level four and level five which are cheating essentially we are breaking the rules of the game so in level four Mace will move outside of the game Mace will move outside of the screen that we have developed and do something else that he has to do in order to get chat deity to be power bomb so it's setting up so basically it's setting up a premise and then breaking it which you know is a big part of what the actual play is about it's setting up the premise of this is what wrestling is so after that we have the handicap match and fighting through the fans and these are basically just going through the same idea of now the players kind of don't trust us they don't trust the rules that we have set down so they are looking for ways to break out through that they are looking for ways to explore the space that we've given them in ways that we haven't told them about so obviously the end result is going to be the same if you play it right Mace gets power bomb but how you get there changes and how you get there changes entirely on the job it depends on the moves that Mace does to make chat deity be able to power bomb so we've also talked about the possibility of unlocking features after seeing the live show whether that means that we give people a code after the performance so that they can unlock something that allows them to see a little bit more into what Mace does whether that means it goes to a blog or whether that means that now the focus of the game is not on the power bombing Mace whether it's about Mace doing something and Mace so we are still trying to figure out exactly what that would be but it would be something for after you've seen the production after you understand the flow of the story and how the game completely connects to the performance so it's a way of saying here is a little something extra for you to understand the character end of the game so now I'm going to go into a little bit about our behind the scenes our process of how we come up with these concepts and how we work with them so one of the guiding principles that we always follow is to launch and iterate because we can research all day long that process can take very very long it can take us the entire semester just to research but what we really want to do is rapidly prototype and get the product out there and do that as we can before we sort of launch it completely so the way I like to think about it is sort of creating a treatment or an outline first and then getting as many people to read it especially the people that are trying to reach so even before we talked to Chris we took all the research that we had and we came up with first we talked internally this is fun are these characters in line with what we think this is going to be and then in that process we come up with a second iteration and a third iteration and even more formally we will have testing groups so our first alpha testing internally is completed for the end of this month then we will have one again in March and then again in April and then at that point we sort of get all the final feedback and then pass it along so I think next slide so in terms of deployment strategy I know we talked a little bit about the technological decisions that we made and the main reason is that the reason we talked about HTML5 why we chose something that was accessible is that hopefully we can package this and then hand it off to the theaters or release potentially something like the App Store or release it onto the internet so that people can actually find us on their own and I think that's a really important thing because the discovery for this game you know what while we want to package it for the people who are actually coming to see the play we also want people to be able to discover it on their own and I think that's all I have for this portion I believe we have a coffee and we've got any questions that these folks just described please yeah, Bill this question I know what it dropped very good son is seven years old and he's a serious gamer so it's been interesting watching him and seeing that there is kind of a story especially like he loves Mario stuff and it's basically a girl gets kidnapped and you jump over and do stuff and you get her back do you did you do any sort of survey of video games that gave you a sense of what the customary storytelling techniques or storytelling style that might exist in some of these retro games that you were able to incorporate in this sort of hybrid of an actual play writing a play and about writing a play that sort of sits in this environment well, I played one I was wondering you know I've had a big great game boy that I played the same Mario I don't really think the Mario games have changed that much they're pretty much the same basic like get from here to here try to rescue princess, fail princess is in another castle so then you keep going but um we were not we were looking at what those games would do like at the basic principles for those games and how there is a basic idea that all of those games follow where you know there's generally pretty simple objectives and the objectives that we've put out as well are pretty simple like Mace gets Power Bomb but the difference is how you get there like in some of the Mario games you might have to go down one of the tunnels and you know go into an underwater world and swim, when did that happen and you wind up having to face all of these different challenges that makes each level different and we were trying to figure out a way to do that while conveying theme and so I think that that was a challenge that Chris and I talked about a lot because we you know we wanted to be able to say this is what Chai deity is about while also giving a really fun game so the fact that we looked at these different levels and said how can we convey theme through this and I mean the theme that we decided to work with was what is a hero what is a villain how can you deconstruct those roles and make it something so that you wind up playing the villain that's something now a lot of the old school games really did so like I said if you all of a sudden in one of the games had to play Bowser like if Mario for some reason was trapped and you have to get Bowser to him so that Mario can defeat Bowser like that's what we were going for so we're kind of turning some of those things on their head how many minutes will the game be and is 14 weeks long enough to design such a game so the exact length of the game varies a little bit depending on how the player goes through it but I would say it's approximately 10 minutes that's my guess right now 14 weeks is a tight schedule for that kind of development process but we've designed in such a way to keep it within parameters that we can finish that within 14 weeks we're very confident that it will get done I had no question how many days we're working 24 hours okay they are graduate students any other questions? does the game point people back to either the history of the production of the play or the upcoming productions how do those link together we will have some links to the history of the production of the play I think that the play probably will have another home somewhere on the web that we can point to information about it chances are that information will be available both on the first screen people see when they load up the game or when they finish it they'll get reminded by the way this is about a live theater production that you should really go see we've talked a little bit about ways that we can have it point them to upcoming productions of the play but that's a technical challenge that might be outside of our scope this semester we're going to talk down the road about that this is a question that you guys maybe prefer too I'm actually really curious about that I don't know if you have any stories or anecdotes you can share about the decision to make the game for the people who have seen the show or have their tickets as opposed to a whole different audience group which are the people that you want to get to see the show and sort of how you came to that decision how does your finding the development process to make sure you're sticking to the story of the user being the person that's attending the production as opposed to considering attending the production there would only be one level or one thing that would be available to the people who are who have already attended just kind of as a yay you attended here's something extra because you know we want to further the understanding of the play after they've seen it beforehand I mean it's going to be open to anyone with an internet connection it's going to be hopefully we're going to put it on as many sites as we can probably like congregate which is a lot it just has a lot of these games and we have no way of knowing if it's going to go viral which means that millions of people could see this game and play it and then be pointed back to Chad Deity the productions or at least at the very least Chris's website which can say the productions Do you want to talk a little more about that? Yeah I think I think the hope would be that it gets it's open to as many I mean it's open to everybody no matter what the idea would be that it would get in front of as many people who are just into games as much as possible I think the parameters are really specific and really small we have this short window of time we can create six levels so we're sort of creating a smaller game that maybe it's a full and complete experience but maybe it's not like the hardcore fans who play games we're looking for 20 hours of gameplay or whatever whatever it is online are not necessarily going to dive into that I've been playing the same game on congregate but I don't think we have that I don't think we're able to create that same sort of length and I know that talking to the two theaters that we're specifically working with my question to them immediately was what are the things that we can do to help the audiences that we know are already coming in so I think it's mostly about a scope question for me the idea becomes because my mind sort of goes everywhere my idea when we start thinking about this is well we can make it huge and we have the level editor we can make it gigantic and we can make an app and we can sell that and you don't even need to know and ideally it would be like like Brandon was saying you can pick it up in the app store play it for 10 hours get to the end and say oh this is a marketing thing this is connected to something else but I think in terms of the scope of the project it made more sense to be sort of in terms of immediate distribution be distributing to two audiences that we know are involved goes beyond I just wanted to add that I think that you approached the problem differently if the play was a brand new work and you were looking to add an online component that would kind of let's just say be a cliffhanger for the play because you could sort of tell story in both spaces that way I know Karen and I had discussions about this early on that maybe in some future iteration of this if the idea sort of catches hold a little bit that people might think of the online presence being a not simply a reflection or a in the mirror darkly version of the play but really being an enticement have this experience online and then lead you into the play to see simplistically what happened right we debated those issues a lot about how to use the online presence there is also the fact that the play requires a pretty specific unusual state of mind in which we're only in the play mostly hear bad things but we know that for most people outside he is the hero but from our point of view he is so the idea I think if you play the game you can get into that mindset also outside of the theatre you can get probably a fuller understanding if you see the play or if you've seen the play first you can regain that state of mind outside it's well the same state of mind outside or beyond the state which is one of them that is actually an excellent question and it's one of the questions that we're hoping to tackle in the panel discussion at the end of the afternoon session is the potential of tools like this to actually be social media marketing and incentivize attendance as opposed to just be for an audience of people who already have their tickets to the show for sure and then just piggyback on that from the artist perspective the exciting thing is that to understand marketing and incentivizing ticket sales in all of that in a way that's actually still art is actually still narrative so figure out another piece of your story that's being told before the audience even gets into that so let's just assume this is mad successful and satisfying artistic experience satisfying audience experience and now we want a video game with every new play that anyone's producing anywhere or you know the importance of being an artist you can find the handbag what I'm having trouble envisioning is where's the practical model that ever lets us do this again when we don't happen to have a room full of captive graduate students and is there a way that this could become a routine part of artistic creation you know like go well beyond theater you know art gallery openings things like that like does anybody have a vision for how this could become routine I do one of the things I'm involved in when I'm not advising this project is trying to use the new kinds of social gaming incentivization to introduce ideas to audiences in sort of a backdoor head fake kind of way and there are monetization schemes I think you could look at I'd be happy to talk to you about that and obviously other people are thinking about the same thing right one of the biggest changes in gaming over the last five years is this idea that you don't have to put a game in a box and charge $50 for it that you can give it away for free if you monetize monetize a small portion of that and those games also thankfully are relatively inexpensive to build I have to say something to that real quick I think one of the most exciting things to me I'm a theater practitioner and a tech junkie so that's my background is the wealth of creativity and possibility that happens when the technical mind speaks to the artistic mind and just to sort of put it out there to the audience to sort of marinate on DC is sort of the second largest theater city in the country and the DC tech industry is the fourth largest DC is the fourth largest city for up and coming tech companies startups etc in the country as well so if this is we look towards the future this is a really great geographic location for work like this to exist Is there a dollar budget for the project and if so where did it come from and who's responsible No is the answer it's an educational project so in some ways it's being funded by the individuals in front of us but because I spent so many years in the industry I know how much it would cost to build out there but we don't keep internally budget numbers or cost things I'm sorry I meant for this project the chat deity game to build the chat deity game is there any budget I assume it costs money to do whatever it is you do with HTML and flash the ETC is doing this work pro bono for the black foods running playwrights Karen you've done some fun things we've been really lucky to have on the exterior part because the interior part is ETC and their wonderful graduate students but for the external part we have had the Joyce Foundation step up and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation step up to the playwrights and also to fund this little narrow window that they're talking about how do you get people to understand that this is happening in conjunction with this play how do you introduce audiences and potential audiences to this play so we do have some funders from foundation and our participation in the project goes into holding all of it and to making sure after ETC does their magic that there is outreach to teach people that this is going on with this particular play let me turn the question around who will own this thing at the end of the process Tom I'm starting to interrupt but this is actually the reason that Tony LeBow is coming in in the next session to talk about intellectual property it's another huge question that's come up to work here and I love that everybody's mind is kind of rocketing forward to those big questions and those are the ones that we're going to tackle after the break this is a good segue we're going to take a 15 minute break please help yourself to copy and snacks in the lobby when we come back we'll hear from Lynn Norwich I am pleased to introduce Lynn Norwich and try to find words to introduce Lynn Norwich but I'll she is one of the most produced playwrights in America and I'll go out the words Pulitzer and MacArthur and the Liszt theaters is way way too long but I would also like to say the most heartwarming thing about Lynn Norwich for me is that she has supported Black women playwrights' group forever and it makes my heart stir when we come up with these slivers of ideas and she'll say welcome slivers of ideas and again we have come up with an idea that has grown from a sliver and because of her participation and her support as well so I introduce to you Lynn Norwich to talk about by the way Meet Fear Stark was originally conceived as a trans media play and when I went to second stage and said this is the play that I want to produce it's a play in three acts the first act being a screwball comedy the second act begins with a traditional film and the third act is digital media they said to me okay we'll do the first two acts but you're on your own for the third and so I ended up building a very primitive website which got a surprising number of hits given what it was but let me just sort of back up and explain what the play is by the way Meet Fear Stark by way of sort of introducing how I'm involved in this project the play examines the legacy of racial stereotypes in films of early 30s it's a multi-platform play that uses film and digital media to piece together the life of Vera Stark who's an African American actress who's crippled by ambition and racism and a culture that really doesn't know quite how to fit her in the first act of the play as I mentioned is this fast and furious screwball comedy in which Vera Stark who's this young headstrong actress and May is trying to get into a film like Gone with the Wind but in the case it's called The Bell of New Orleans it's a southern epic a very traditional film that you might find from the 1930s and she's willing to do absolutely anything to get into this film the second act of the play begins with an excerpt from the film The Bell of New Orleans and it's told very much in the style of the period it's a classic melodrama that feeds all of the worst stereotypes that you can imagine from that period and the second act begins with the last scene in that film and then immediately we jump 70 years later and we're in a panel with a group of African American academics who are sort of arguing over the legacy of this particular play this particular film called The Bell of New Orleans and the academics are all battling for ownership of Vera Stark and this is sort of discussed while they're also looking at a clip from a film I'm sorry they're looking at a clip from a television show that's a Dick Cavick-like television show where Vera Stark appears for the last time I know it sounds very, very confusing I promise you it isn't but it's sort of by means of explaining this project that it is multimedia and it's trying to mix lots of many different ideas and sort of play with perspective but the third act and the third act is what's really important in this presentation here is the third act was always conceived to exist on the web it's a site that was created by one of the academic characters named Herb Forrester and the site examines the legacy of Vera Stark it's a classic website that is designed to keep her alive it introduces a documentary which you will see here later that's made by Herb Forrester not Lynn Nottage, not the Carnegie Mellon folks but by the character Herb Forrester very much in his aesthetic which means that it has a kind of gritty homemade feeling the website also has selections from her autobiography it has fan memorabilia it's also going to have a conversation between those people who are sort of interested in invested in Vera's character in the period and hopefully the website will be evergreen which means that once the play the website will continue to generate interest and will ultimately no longer be curated by me but curated by the people who are interested in Vera Stark or interested in old cinema or interested just in this game that we've created which is the Herb Forrester website I always envisioned this play as I said in three acts it was a play that crosses time periods and thus I wanted to incorporate the vocabulary of each era of Vera Stark so the first era is the vocabulary of screwball comedy the second era it takes place in the year 2000 so it's very much sort of an academic vocabulary and then the third era that I wanted to examine is the way in which digital media has shaped the way in which we view the past and that's what we're trying to explore here right now how do we create this new vocabulary because I do see it as a new vocabulary and how do we take these characters that I've created two or three years ago and have them leap out of the proscenium past the fourth wall and have this evergreen life where they get to interact with the audience in a very different way the play however and I want to make this clear remains the anchor because I'm a playwright, I'm a storyteller I'm always going to be sort of rooted here to the stage but I want the play to be a leaping off point to be a departure point for a story that's more expansive and dynamic and that invites the audience to be a storyteller as well I'm really interested in seeing how our stories can be reshaped once we invite the audience to be part of making that story I don't know what that means but I'm interested in finding out what that means and this piece as I mentioned was always conceived as a trans media piece that the website is not an addendum it's not something that's sort of tacked on at the end the website is the third act it's part of the narrative and the play is not complete without all these three elements the first act, the second act, and the third act interacting and I also want to make clear because I know that a lot of times trans media is used as a marketing tool I don't see this third act as being a marketing tool, an advertising tool I'm really interested in how it can be a storytelling tool, a creative artistic tool in understanding the characters that I've fashioned what I'm going to do is show you a clip from the play which was created by myself my husband Tony Gerber who's a director we managed to get an incredible cinematographer named Stuart Driver who shot the piano to shoot it this clip that you'll see has Sinal Leitham Stephanie Block Karen Elivo and Kimberley Ear Bear and what it is is the last scene in the movie The Bell of Our New Orleans it was created as closely as possible to the way in which a film from the 1930s would have been created so it was shot on Panavision and we had a little stocking over the lens to give it a diffused feeling the lighting was kept sort of low and moody and without further ado I present The Bell of New Orleans and then afterwards I'm going to show the documentary so I'm going to just sort of slip to the side If you live in a bed I thought surely you'll be packed enough wait till I am attached by now No I'm not going If you've been talking about for weeks I believe here Madam Pierre has threatened to tell him the truth that my blood isn't pure that it carries the drop of shame and misery and eventually he will possess the blood of a noble French family and look how much good it has done me here in New Orleans He loves you What do you want me to be like a mistress of the great love Madam Pierre we won you yesterday she fit to be dad and damn it before she tamed you I have to be back chocolate show now this you're going to get through this and soon you'll be back out there Madam Brace nearly finished with your gown and come Friday you're going to put it on and be the prettiest thing that ever done there's a quadra like the Magnolia ball Wouldn't that be lovely Tilly tell me tell him to go tell him I'm sleeping tell him anything No and did it bring us alias He know he always do and does he know he's that man out there loves you and if you send him away now it's going to be a real shame because you and I know there ain't no other man in your heart but him How do you pull up with me Miss What do you want me to tell Remember me on that warm spring day we went boating on the fire and the nurses I do When you barefoot in the backyard and you didn't found that wounded bird you taught that for them to fly again which was sort of an unconventional way to begin a drama which is with the film and so the next thing if you'll bear with me that I want to show is some of the content from the website and this is a documentary that Herb Forster who's one of the academics in the film makes about Vera Stark But was the film an artful masterpiece or a lucky confluence of lesser talents three artists are widely credited with its success director Maximilian von Oster who is sort of almost by by desire cinematographer Mo Talbenschlag Talbenschlag started out as a what would you call a second year director of photography and actress Vera Stark a leading lady in a maid's uniform stay awake in the early days of American cinema black actors weren't even cast in films you'd often have white actors in blackface and so a film like Birth of a Nation comes to mind or even some of the early versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin it was no accident that the Bell of New Orleans was produced on the cusp of the implementation of the Hayes production code which enforced certain traditional moral standards such as banning extra marital sex and miscegenation the mixing of the races on screen blood isn't pure but it carries a drop of shade and misery to whom is the seal the whole idea of miscegenation and the fact that the lead character had black blood that was not something that the code dealt with afterward the fact that black and white characters mingled with a quite modern sense of familiarity and ease again would it be? Scarlet's point to this film as the straw that broke the camel's back and got the code put into place tell him you love him because you and I know there ain't no other man in your heart but him how do you put up with me? I love seeing the characters sum up to the present day being very long missions involved with the war characters in the same scene tell him it's not maybe the coast seabirds there's only a month left in fact they came from a little background it never seemed to him a conflict the bell of New Orleans burned many bridges but out of the Pyrrhic fire emerged Vera Stark one of the brightest African-American stars of the 20th century she really led the way among with actresses like Ethel Waters or Patty McDaniel or Louise Beavers so being that kind of trailblazer it opened the doors for those actresses who came after her through the 1950s and 60s she was an ardent civil rights activist frequently participating in marches and easy to start with as she was aghast towards integration at that point she's staying at one of the very fancy hotels in California and tries to use the swimming pool and unfortunately it created such a stir among the other white patrons staying at the hotel that the workers had to clean the pool and refill it as a victim himself of discrimination in pre-war Europe director Von Oster claimed to understand the plight of African-Americans and Jim Crow America he was oppressed in Russia of course and in June she felt the oppression from birth so to speak so I think he had a sort of sense of humor about a dark sense of humor but his sense of humor was not nearly as legendary as his dictatorial style Max was very sort of didactic go over there and sign but Von Oster was different with Vera with Vera he would go over and whisper in her ear and you might hear what he said there were rumors of an affair which at the time were scandalous Von Oster never denied it he was a ladies' man he once said that having affairs with actresses was an occupational hazard of directing films it's like direction or action the success of the Bell of New Orleans is due at least in part to Von Oster's unwillingness to compromise with Celestial Pictures conservative morality when the studio founder had planned to set this film in Bordello they were very upset about it you know you can't put this in a god damn warhouse he convinced them it was more like a club it wasn't really in Bordello and it wouldn't be come across quite that way of course it does come across exactly that way nahi, what are you still doing in bed? Von Oster's vision of an antebellum Bordello and its virginal prostitute with a heart of gold as played by Gloria Mitchell has achieved an unexpected immortality even if he rankled some producers along the way his obsessiveness with details that really didn't flow around was a good studio craze I mean I remember they had a scene in some picture where they had a lot of army personnel Russian army and he insists to get the underwear be the same as the Russian army it's serious it loves when you see them in their underwear what do you care about that Max he said but the actors will know after the Bell of New Orleans with the implementation of the Hayes production code Von Oster had a tough time in Hollywood staying employed he was blacklisted for his affiliation with the Communist Party over the next several decades he faded into obscurity barely scraping by as a commercial jingle writer I think he was a little bitter he was living in a very small house in New Valley that I thought was his but it actually was his housekeepers because he was broke if Von Oster has any legacy it is the career of Vera Stark who got her start with the role of Tilly, the maid Vera was able to get away with more in the Bell of New Orleans as a pre-code film because she was able to speak truth to power Vera's later career was plagued by alcoholism the abuse of prescription meds and a spiral of disengagement from everyone close to her but through sheer force of will she continued to work Vera Stark did two weeks at the Folio Berger in Vegas and I caught one of the shows she was quite extraordinary she had the audience in the palm of her hand I saw her briefly backstage and then she showed me a little bunch of Heather and she had a little plastic bag and she carried with her as good luck and she said, Max did it I found out later, years later when I was studying mythology that Heather was the tree who the love got us so maybe she knew that in 1973, after her short lived run in Vegas, Vera Stark disappeared there have been many many rumors as to what happened to Vera Stark in her life I don't look like a spectra I can only hope that she found peace and happiness I think what's more interesting than the truth is that the question exists in the first place right, that we don't know what happened to Vera the circumstances surrounding her disappearance are shrouded in mystery what we do know is that her legacy endured my favorite line is just the one everybody seems to like from the very beginning stay awake and together we'll face a new day stay awake and together we'll face a new day stay awake and together we'll face a new day it's a great line with a message that is paradoxically antiquated yet decades ahead of its time Vera, Tilly the maid and the bell of New Orleans exhort us to stay awake to resist the forces of censorship and cultural recidivism and then together only together may we face a new, better enlightened day for me, Vera Stark.com this has been Herb Forrester remember to stop by the site for new revelations and upcoming events in a city near you and as you're coming I just want to something about the video I think that the video is representative of what we want to do with the website is blur back with fiction and so that when people are visiting that they're engaged with the website regardless of whether they've seen Vera Stark or not anecdotally there are people who went to the meet Vera Stark website who didn't know that it was made believe and Herb Forrester was actually invited to lecture at the New York Film Academy and Herb has a website and there are people who actually engage with Herb as if he's a real character and I think that we as a team want to play with those lines and see how we can keep this conversation open. So as Lynn introduced the goal of the Meet Vera Stark online project is to be an act three to her play and to create a space where a community can form that collaboratively explores and invents Vera's career from her appearance on the screen in the 1930s to when she vanishes from the public back in the 1970s and maybe beyond there's a lot of ways that that's going to happen but to begin I'm going to have Dana talk to you about some similar past projects that we've seen that influence some of our brain storming on this project. So Lynn has told us that this is a transmedia project other transmedia projects that similarly blur the line between fiction and reality are alternate reality games which use multiple media platforms in order to tell a story that people can become involved in as themselves rather than as a character. So they become part of the story, they're able to change the course of it sometimes and their actions mean something in the world of the story. Oh we don't have our team at work. I think it's the next slide. Yes. Wonderful. So a lot of alternate reality games will blur that line between fiction and reality and present itself as a tenant of reality while also addressing the fact that it is in fact fiction. They're not like they aren't trying to trick you into believing that I don't know aliens are descending to earth and you have to help fight them. For example so it's acknowledging the fact that it is not real but it is encouraging you to suspend disbelief and take part. So that is one thing that we are really going for with Lynn's site is to express you know this is fiction. Here are the people who are involved in creating this fiction. But please play along with us. And let's see we are looking at things like puzzle hunts which are similar to alternate reality games in that they have they have a thing that a lot of people must work toward in order to get a certain like a group result. And let's see so we have been working with the existing meet veerastark.com which as we've mentioned you know it presents it as reality. It presents the reality of veerastark through Perforaster. We are also looking at other sites that are doing similar things two of them being out my window and duality with Mark Bradford. As far as the system goes Lynn wants it to be something that she is not entirely responsible for in terms of upkeep. So what that means is we have to look at how people can enter this community and influence the creation of content and you know we have we will be working to layer contribution so that there are people who are at the top who have been with the site for a while and they are able to look at new content and say oh okay this sounds like it should be a part of the veerastark canon. So we are looking at sites like Wikipedia sites like Reddit, things that are community driven. And next are you going to talk about just system stuff? Okay. One of the challenges that we've had with the design of the veerastark project is that the way that it's like an alternate reality game is that you have people interacting as themselves with this site that was created by her forester who is a creative character and talking about the character of veerastark who is a creative character but through that they are bringing up real issues and when you are trying to come up with an aesthetic for a website created by a fictional character getting the mindset of what kind of a website would this character create is a really interesting challenge. And that's part of the reason that we've turned to the existing content the existing website for our primary influence in design and because we have to build a community we're turning to community websites online for the same thing. In terms of technology again this is a website so it's going to be something that's going to be accessible from any kind of a computer with a browser that you have from the majority of your mobile devices and in terms of development we're using a web framework we've picked one that we think will work really well and the reason we're doing that is it's going to allow us to do really rapid development and to expand the project down the road if necessary without having to start from zero. The launch and iterate process that I alluded to for Chris's project here it was especially important because as Radha mentioned we're trying to create a sort of Herb Forester recreated so is Herb Forester someone who's not familiar with websites, would he use sort of a prepackaged solution or would he get one of his students to help help and I think that was really important because when we sort of brought the framework and got it in front of Lin as soon as possible we were able to sort of get more of an understanding of who exactly Herb Forester is and how he would create this website and I think also particularly I guess challenging for us or something that we're working towards is making sure that we are because we have a limited scope we want to make sure we're providing a framework where as Linda mentioned it is evergreen so what that means is after we hand it off there is that foundation for additional content to be added even when we are no longer part of the project and so that's something that we're trying to figure out what is the best solution and also that this website would potentially be hosted sort of independent of CMU or theaters and it would actually belong to Lin so ideas that we've had so varistark.org potentially additional domains and any sort of tools that we can bring to the table and package it so that then Lin and her team could you know just take that and then let it keep going additionally. One of the other key challenges that we have is how do you play to something like this because if the audience is supposed to help create the content how do we encourage the audience to actually participate so that is something too that we're thinking do we actually have seed content you know have users who sort of spark the conversation you know if PERV is actually a moderator you know how does that sort of work into sort of this half real, half fake discussion website entity so that's sort of an insight to the process that we're going through currently with this project so now I'm going to open up for questions I think my question is a little bit further around the idea of the audience participation since it is the Act 3 of the play and obviously I know how Act 1 and Act 2 will be informed by the full within the four walls of the theater but then in Act 3 how does that happen or how do you see that happening outside of is it about the audience going home and getting on their computers or is there something happening in the space that encourages that dialogue One of the conversations we're having is how do we drive the audience that's in the theater to the website after they've had the theatrical experience and I know that when we did it originally at second stage that was part of the problem is like how do we get people there and we didn't solve that problem and I'm hoping that that by the end of the semester that that's something that we're able to have a solution for Maybe as a way to help with that answer I'll talk a little bit about what the core user experience on the site is this site that Herm Forrester has built it's kind of a cross between a simple fan site to Veristar because he really is her fan he wants her memory to live on and a kind of curated permanent connection collection of artifacts from her life as if you've had a museum exhibit with photos and film clips and audio interviews all about things that she had done and places she had been and people she talked with and in the beginning we'd like the audience to just visit and explore this collection and get to know Veristar better. Over time which I think can only happen after they go home we see the more dedicated audience members finding themselves contributing to this collection as well maybe creating artifacts that are bits of Veristar's life and helping contribute to that story of her life and then the curatorial the editing process that Lin's team will be in control of and that maybe down the road they'll be able to hand off allows us to set apart the permanent collection of things we do consider canon from general user contributions and to be able to move through especially good contributions over into that permanent collection so that it becomes a collaborative process. Also if I can continue I mean one of the goals is for the audience to be able to interact with those characters say a year or two after they've seen the play and that when they go to the website that there is constant new content for them to engage with. I'm not sure who this question is for exactly so I'm just sort of asking maybe the team maybe it's Lin and I'm curious just about that ethical line I was recently part of a theater project in which we had a fake town website we had reviewers actually talking to us on press night like where did we get to know this town like how did we meet them we're like it's not real and we basically snowed many people and unintentionally snowed because for us we were being very like no one's going to think this is real and then eventually we found out because we again we're blurring the lines between history and fact and fiction actually doing Google searches on historical things we embed in the website our website was getting like high hits in the search engine so I'm just sort of curious if anyone can speak about a little bit more about the ethics or the tension there and creating something that is fiction that is also perceived as real and how open do you feel you need to be in disclosing or not? You know, our reaction to that is with ads right sometimes you don't know if they're so let's take the Google example you don't know if in the search result it's the actual search result is an ad and then there's a little bit sponsor so we were brainstorming ideas of how we can have an elegant solution like that so on the website that we do have sort of a little bit of a disclaimer or an entire section that sort of helps inform the audience so that they know that they are part of this effort to create this for you because how do you contribute to something if you don't know whether or not what you're supposed to be doing That's true. We were concerned for a little while about this line between fact and fiction and not letting people see where that line is and that's a difficult question because part of the essence of the experience is the blurring of that line the ability to log on to the website and let yourself be lost in the idea that there is this actress out there and this her forester character and communicating with them as if it was all real so at this time we are concerned since we're dealing with the topic that's so grounded in the real world that it'll be easy for people to lose track of that internally we've discussed a feature of the website where at any point you could click a certain link and turn on kind of a behind the scenes view and see real artist credits for who created these individual artifacts and real details about when they were created and why so that there's sort of a live like a commentary track on a DVD that you can turn on and off at will to either say I want to have myself totally immersed in the fiction of this world or I want to see what's actually true and what's not all the time yeah it's almost it's kind of like staging a play you're asking people to suspend disbelief but you're not pretending that when someone dies on stage that they're actually not going to be back up the next day so we're asking for a similar kind of suspension of disbelief where we still acknowledge that it's fiction here my question is similar to hers you said that the New York Film Academy approached you to get an interview with Herb Forster so when they found out what the real deal was that they think it was hilarious and when they found out it was very funny yeah so just maybe a question for Linda maybe for you guys so the Goodman Theater and the two partnering theaters for this project but the website itself will be sort of moderated and controlled by you moving forward and it's a lot of content that was already made the same question that I think some people were asking about the video game there would be different actors playing Vera and just content changed, you film a new documentary do you film a new that's one of the conversations that we're in the midst of having is how can we create a documentary about Vera Stark in which we don't see Vera Stark and how can we put up representations of Vera Stark when you don't see her and I think that's the biggest challenge right I think one of the answers to that is some of the clips you saw in the documentary where somebody had circled the back somebody's head oh yeah there was Vera at this event and we can absolutely see audience members understanding that's sort of the convention for this experience and if you build a community that understands that you'll have all sorts of situations where you can just barely see the back of somebody's head and their side of their face and they'll create a whole story that goes with this photograph that could go any actress on stage is there a reason why you want people to see the website as the third act and why they couldn't see it before the show and so it could then function in a couple of different ways I think that would be the full journey of Vera Stark I think that people can certainly go to the website and they can have a satisfying experience before seeing the show but I think that it will not be a complete tale without having seen those first two acts but it won't spoil the show hopefully it won't spoil the show for them I was at a technology workshop last week and they were talking about how computer websites and phone apps they're changing in terms of relationships of use have you thought about using this as a phone app as a way to increase who can have access to it and when the limitations of our semester we're beginning by making it a web page which will be viewable on most of modern phones like an iPhone we'll be able to open it up it's possible that down the road the project could be expanded to include an actual phone app to tie into the same information so that it would be easy for somebody to say take a picture of a supposed sighting of Vera Stark and upload it to the website but we really with our 14 weeks which really is the blink of an eye for software development we've decided to start with the website which can be viewed across as many platforms as possible and if I can add to that building this framework that users can actually submit content and content that can be images or writing or even video if they get really involved because it becomes almost a hobbyist site so for us to tackle it we're not too worried about the phone app because there's not much content that's going to get submitted by phone it's more about this website and going on it and becoming involved in this community and trying to end this story around this character so are you guys the same team with the projects concurrently and how many projects are you working on concurrently? Vera is the team we're working on the two projects that Krispy has and the lead-knottage projects concurrently and how does that work with in terms of what the roles are and how your involvement shifts we have a really convenient setup actually where we have our dramaturg and then we have two producers, two artists so we're able to almost split right down the middle with Dana having extra work to divide and conquer on these projects so we actually in each category we're assigning leads on the project, all of us will work on both because the constant feedback is good but it allows us to give everybody ownership of a specific portion of one project for the other I'm guessing the answer will probably feed into the intellectual property discussion later on I'm wondering about the reward system of this ARG where if you submit an artifact that really jibes with a mythos of Vera's it could be in this permanent collection but is there this idea that these community-generated artifacts could then feed back into the Act 1 or 2 like in a future revision there's community-generated history of Vera's life that then is alluded to within the play that you've written I think that's interesting but then we do really get into intellectual property's questions and questions of ownership but it's an interesting idea I think it would be really reasonable because there will be a formal editing process where you actually have to communicate with Herb Forester or with Lynn's team through Herb Forester that part of that process could be hey, is this content something you want to get permission for that to be involved in in future works there's something really exciting about that right? being involved with this community and what you make the amount of part that you put into it could actually end up being part of this almost immortalized play would you give a new direction? would it be the new direction? well it would be up to Lynn Nott I mean ideally I'd begin as the curator of the site so that there are not things that go up there that sort of really shift the direction that I wanted to go in but eventually I give over to the community and I think that that's one of the things that really interests me is how community can shape the aesthetic and move it one of the ideas that we have is an autobiography that has just recently been found and ideally I'd like the community to contribute to pages so that the first chapter could be written by someone other than myself no I was talking about the new direction these people incorporated their story into the vision of the play they don't get paid I don't know we haven't crossed that bridge but I imagine that at some point if the idea is such that it's interwoven with the narrative that there would be some compensation I can't imagine just taking someone's idea and putting it out there and not sort of sharing credit for it just as an example I saw play a couple of years ago as part of a festival it was called Super Nova and it was a sort of community engagement play and it was created through interviews with people in this particular community outside of Krakow and the way the play came out was that the first act of it was a museum that you attended which had a whole series of exhibits many of which had online content but that had memories of various people in the community there was a room that you went into that had photos of different people people in the community remembered who were all dead and had different stories about them and it was all done from the point of view of 500 years in the future where you were going back and sort of looking at the history of this community today I won't go on about it but basically it sort of took that idea of engaging with the community developing content creating all of these museum displays that created all these online interactive things you spent an hour immersed in that experience and then you actually sat and watched two short plays that were performed by actors that also carried forward some of the history so it was a way of almost doing that from the outset what you're describing and making it part of the whole structure of the play We introduce Spring on Harrison and Rivers Thank you My name is Harrison David Rivers and at the full title Look Upon Our Lowliness of Male Voices and just to sort of give you an idea of what the piece is I'll start with the synopsis and then I'll sort of go into how the piece came about and then I'll talk a bit about my involvement in the cyber narrative project The synopsis is that the play charts the relationships of eight gay men reeling from an unexpected and unexplained debt of a close friend the men, a painter, a writer, a curator a dancer, a nanny, a student a slut and a suit turn to sex to work, to drink, to tears and to each other in an attempt to make sense of the world around them a world forever changed by the exit of this specific loved one and they turn to each other for empathy, for solace, for laughter they turn to each other in hopes of discovering or uncovering some kind of truth and so the play does deal very specifically with debt but what I sort of have loved in the genesis of this piece is how it started some place very sad and has become something almost joyful and this is probably due to the genesis of the actual piece. The idea or some of the ideas that are expressed in the play began with David Mendesava who is one of the artistic sort of leaders of the movement theater company who came to me in mid-2010 he essentially said something like Harrison, I really want to write a play about men about masculinity and about drag and about the ways in which we express our masculinity and he also wanted to talk about faith and religion and iconography and there were so many things and I was like ok, ok, ok, slow down wait, these are all great ideas but what's the story and David was essentially like well, you know you're the writer and I sort of took all these ideas and I went away and I was sort of ruminating on them and in 2010 there was the inaugural white light festival at Lincoln Center which is a festival that is sort of designed to introduce New York City and the world to music that really sort of sort of opens up our understanding of the universe and one of the exhibits in the white light festival was this installation by Janet Carter called the Forty Cart Motet and this piece features a piece of Renaissance music by a man named Thomas Tallis which is called Spem in Allium and it's essentially a meditation on faith it tells the story of Judith from the book of Judith which is sort of one of those books in the Bible that end up in the Bible cuts the head off of the enemy army captain and in a sense saves her people and it is her sort of at the entrance to this general's tent praying to God for not to survive but to give her the courage and the strength to go into the tent and so this piece which is done in a studio space with 40 speakers lining the walls each speaker has one of the 40 voices and if you move close to one of the speakers you hear that voice in particular if you stand in the center of the room you hear all 40 voices and so this sort of idea of a piece that begins with one voice and crescendos to 40 became the structure for look upon our loneliness and so this piece begins with a phone call which then becomes a duet a trio a quartet and so on and so forth and the piece ebbs and flows very similarly to this particular piece of music so that is sort of where this piece began when TMTC was invited to be a part of the cyber narrative project this play was not done in fact we had maybe an act one which makes it a very different project than Lynn's or Lynn Chris's because their plays were already done so we were looking at the piece establishing themes and then creating either a beginning or an ending or something that was going to enhance the storytelling and with my play we were sort of like well we could create something that sort of goes along with what you've already written or I think what sort of blew my mind initially was Chris and Dana suggested will one of you use technology all the way through so that we open with something that people can access sort of the world in the play before they arrive at the theater and have to come to the theater to witness the actual event the technology continues throughout the play while they're in the theater and then because they've come to the theater they have access to even more content after so this is almost a marriage of what we're doing with Chris and Lynn's pieces in that it goes all the way through so these components beginning and the end are now sort of interwoven one of the major sort of devices of the play are these phone calls is this sort of phone technology and that is sort of the primary way in which audience members receive information about the ongoing relationships amongst the men in the piece they receive phone calls and text messages and at certain moments in the play all of the phones ring creating this sort of aural experience and sort of helping to heighten the storytelling and then encouraging people to dialogue after the piece with some of the information that they received on these devices I'll sort of clarify the idea is also that when each person enters the space they are given a phone or some sort of device that is all the information is sort of transferred to them through that device throughout the course of the play so I am in sort of a very different place than Chris and Lynn in that so the play is just now reaching a place where it's sort of finished so now is the time to sort of take some of these larger ideas and begin to apply them and I suppose that now is a good time to have Dana do you want to talk and Chris too dramatically and also the ways in which we discuss using technology that were sort of mind blowing for me that I think really have enhanced the piece in my head as I have been writing one of the things that I really wanted to engage in the project from my own personal passion was this idea of really trying to engage the audience in the story from the beginning it's a technique I've used in video games where we were treating everything involved in the video game as part of the story we started telling the story for this one project in the ads that were placed in magazines and on the web and not from a sense of just simply showing a character but like what the character was doing would in the ad inform the way that the players met the character in the game and that idea really fascinates me because it sort of becomes post-modern storytelling in a really interesting way and immerses everybody from the very first encounter with the content into the story so it was really exciting for me that Harrison's work was in process because I was fascinated by what would happen if I made the suggestion because I've worked a lot with I'm a playwright, I've worked with playwrights in the video game industry and it is a very very challenging thing for any writer especially a playwright who in process in my experience is sort of different from let's say a television writer where you've got maybe eight people in the room and they're all attempting to manipulate the story a playwright's process tends to be more solitary at least in my experience so the struggles for a playwright are often internal and to give away some of that process to collaborators as early as Harrison was willing to was exhilarating for me because I think it opens up the space for what is possible when we in a secondary way ask the audience to come into that storytelling space and part of why Dana was engaged in the project in the beginning was she had worked with me in an interactive story class that I had taught a year before and I knew that she thought about story in this way so when we were able to get a playwright that was sort of willing and gracious enough to allow us to engage the story on that level we added Dana to the mix we had the opportunity to do something that was really interesting to me so why don't you talk about the back and forth process? So what we were trying to figure out was how we could use technology to better understand the characters that Harrison was writing we came up with a lot of ideas that involved phones and technology like that people can bring to the table because that was something that a lot of the characters were interacting with during the actual story it was a logical extension of the current thing with the existing world so it wasn't too far a leap to say well they're using cell phones maybe we could use cell phones huh so we thought about how we could use cell phones to like I said to better understand certain characters in the beginning our focus was mostly on the deceased friend we were talking about ways that we could get the audience to know Tyler as his friend circle does so that when you walk into the play you are feeling that same sense of loss that the characters do when they realize that their friend is dead later that evolved to talking more about how we could understand each of the eight men potentially through as Harrison was saying through phones these are just ideas so these but we were talking about how we could potentially use those to explore for different audience members one person and so for example I might have a phone that belongs to character A so I receive character A's texts and I see characters and I see the text that character A sends throughout the play to character B's blah blah blah each person in the audience would be able to see each person in the audience would be able to see a different character and they'd be able to better understand a certain character so that after the play is over in the lobby they can all discuss the events that they saw in the same kind of way that if you go toward one speaker in that installation piece you can hear one voice and then you step into the middle and you can hear all of them so that stepping into the middle meant talking to people talking to the other people who had seen the play and say well what character did you look at did you get character C because character A said this thing and I didn't really understand why they were arguing and then the person who saw character C was like oh well it's because of something and you know you're able to better understand the story and you're able to talk about the story so these ideas are still shifting we're still trying to figure out exactly what we want to do but we're really excited about all of these opportunities to just work with exploring character whether it's one or eight I just wanted to add I have to give Harrison a lot of credit you know engaging a story from multiple points of view simultaneously is like mind blowing for a writer it totally is in the gaming industry we sort of deal with this routinely and it's just part of the soup we create for ourselves but as I've nurtured writers coming from traditional linear media into the interactive space it is a total alteration in their sense of how to structure something so that it can land for an individual audience member if that's the only one who can seize it or allow audience people to sort of own some of the story and then contribute to it and you know I speculate in here but I don't think you knew how deep that well was when you began not and having wrestled that demon myself many times I knew that that sort of epiphany was coming because we all end up trying to face it at some point and wrestle it to the ground but Harrison really engaged it head on and I really wanted to give you credit for that you know and you know I've watched like Dana try to create like interactive stories and there's one classic which is about interactive stories and one of the exciting things about marrying interactivity with the theater space was the potential to get the audience engaged right I tell my students like you've got all an interactive story you've got all the problems that you have in linear media and you add to that getting the audience member to care enough to do something not just watch it but to engage it and I have never heard or I knew about the piece of music and I knew how that it acted as an inspiration to you but I had never heard the explanation so today of the idea of going to the speaker and hearing the one voice in the middle because that's essentially an amazingly powerful and interactive story is the conversation that happened and that the story kind of comes out of the communication between everybody who's experienced it which is one of the most exciting things so very exciting ideas around this project I think I'm but I got a problem in mind so immediately I wonder how this production or any production of it will manage kind of the audience's attention budget over time as you move through between things that are happening kind of performed audio domain and then in the delivered text domain so the idea of playing all eight people communicating I think that as I've been discussing this more and more with the TMTC that we're moving more away from that and looking at receiving messages from one character so that what you're seeing in your device is more integrated into the larger performance so that is something that we discussed quite a bit and that we've been discussing how do you sort of clarify that story a bit so I think maybe not having everybody in the audience receiving information from different characters automatically sort of tightens that lens a bit and allows for the story that's being told in your lap to also sort of enhance what you're seeing on stage as opposed to sort of wondering what you missed. I sort of love the notion of the audience tracking one character means that they have to come back eight times The only problem with that is that you have to then what if they get the same person I mean it's an interesting quandary when you have that many characters whose stories are potentially rich enough to follow individually and sort of how do you decide which story or which perspective gives you the most story or perspective when you're watching the thing on stage. So it is something that we're still definitely wrestling with and sort of trying to figure out where to put our energy and where to sort of focus the audience's energy as well. This is a question for the project overall. My understanding is that including one of the reasons for this is including technology would bring in younger audiences into theater. That's one of the things. Most of the time I go to theater most of the people there are old like me. So has anybody addressed the question of how to get to the young audiences in the first place so that when they're doing all this technology they're not just really teaching old people who attend the theater about how to use technology. Is that my question? An extension of the play to younger audiences. I think that one of the great things about the movement theater company is that a large part of that particular theater's audience are younger people. And I think that we're also using technology that is accessible to a younger audience. I think that that's also an appeal. But others can speak. I think Harrison's project is the most amazing thing that I've heard in a long time. But I think about younger audiences and younger audiences meaning me, Harrison's younger audience. I'm 35. Those of us who grew up on television and MTV our understanding of storytelling is so sophisticated already and it becomes exponentially more sophisticated storytelling. My six-year-old nephew understands multiple storylines going on at one time while he's playing his iPad and doing a ton of other things. So I think there's something about the new kinds of forms and fracture works in different ways to tell stories that's going to be fundamentally appealing to a different kind of audience to begin with. Whether we try to make it a marketing tool or not, that's a different kind of question. So what these guys are talking about right now and the kind of work that it's not even necessarily younger audiences as so much as different audiences too. Audiences who aren't necessarily going to the theater. I know lots of people who will be so excited to participate in Lynn's online third act that wouldn't necessarily even come to the theater the same way. Whether they're young and young college kids, young graduate student, an older person so I think there's a certain amount by expanding the scope of potential narrative tools that will automatically expand the scope of audiences hopefully. You know, we get away a little bit from the family sitting on the couch drinking red wine playing which does turn certain people off and by opening it up like this maybe you'd be expanding to a different audience. I think that for me some of it was just allowing access to the story material through avenues that internet-centric audiences are used to finding stories. Part of what drove me to the project was I for a number of years I managed a design team of of about 20 designers on a huge project that we were doing in the trans-media storytelling space. So these designers were all story aficionados in the first place. And they like Chris talks about, their sense of being able to dissect and analyze and understand stories was exponentially more sophisticated than mine at a similar age and I think probably exceeds mine even now. And they would consume story in comics and on the web and in film and on television and in all these media where they were ravenous for stories they would never go to the theater because they did not perceive the theater was a place where interesting stories took place. It wasn't part of the lexicon and I would drag them to theater productions we'd have theater outlets and they'd come away going oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, I can't believe it she was standing right in front of me you know what I'm saying? They got it when they were exposed to it and they appreciated it when they were exposed to it but it wasn't part of and these people would stand online for 24 hours to get into a midnight showing in Harry Potter it wasn't that they weren't willing to get up and go they just didn't include theater in their spectrum of things they wanted to do so when I heard about the project I thought that technology could be sort of a head fake to get them to pay attention in the first place because I saw that once they were aware that what theater could bring in the magic that we all share a love for would attract them anyway they just never considered it before so if that meant the entry was a comic book or if that meant the entry was a website or if that meant that they heard about this interesting play where they sat in an audience and then you got text messages how cool is that? I didn't care as long as they got their butts in the seats for me Thank you all and move into the panel discussion portion of this because I think we're sort of moving into a general question phase which is perfect I think a perfect later wrap up so thank you Harrison thank you so much for joining us right now I've been writing down some of the questions that have been emerging about intellectual progress specifically and then I also want to make sure that we give everybody time to ask any additional questions of Karen and Chris before we wrap up unfortunately I think Glory had to take off unless you're still here Glory our marketing expert had to run and do marketing or something I guess but I did want to just take a moment and try to recall the biggest questions that we've heard so far about intellectual property and digital media Tony the first one and this is really my ignorance of technology we've heard this term open source tossed around a little bit regarding the technology that would be used as a starting point for some of these tools because what open source technology is and what it means if those tools are adapted or repurposed by individuals and who then owns them sure so open source I want you to think about it as only applying to copyright so when you have programming we have a lot of different things that go in there we have trademarks maybe we have patents we absolutely have copyright and you might also have trade secrets open source doctrine says that here's the nugget, the kernel so let's assume Microsoft we have different operating systems and everybody's familiar with so you have on one hand Microsoft operating system and you have a Mac operating system along comes Lenox and there are maybe 10 to 12 different open source programming doctrines that people sort of subscribe to each of those doctrines have different rules the largest one is called the GNU doctrine that's sort of what the Lenox is based on those rules say you have to look at the rules of the specific programming that you're using they dictate how and what rules will apply so let's stick with Lenox to make it for simplicity's sake you build a program based on Lenox you're agreeing that you're giving up your copyright you're waiving it essentially that means that if someone else takes your programming embeds it and uses it you may have a patent claim still which most people don't realize you certainly have a trademark claim still we do a lot of work with Red Hat Red Hat's an open source company Red Hat has a program you could go on tomorrow take it put your own name on it and sell it, no problem what you can't do technically is sell it as Red Hat without giving some notoriety back to them you'd have to make it clear that this is not an authorized copy and the like so there's ways to do that once you use that kernel to create your program and you make the next version of it or anything else you're also agreeing that your improvement or your modification will also be open sourced the way I advise clients is the following let's assume we'll use Microsoft Word and at the end of the day Microsoft Word will say is not an open source program but they want to bring in a component that is open source if they can make it so that it's a plugin let's assume it's spell check it will not infect the rest of the program so long as it's a plugin if on the other hand they decide to incorporate spell check into the operating system the source code is a whole they've now infected the whole Microsoft program as a result they've essentially waived the copyright so in this arena if you guys are making programming it's really important to understand what that means for you if you're designing it based on open source license fees you're going to be restricted on what you can actually license out and how you can recognize the profit so you just sort of have to understand what you're using and what the limitations are is that a job the way that you often are thinking about the tools that you use at certain points um yeah that's pretty much the accepted definition of how open source works I was particularly wondering about the implications for the project they could be used by specific theaters for specific productions because one of the things that we've been talking about is whether there are ways for individual theaters to then make slight adaptations or modifications to decide where they're at for the particular productions that we're trying to promote if just for argument's sake hypothetically will they produce chat duty hypothetically and we took the video game and did something very specific like superimposed the face of the actor playing Mace into the game that would be terrible and we wouldn't do it but just as an example and then we used that for the purposes of promoting and enhancing our own show that modification would then also be open source so if another theater wanted to use our version of it it would be a crisis in the head shape so we're talking about open source as it applies to the underlying code structure the content is a different issue Carnegie Mellon's agreement with his students is kind of unique in it applies to all client-based projects it's a mutual license to the material so in theory Chris may own it and the students may own it which means that the students could build upon that in some theoretical universe and do something with it but Chris would have the right to go off and do what he wanted to do with it as well so as long as in your example in a theoretical sense if you ever do a production of JV you would go to Chris and you would say to Chris we want to put a face to replace this character if Chris says it was okay he has the right to do that because he owns that instance of this game Chris could add modifications to it if he wishes because he also owns it but so could the students in theory but also I agree with your point it's important to understand electronic arts made a game based on Lord of the Ramies and they used open source to make the programming for that game it doesn't mean they waived any rights to the story it just means the programming how I kill you and all the other stuff might be open source the story itself is absolutely protectable and it's not waived so you need to distinguish between the programming and the story per se right and that's a good example I was at EA when they did the Lord of the Ramies game and the arrangement was the license was very restrictive they could take these story elements to this release if they wanted to take those story elements and do a new version they had to adjust the basic template of the agreement because the Tolkien Estate owns all of that you know even if EA had done a new rendering of Gandalf new drawing, new illustration they were agreeing that the rights to that illustration would sort of roll up into the Tolkien Estate that they were only granting the single use of that content in that product yeah this content and tools are really two separate views that's very helpful for us to hear I think here in the theatre world let me add another element which is the public, the community when we were talking about Lin's project we were talking about the idea of I think the right term for it is crowd sourcing right is allowing the community to contribute maybe, maybe not well that's one question that I have what is crowd sourcing is it a different thing to just allow the community to contribute elements to the work that men and the students are making is that what crowd sourcing is? is crowd sourcing something different? Tony can you define that for us? I don't know what crowd sourcing is I can tell you what the law is crowd sourcing is essentially sourcing information from a crowd so pulling and gathering information rather than content so let's go back to you in Lin's example the autobiography was allowed to be contributed to and I could write the first chapter I wouldn't need Lin's permission to write the first chapter there would be a slot on the website and let's just say for our example chapter and we get posted up and we all could read it so let's go through some different scenarios it's important to understand that copyright protection only attaches to something that's fixed so if I go around and say what's your favorite movie what's the most important aspect to you and I write these down you don't want to copyright any of that you could maybe sue me for idea of that possibly it's not copyrighted it's not anything in any tangible form there are exceptions if I record you different story but I'm technically the person that's recording it so I own the copyright that's a trick that most people don't get so if I go in and you make a UGC video and I tape you in it I own the copyright you don't know if you wrote the script maybe you own the script and this is the derivative of it but the person that recorded it technically is the owner of the copyright there are other rights involved outside of that it's not a copyright the second thing that's important to understand with copyright it only applies to expression it doesn't apply to facts and things like that so if I did a crowd source that's what I thought it was what would you like to see in these different elements if I got little nuggets from everybody I don't think that anybody would have rights in that as a whole I took it back I synthesized it and put it together right on the rights now it's switched here it's worked on by multiple people and it's going to morph and change and we're going to let people add to it this is tricky because under the copyright law there's a concept of joint ownership and so if you and I agree at the beginning stages that we're going to both contribute to our work what the law is is that both of us have the right to exploit the whole work as long as we're interested that you weren't creating a standalone Star Wars book but if we were writing chapters that was meant to be one more the law is without an agreement that each of us has the right to exploit the whole work without permission from the other person what I owe the other person is a royalty for their particular contribution so that's one of the reasons that it's so important when you have these types of collaborations that there's an agreement expressing because imagine if you and I had a five of us contributed to a book we all had rights but there was no agreement and I decided I wanted to give it away for free can't stop me you get no royalty from me because I made no money on it and so it's very important at the beginning stages that we dictate how this can be shared how the royalties are split is there a non-compete who's going to own what you'll notice now if you're an employee within the scope of your employment so I hired you to make this programming for me and you're my employee I technically own it I don't need an agreement it makes sense right I've paid you to do this and create it for me if you're an accounting and I'm asking you to comment on this I didn't pay you to comment on my work you're doing this outside of the scope I need an agreement and they call that a work for hire agreement usually the company tries to assess the ownership of it that's the aspect question about go ahead I want to ask a question with regards to that are you familiar with the Johnny Cash project keep going it's a Johnny Cash song in which artists are invited to animate individual cells and the music video is a combination of all of those individual cells so it really is truly a collaborative project in that instance I would like to ask who would own it well I would imagine if they were smart they would have had an agreement to allow all artists to waive the rights and if they don't then anybody that contributed technically has an ownership piece in it a joint owner has the unfettered right to distribute it without an agreement otherwise related question about Princess Music and other copyrighted elements that the team or Chris may say oh well I like this particular song whatever in this project how would you handle that okay so music is really tough there's a whole separate copyright law that applies to the realm of music that applies to anything else it's important to understand so I can go and I can record we are the champions I can sing we are the champions on stage now and I could not consume for it you know I they could not stop me from doing it they could throw them some royalty but they don't have approval rights it's called mechanic license in some instances I can record it put it on a record and I have to pay them statutory fees for that that's easy the minute goes beyond recording and I'm putting it into a play now I'm changing the dynamics substantially and it's not covered under that negotiated license so technically I have to go to the artist and use it as theatrical work and it's going to be this scene I'm going to have to technically go to permission and that's going to be negotiated in a case by case basis unless I can argue that it's fair use so it's relevant to the format it's relevant and fair use is a very difficult one but there are examples where I could use something in the case of parody without permission you think about the pretty woman song who then comes out with it puts a slightly different tone on it they're able to claim that it wasn't copyrighted but Roy Averson wasn't able to do it because it was done in the context where it was using it for a different expression or a parody so if you took We Are the Champions and you put it to some type of school where it was relevant to the subject matter you might be able to argue that it's fair use without permission but it's a pop I don't lack my role in that one if a I'm not a lawyer is that if if anything that we produce we use music that's either available or is not we don't need to get from I forget what the term is for the music it's something that they have some type of open source or it's actually it's rights managed right if we hand the final entity over to Chris and a theater, some random theater decides to do a production and wants to add We Are the Champions to that play of the game on their website I'm suspecting that they'd have to go get the rights for that probably if I was in that group I'd say let's make a couple phone calls to see where our rights ended there's a great saying in the law it's better to ask forgiveness than for permission so first thing I would do is go to my lawyer and say do I have an argument under fair use do I have some type of argument only after that would I go and ask for permission because if they say no I mean once you go and ask for permission you're screwed I have one more question and then I'd love to open it up to you all if you have any other questions one of the most confusing and sort of entertaining conversations I've ever had with a literary agent was about this project when I got a call from an agent and he was trying to understand what this essentially commissioning was what it meant to compensate a writer for contributing some content to something that was collaboratively created by this whole wonderful group of students what exactly how one determines how much a writer would be paid for that how much of the product the writer owns our conventional notion of royalties then were and ultimately we both ended up going this is totally new territory and we don't really know we're back to the expectations that we bring in are from on our side conventional the actual world and so we realized that we didn't even really have enough of a common vocabulary to translate our expectation as artists to the reality of what we were trying to create collaboratively with these students tracking this project out some of those questions as we get further along but we did start with a standard understanding a standard theatrical understanding of what commission is and we decided that we think this is really good work and we don't want it to be good work we want it to be on par with anything that they would be commissioned to write for any regional theater in America so we're going to set that bar here and give a commission to the playwrights and we envisioned it in two parts that part of their work and part of their commission would be paid once they did the original work which is the work process they did with Chris and Dana and that section of it and then we saw the second half of it as the collaborative end the continued collaboration between the playwright and the team as it began to inch towards an actual product but we really did some of the questions of what happens at this royalty and what are royalties and from a playwright's point of view I think I was very invested in the playwright owning as much as possible and I know that's not the final answer because it's not a final product as we're used to in theater that the playwright owns it and the playwright really receives a renumeration from multiple productions of it but that's actually not the model it is a totally new model and so that part of this research and development project is that we will answer these questions as we kind of bump into them and find out what the actual circumstances are you know it's I was talking to Dana earlier about this one way to think about the piece of software let's take Chris's game as a good example there is this document that Chris created we call it a design document in the game development world it's sort of the equivalent of the manuscript of the play and then what the students are sort of doing is akin to designing a set in a traditional production environment and then what we're doing legally is somehow marrying that single production set to the manuscript for air and therefore it is exactly as you've described Ion and Lenny model applies to that you know I was going to say theater is so antiquated and how they handle this and it's a different beast than other areas I mean if you really want to look at the most polished model you look at the television or movie studio so somebody comes up with a piece of the audience over a certain amount you could structure this in a million different ways I think the first question is ownership and then you shouldn't get too caught up on ownership because there's also a second equally important term which is license and so what I do a lot of work with television studios and one of the things we have to think through is co-productions am I putting the money out in the first instance am I commissioning the work for you ownership component in a different sliding scale on merchandise and everything else that goes with it and there's been a lot of learning in that space to see how different shows have gone so it's much more sophisticated but it's a different beast too and I wouldn't say it's got its problems as well economically I think the truth is the playwright should own quite a bit but so should the party that put the money up in the first instance and then there is a way to have a price license back and forth so you know first premieres exploitation second runs things like this and then you could put a space on it but then if the studio actually if the theater also put up they should share some of the benefit from other productions as well you know if they actually pushed it so it's an interesting balance an interesting dance that I see in a lot of different industries in the gaming industry makes more money than Hollywood the reason is because they don't pay the developers anything and so in the television industry it's frigging broke because you're paying these actors unbelievable salaries that you can't recoup so you've got to think through your cost a little better in this theater industry I think you guys are on the cusp of something new in a new way of thinking and there's ways to structure the payments in such a way where ownership is vested in one party the other party ownership is great it's not important the real question is what are the rights that they have from a license back or something else where the theater having it so the real issue is what are the thresholds under which both parties start to repudish additional compensation benefits and what are the exploitation rights are they limited to first runs and then to geographic areas what are going to be the revenue splits that's where I think that this is the right area and there's a lot of other industries that you guys can use to learn from other questions for Tony or Chris or Karen I have one from Twitter at JD Carter says the other exception is under creative commons can you ask about that so I think we're trying to get at what content how content is managed under something like creative commons might be used in this and talking about how things like that work I don't know enough about creative commons so I would be scared to say fair answer I don't I think I have a Twitter it's an ad so I can read you what Twitter creative commons describes itself as if that would help creative commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others consistent with the rules of copyright and actual symbols that means copyright law applies they're leaving it to you guys to figure that out copyright law applies with these exceptions remember I could write the next chapter Lord of the Rings and no one could stop me if I'm not selling it if I'm doing it for a class project there's a whole fair use component copyright law is really one of the hardest areas to do a black and white the minute I start to exploit that work I got big problems but if I'm doing it and posting it here's how I think what would happen after Star Wars and I wanted to write it and I put it out there you'd have a hard time coming after me until I tried to exploit it there was the God with the wind scenario where they wrote a different perspective had that just been written for a project and it wasn't exploited you wouldn't have a problem they could have tried to complain but I think at the end of the day they would have had a fair use argument possibly the minute they tried to exploit that they got a different game happening because you start to fall out of the fair use a little more so if this creative comments is merely for people putting it up and the sole purpose is to get creative justice flowing and to get people thinking and stuff they might be fine, they want to take that and publish it in a book then we go back into copyright that fundamentally is how creative comments works in the wild I listen to a lot of podcasts that are creative comments and the disclaimer at the end is you can share this, you can quote it you just can't sell it the enthusiast generated content on the web is done under creative comments so details about fantasy worlds are growing by the day as different individuals fill in another little corner of some imaginary world that's all under creative comments in most of those cases and that to me feels like the phenomenon I'm already aware of on the web that's most like Lynn's project it's tricky though because my experience is once a thing like that I guarantee somebody's coming out of the woodwork saying where's my share and that's just the nature of human beings and so I love to see the contract where I do this with blogs when I do a blog policy I make it clear, whenever you upload you're waiving all your rights in here don't understand there's no copyright I don't want anything copyright, you're putting it up you're waiving your rights because I want to be clear at the beginning you've given me the rights to do so and I don't have to then come back and all of a sudden hit it and have to worry about somebody coming up and saying you know I gave you that I told you to turn the world orange instead of the little there are creative comments based on four rights one that you cannot give up is attribution if you share my work you have to say I'm the one who created it the second one is redistribution you're allowed to look at it and you can share it the third one is whether you can change it and the third one is whether you can include it in something that is commercial and you pick which one of the three options you want and it produces a license for you that's good public health is going on in the arts and the term is going viral I think Chris mentioned that it has a whole different connotation for me of health a positive one here at the same time you can go viral it's out of control and so if you're looking at all the things you put in place for protection and use and autonomy and all of that if something out there that it is out there then what you know it doesn't stop you from going after it the problem is it's whack-a-mole it's like the biggest mistake I think that happened in the last I don't know 10 years is going down because they had everybody at one place they should have figured out how to license that model not shut it down because once you did that it's off shore and now years later Apple actually arose from this because it was finally a model that could make some money off of and so you have to be really careful before you start shutting down things to have an alternative I went over to Indonesia for a while and I rewrote their copyright law and I'll make the bridge in a second they had the MPAA there and you know I was given a speech to the judges on why it was important to have the tech copyrights like and the MPAA was incredibly silent from other times I asked him I would have thought you'd be a lot more vocal he said well we learned our lesson here he said originally we got Reagan to tell the president at the time to fix the copyright problem and only as an Indonesian he turned to the general and he said fix it the next day it was fixed they went into every place that had movies and they destroyed all the VHS tapes and he said overnight it was gone but what happened was a whole other market popped up as a result so they had these VCDs at the time because people were going to find a way to watch these movies and they killed the one way they had and they learned their lesson and they said we don't want to touch a market until we can figure out how to supplement and fix it and so it's always been a great lesson so before you go and shut down a major hub let's think through what are the implications of that because people are going to get it but you do get to some point where it's just not worth the money you've lost it it's gone almost openly and it's part of this project this conversation will continue as we go along at critical points to find out what are the issues in front of us bringing together people who care as we sort of bump into various stages of this project and trying to take this project from the playwright and to theaters to the public so it's part of our mission is a continuing dialogue about all of these issues at the various stages yeah and to that end as we wrap up here I want to encourage everybody to keep the conversation going we should be sending out a follow-up email in a couple days so please if you'd like to stay involved in the conversation reply to that email make sure that we've got your information and we can keep you up to date because we would love to continue to you know share what we learn and hear questions and reflections and ideas from you all as well so I want to thank you so much to the students to the playwright Karen, Chris and Tony this has been fantastic and thank you all for coming