Media Labs: what you need to know

James Clarke

James has written about film and filmmaking for the magazines 3D Artist, 3DWorld, Moviescope and Empire. As a writer he has also worked with American and British educational publishers Journeys in Film and Edusites.

James has written and produced a range of short films for the British Council and his recent projects include a documentary for BBC Radio 3.

James is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and as an educator he has taught at the London Film School, the University of Gloucestershire, Hereford College of Arts and at the University of Warwick.

As a screenwriter and producer, James’s short film work has screened on TV and at a range of film festivals internationally.

James’s books include The Year of the Geek (Aurum Press), Bodies in Heroic Motion: The Cinema of James Cameron (Columbia University Press) and The Virgin Film Guide: War Films.

@jasclarkewriter

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First published in the UK in 2019 by

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Media Labs; what you need to know copyright © 2019 James Clarke

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978-0-993220-76-0 (print version)

978-0-9566329-8-2 (ebook version)

SUPERNOVA BOOKS

MEDIA LABS

what you need to know

by

James Clarke

Acknowledgements

Every book is a team effort and so my great thanks to Cheryl Robson for inviting me to become part of this project and for all of her support and guidance throughout. Thanks, too, to those who took the time to speak with me for this book. Particular thanks must go to Carrie Mok at Outpost Visual Effects Studio in Bournemouth and to Jamie Stonehouse for his ever-present encouragement and good vibes.

This book is for everyone out there who is engaged in the challenge of bringing their creative ambitions

and hopes to life.

We are at a time where it’s the most abundant, dynamic, and complicated communications system in human history and the artists are showing up again to help us make sense of the ways that it’s disrupting our sense of reality.

– Kamal Sinclair, Director,

Sundance Film Festival, New Frontier Labs Program, Sundance Institute

Contents

Introduction

Setting up a Media Lab

Disrupting the Norm

Digital Diversity

Getting Started

New Models of Collaboration

Digital Content Creation: Games

Funding for Games

Funding for Films

How to apply to a Media Lab

Media Labs in the UK

Film Festivals & Media Labs in N. America

Film Festivals and Media Labs in Europe

Media Labs around the world

How to enter a festival

Film Festivals in the UK

Platforms

Checklist for Creative Entrepreneurs

Get Connected

References

Index

Images

Introduction

Back in 1978, Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab correctly predicted the coming together of three separate industries, namely: (1) the broadcast and motion picture industry, (2) the print and publishing industry and (3) the computer industry. In 1987, Stewart Brand published a book titled The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT which tells the story of the MIT Media Lab and how it was set up to collect, process and lead our understandings of the ways in which communication technologies could and would be redefined.

The book pulses with a sense of excitement and fascination at the prospect of how digital technology might be developed over the next thirty years and applied across the media, computing and communications industries. Reading the book now, it is remarkable how many of Brand’s insights and investigations have led the way to the digital world we inhabit today.

In 2018, YouTube announced that it had launched a free, streaming ad-supported feature film service for audiences. This marked yet another moment of disruption to the traditional media landscape of distribution and exhibition. The term ‘disruption’ has been a feature of the new technology giants which have emerged over the last thirty years. It’s a word that speaks to breaking rules, challenging norms (of inclusion, representation and access) and shifting the status quo.

In an article published in Filmmaker magazine (2013), David Rosen made the observation that:

As digital disruption continues to remake the media landscape, a new viewing experience will take shape. It will be determined by interactive, mobile devices that – like the movie theater and TV set before it – will further redefine the definition and experience of viewing a movie.

For content makers, it’s not simply a question of making a movie – and paying back one’s investors – but ensuring that as many people see your content as possible via the numerous channels on offer. Keeping up with the advances in digital technology is a challenge in itself as movie distribution is undergoing a major technological shift. The DVD is dying, movie theatre ticket sales in the USA and Europe have stalled and cable cord-cutting is increasing. Streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have market dominance, and with Alfonso Cuarón’s movie Roma (distributed by Netflix) winning major awards, they are proving themselves a match for the older models in terms of quality, too. The possibilities and challenges for established broadcasters that now reside in the brave new world of streaming content is acute and in February 2019, the BBC and ITV announced a new joint platform named BRITBOX which will comprise box-set series and, critically, new programme content in an effort to attract new viewers to their platform.

New forms of movie-making are emerging too, made with handheld mobile devices – a medium that invites interactive multitasking, social engagement, but also greater emphasis on a new aesthetic with faster cuts and tighter close-ups." [1]

The worlds of both filmmaking and gaming now offer exciting opportunities for creatives to enter the field with little need for investment in expensive equipment or a massive outlay in training.

Of the culture of disruption in relation to gaming, Steven Poole in The Spectator magazine made the observation in his review of a newly launched exhibition entitled ‘Video Games: Design / Play / Disrupt’, at the V & A Museum in London that:

The exhibition as a whole becomes a lot more interesting, indeed, once it focuses on such arthouse and experimental games. A whole room on videogames as political interventions, in particular, highlights the developers making games that critique the mainstream industry’s overwhelming and long-standing sexism and obsession with violence. [2]

It’s not a new observation to make but it’s increasingly valid and it’s this – the line between narrative fiction film and gaming is becoming increasingly fluid.

In the UK, BAFTA is facilitating a whole range of gaming-focused support and networks. In doing so, the organisation embodies the connection between the screen media of film and tv and computer gaming and, indeed, VR.

In 2019, the BBC and Arts Council England, launched a new scheme entitled New Creatives. An England-wide initiative, it attests to the mainstream media’s recognition of how creative potential needs further support especially to attract people from a much broader range of backgrounds:

New Creatives will give artists aged 16-30 the chance to develop their technical and creative skills and have work commissioned for BBC platforms. The program will particularly focus on giving opportunities to young artists from backgrounds that are currently underrepresented in the arts and broadcasting. Commissioned artists will be encouraged to push creative boundaries, reach new audiences and reflect their experiences of living in Britain today.

David Banner, who has worked in game design for

25 years, and who established the Wales Development Game Show, commented in The Daily Telegraph newspaper in 2017 of the current creative zeitgeist that it means you don’t have to be based only in London or Los Angeles in order to develop and generate gaming content.

This book hopes to go some way in suggesting how and where you might find the opportunities to develop your own creative lives and how to do this within the worlds of the media lab and its variations.

Against this backdrop of vivid change and evolution, the world of the media lab, as a talent and project development support process, for both filmmakers and game developers, arguably takes on newfound significance.

What is a Media Lab ?

A useful way of understanding the term is to define it as

a safe space within which creative content makers are able to experiment and develop their unique personal vision.

Engaging in creative work is a testing experience that can prove unnerving and there is often a binding together of the work itself and a creative individual’s own sense of self.

The cultures and worlds of the media lab (diverse and global) are also unified by fundamental key impulses – impulses which belong to a much older tradition of nurturing, supporting and guiding talent and their creative ambitions. So, go and introduce yourself: be bold and send out a speculative, and politely worded, email. Then, if you don’t hear back six weeks later, send another, just as a gentle reminder.

Media Lab Culture

Globally, media lab culture has a foothold that continues to evolve in exciting ways. In America, there are both urban and rural media lab opportunities. Scholar Atau Tanaka has noted that:

Europe has led the field in the area of media arts centres. The Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz and the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe are forerunners in the field. C3 in Budapest was funded for a period of 10 years by the Soros Foundation before becoming self-sustaining. MCD magazine’s special issue, ‘Media Labs in Europe’ describes the present landscape with topical essays as well as presentations of over 40 labs and artist groups. …In North America, Canada has traditionally been a leader in the field with local and national support for media arts centres. [3]

In her survey and examination of media lab history for the Arts Council in the UK, Charlotte Frost explains that:

Though the term ‘lab’ conjures the image of a fairly sanitised environment optimised for scientific experiments and populated by people in white coats, media labs – centres for creative experimentation – are quite different. At their most basic, they are spaces – mostly physical but sometimes also virtual – for sharing technological resources like computers, software and even perhaps highly expensive 3D printers; offering training; and supporting the types of collaborative research that do not easily reside elsewhere.

This book explores the range of media lab models and delivery that are available for creative content makers internationally. While many see their role as facilitating the disruption of traditional businesses, others regard them as a place for artistic and scientific experimentation. The authors at www.whatisamedialab.com offer this helpful definition:

Media labs are minimal, but increasingly powerful, spaces in many contemporary settings. They appear in universities and colleges, wedged uneasily between traditional departments and faculties. They’re also in basements, warehouses, strip malls and squats... As part of the historical avant-gardes, media arts labs were the sites where the new materials and aesthetics of technical modernity were developed. They often share a common ideology, tied not just to the neoliberal drive to privatise, innovate and disrupt, but to longstanding modernist ideas about creative destruction, quantification and the value of scientificity. [4]

The liminality referred to in this definition speaks to the potential for creatives to move their services and products between different places, often preferring to be on the periphery rather than embedded within a big organisation.

In the UK Arts Council’s report ‘Why Creativity Matters’, Darren Henley writes that:

"In the public mind, creativity is often epitomised by the arts, but this can lead to a narrow impression of what creativity is. People tend to think that artists spend their days performing a kind of