Relationships between Movies and DVD extras

I’ve been looking at the extras provided on DVDs for a while. They are good examples of how a storyworld is elaborated in another text. A couple I’d like to mention, for their unique and intriguing elaborations are:

Punch Drunk Love, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002

The Incredibles, directed by Brad Bird, 2004

In the later, Incredibles, the film has a scene in which the mother rings up to find out how the babysitter is going with her baby son. The mother hears lots of messages and screaming on the phone but does not know what happens. In the DVD extras is a short animated film: Jack-Jack Attacks. The short film is the POV of the babysitter. Besides being hilarious, it is an excellent example of how the narrative landscape burst over the edges of a single-text.

The former, Punch Drunk Love, experiments with a narrative elaboration too, but in a slightly different manner. The DVD provides an extra that is a short film. At first it seems like the short film is an edited down version of the film; but then it becomes clear that they are scenes from the film that are shot from slightly different angles. This is another POV, literally.

Two interesting examples of narrative elaboration across texts. Let me know of any you think of.

Another Model continues

A model that I look at closely for my developing list of design elements for cross-media stories is that of ARGs (alternate reality games). There are two books on the subject and recently, an interview with ‘puppet-masters’ Elan Lee and Sean Stewart at Cultural Gutter.

Gosney, J. (2005) Beyond Reality: a Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming, Thomson Course Technology PTR, Boston, MA.

Szulborski, D. (2005) This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (2nd Digital Edition), Lulu.

Munroe, J. (2005) ‘The Sociable Horde’, The Cultural Gutter, [Online]

Modeling Cross-media

I’m looking at a few different models to use for inspiration in the creation of my cross-media model. One of them is military systems. The Future Combat System is a “joint (across all the military services) networked (connected via advanced communications) system of systems (one large system made up of 18 individual systems, the network, and most importantly, the Soldier)”. It has four ‘building blocks’: the System-of-Systems Common Operating Environment (SOSCOE); Battle Command (BC) Software; communications and computers (CC); and intelligence, reconnaissance and survelliance (ISR) systems. I view a cross-media work (a franchise, enhanced television, reality tv, ARG and so on) as a system, indeed, a polysystem. There are some interesting correlations:

The Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) network allows the FCS Family-of-Systems (FoS) to operate as a cohesive system-of-systems where the whole of its capabilities is greater than the sum of its parts.

Check out the videos on website, you will not believe that it is a serious site and not a game (I wonder who they’re marketing to?). It is getting harder to tell the difference between America’s Army and the actual army.