Michael Naimark
ARTSlabs; New York, NY; USA

Francis Coppola gets credit for saying that shooting a film is the last part of the filmmaking process, not the first. This was during his pioneering work in the early 1980s, using computers and video to help "pre-visualise" a movie. It began with a written treatment, then storyboards, script and a recorded reading, like a radio play. At that point the storyboards (substituting for the actual film footage) and the audio recording (substituting for the actual soundtrack) could be combined on video tape, and voila! a "proto-film" was in place. Storyboards could be added and modified; the soundtrack could be scored; effects could be simulated. The reason for pre-visualisation was, of course, to minimise the risk of anything going wrong during actual filming. When a movie production closes off several city blocks, enlists scores of crew and extras and pays superstars millions of dollars, things had better go right.

Seymour Papert, co-founder (with Marvin Minsky) of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and inventor of the famous LOGO programming language for children, gets credit for encouraging risk-taking and mistake-making in creative programming. "Microworlds" (which became almost synonymous with "virtual reality") expressed his vision that the artificial worlds inside the computer are simulations, where anything can happen without the consequences encountered in the real world. Microworlds are places where children can try new things, where itís okay to fail. This is indeed how learning happens. Risk can be maximised in microworlds.

Herein lies an apparent distinction between old media and new media ideology. In the late 1980s, I directed a production of the Apple Multimedia Lab's flagship project, the Visual Almanac. I was the guy caught in the middle between a highly motivated and creative group of new media designers and the gregarious but steely professionals at several production facilities. The designers wanted to keep playing and trying new things and the production people wanted solid milestones and deadlines. I finally declared to both groups my observation that, in the film community, it's better to be wrong than flaky and in the computer community, it's better to be flaky than wrong. Incredibly, both parties agreed. They seemed to wear their otherwise demeaning labels with pride.

I get deep satisfaction from watching dreams achieve some form of completion. One reason is simple resourcefulness (the Visual Almanac went horribly over time and budget). But the main reason is to be part of a shared experience that goes beyond hand-waving. I'm not a stickler on this: a study, a demo and a simulation all contain aspects of completion. But a joke I shared with my colleagues at Interval Research was my definition of a "project" - anything with a beginning, a middle and an end.

The trick, it seems to me, is to develop a sense of calculated risk, even if on an intuitive level. If I were to ask you to flip a coin and get ten heads in a row, you might, but it would be pretty foolish to bet on it, with odds of 1,024 to one. If I were to ask you to take an eleventh step forward in the middle of a big open field, it would be no sweat, as the risk of something stopping you would be near zero. This isn't rocket science.

I often ask colleagues and students involved in experimental production how many new innovations they hope to achieve and how many they think would be realistic given their resources. There are almost always some who say they have six new, exciting things they want to do, and can only afford to do four, but insist on doing the six anyway. These project members are lucky to complete three of their innovations. Those who are more grounded in their expectations often accomplish more than expected. Thomas Brown, Coppola's original director of electronic cinema, was fond of calling this "jamming time".

Then there are personal issues. A colleague, in the heat of an unrealistic new media project that continued for months, once told me she woke up every morning with a feeling of dread in the pit in her stomach, knowing she had way too much to do that day. And she knew she'd go to bed feeling a sense of frustration and failure. (Friends, before concluding Iím talking about you - I've heard this more than once.) I prefer getting up in the morning feeling well rested and ready to roar through a new day full of challenges, but realistic ones.

Be crazy. Take chances. Explore the unknown. Break new ground. These are weird, exciting, challenging times. We have bold new tools. We have new media and we have new messages. But look and listen, read the ground. The greatest breakthroughs usually happen in bold leaps made from a firm footing.

Michael Naimark has "movie-mapped" Aspen from the street, Paris from the sidewalk, San Francisco from the air, Karlsruhe from the rail, and Banff from hiking trails, and has filmed stereo-panoramic experiments in Jerusalem, Dubrovnik, Angkor, and Timbuktu. He is currently working with VR, webcams and the internet.

Please note minor corrections were made to the text on 18th July 2005

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