Synopsis: The 5D Conference, which focuses on immersive design and world building, might just change the way stories are told. Jawbone.tv talks to 5D co-founders Alex McDowell and Tali Krakowsky to find out more.
Not so terribly long ago, the entertainment world – much like the real world – was believed to be flat. Stories revolved around the known confines of radio, film, television and print. Narrative in a neat and tidy package.
Then came video games, 3D animation, and a divinity called Internet. No more flat.
Soon, story realized it didn’t have to follow the path previously carved. It began to migrate, jumping between websites and living spaces as easily as tubes and projectors, stretching and contorting the established laws of narrative until the tidy package unraveled completely.
Today, writers, producers, directors, programmers, studios, news outlets and corporations are involved in heated debate over the pending shape of the new entertainment world. And at times it can get ugly.
Those who own much of the old world of storytelling want it to remain flat. Those who believe all entertainment should be free want it to be upside down. And many of those who actually create the stories are intent on forging entirely new methodologies.
It is this latter group that’s of interest here, and their movement towards a community that might just galvanize their cause: 5D.
5D could be labeled a design conference, but its themes and motives are difficult to confine to anything so singular. It’s a distributed conference, with global events ‘piggy-backed’ onto others (typically in the form of discussion panels), where they focus on the narrative potential of ‘Immersive Design’ and ‘World Building’ – two relatively new terms that aren’t the easiest thing to get your head around.
Immersive Design is a creative process that uses digital tools to create virtual environments for deep collaboration. It simulates both the conditions of production and of user or audience experience. Ultimately, it’s all about getting back to the childlike place where imagination rules and the creator is a sort of de facto test user.
As Tali Krakowsky, 5D founding member and Director of Experience Design at WET (www.wetdesign.com), puts it, "It’s not just a visualization tool for clients. It's a working environment. A community of collaborators can both design and experience the space. Transforming the way you design places, ultimately transforms the places you end up designing."
Replace Krakowsky’s "spaces" and “places” with "films" or "games” and you get a sense as to how the immersive can be transposed onto pretty much any medium, with ‘World Building’ as the end product of the immersion, a fully realized universe in which narratives can thrive.
It's perhaps no coincidence that the profession tasked with creating narrative visual worlds for cinema – production design – is at the core of the 5D movement.
Alex McDowell, who helped create the filmic worlds of the Crow, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fight Club, Minority Report, and most recently The Watchmen, is 5D’s founder and co-director.
"The base of 5D came about from Minority Report, where we had to bring together a group of scientists and designers to invent a new world because Steven Spielberg wanted a more reality based future,” says McDowell. “That set in motion a work practice designed to truly create a future world, and a dialogue that I got hooked on, because we were empowered to go outside the film industry and start really talking to creative people in other industries."
McDowell kept in touch with a lot of those involved with the film, which led to his becoming an advisor at the University Art Museum of Long Beach, and chair of the technology committee at the Art Director's Guild. That, in turn, led to the idea for an event focused on propelling their newfound methods, which would become the first 5D conference in 2008.
