GATEWAYGATEWAYTHETHEEntertainmentStudio|StrangerThanFictionFall,Winter,Spring2022-23|UCLAAUDIDEASNatashaSandmeier,NathanSu,LiamDenhamer
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This may sound silly, but I like to wonder what people would have for breakfast–which people, as their breakfasts would be different–and where they would get those food items, and whether or not they would say a prayer over them, and how they would pay for them, and what they would wear during that meal, and, if cooked, how, and what sort of bed they would have arisen from, and what else they might be doing while having the breakfast–talking to someone (who), in person or on a device (what?), and who would be allowed to do that, and what they might feel safe in saying. Breakfast can take you quite far.
– Margaret Atwood
THE GATEWAY
Margaret Atwood’s practice of worldbuilding starts from a point of intimate experience (the breakfast table) as a means to outline a world within a familiar yet tightly constrained context. She builds the narrative of breakfast from a deep understanding and memory of having taken part in many breakfasts (even thousands) throughout her life. The Entertainment Studio will embody Atwood’s quote and methodology to frame the way we collectively think about, design and build worlds. Filmmakers, production designers, and writers all have their own methodology for building worlds and stories. But one aspect rings true of the most successful of these artists, which is that the worldbuild begins with what we know and uses that as the crux from which all other questions about the world are answered. As viewers, audience members and participants, we require grounding in order to fully embrace and immerse oneself within a narrative. This crux is what we are calling the gateway. Our gateway will be the room.
Breakfast on the Bagger, from the What's for Breakfast seminar 2021: students, Takin Daneshmir, Willie Wu, Luying Xu
The room will act as a gateway in countless ways this year. It will be a space, much like Jeff Wall’s A View From an Apartment designed and lived to portray a moment in time, it will be a room, like Hitchcock’s Rear Window from which we look out to speculate at the unfolding narratives beyond, or as in Spike Jonze’s film Her, a space in which we fall in love to a being that is simultaneously in the room with us, and in thousands, if not millions of other rooms. It may be a room, like the bedroom in Chris Nolan’s Interstellar that we travel to the ends of the universe just to get back inside, or it may be the room that travels with us as we move across the country looking for work in an Amazon fulfillment center as in Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland.
In Andy Warhol’s Factory, the room was a space of cultural production, the output of which was as much the art as it was celebrity. This year, you decide where your room takes you, what media it opens into, and how it draws in your audience.
4 Stills from Incognito, a film from Stranger Than Fiction 2020 stu dents, Alekya Malladi, Gesthima ni Roumpani, Yanrong Yang
Your room, my room, the room in which you are reading this, is the gateway to an almost infinite set of narratives and worlds. Much like the 16th Century cabinets of curiosity, Andy’s room in Toy Story, or the living room in the film Parasite, the familiarity of your rooms will act as the departure point for your narratives. Rooms are the spaces within which life and its stories unfold. The room contains those stories - whether through the objects that have been used for years, revealing the wear and tear of repetitive use, or through the live experiences that have taken place there.
The room also projects outwards into the universe beyond its walls. Today’s rooms, more than the rooms of any other time and generation, also contain the technologies that are themselves the gateways to even more narratives and mediated worlds. Every single room today operates exactly like the cupboard in Narnia. Every object has the capacity to tell its own story, whether it is the history of the hands that have held it, or whether it reveals to us the entire story of its manufacturing, distribution and use, in short, the story of the entire global supply chain. Our rooms are universes of information and narratives.
THE STUDIO
Still from Wander: Landscapes of Change 2022 students, Maira Yasir and Yuxin Tian
Tech & Innovation
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During the final quarter of the program, we will see the narrative (film, game, XR experience) fleshed out and developed in its final form, alongside a plan for delivering it to its ultimate audience. We will push for hyper-real definition and seamless compositing of digital assets into real-world scenarios.
Projects in the Entertainment Studio rely on the research and development of technological and ecological issues of your world and story. Whether ultra-analog, or at the leading edge of high-tech, you will be asked to incorporate the science of your world into the myth and narrative of your realfiction. This interrellation between your hard research and your soft fictions, ensures one gives credence and authenticity to the other.
The program is a year-long program of study that is structured around 3 key concepts of visual storytelling.
* Teams will be asked to identify and apply to at least 3 film festivals and/or competitions following completion of the program.
The Brief & Course Objectives
Concept & World
Production & Audience
The crucial start of any story and worldbuild project is the framing of a concept alongside the design and development of its environment. You will establish your scenario and the world within which it sits. Emphasis will be placed on developing and fleshing out your world, its logics, characteristics and details. More than how it should look, you will develop it's behaviors in order to understand how to operate within it.
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If man sends another Voyager to the distant stars and it can carry only one film on board, that film might be ‘Baraka’.
Filmed over 14 months and released in 1992, Ron Fricke’s Baraka is a non-narrative documentary that compiles footage shot from over 24 countries into a thematic visual symphony through themes of life, death, identity, labor and technology. The documentary approaches human existence on our planet from the perspective of ‘observational cinema’/’cinéma vérité’, where the camera is set up to not interfere with the world in an attempt to capture authentic and sometimes hidden realities.
To begin our fall quarter we will observe LA and nearby regions in SoCAL through the lens of our physical cameras - working collectively to produce ‘LABARAKA’. This will both be an opportunity to learn the city and its surroundings and a chance to familiarize yourselves with the cinematic toolkit available to us at IDEAS. Guided by a series of thematic prompts, we will capture scenes from our everyday contexts to find the strange, the extraordinary, the frightening and the beautiful in the city we all now live in. As a collective we will cut a visual and audio cross section through today’s world.
The way we read the world will be guided by careful decisions you make about your lens length, your composition and framing, the environmental lighting, whether subjects can see you, your sound recording, your framerate, your shutter angle, your color profile, and the movement of the camera. We will be using the two black magic cameras available to us at IDEAS, which come equipped with a full cinema lens kit, and are supplemented by a range of field recording microphones. You may also choose to augment the footage you collect with recordings from your personal devices and cameras, but our focus will be on curating a highly cinematic and immersive series of moving portraits of our city and so where the situation allows, we will seek the highest possible levels of visual and sonic quality.
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Fall Quarter | Sept 23 - Midterm Review
- Roger Ebert, Film Critic, 2008
PROJECT 1: LABARAKA
Still from Inland Odyssey, a film from Landscapes of Change 2022 students, Jerry Jiang, Haowen Jiang, Yiran Ye
Thematic prompts for your search might include: Highway Infrastructure Agricultural Produce Traffic (vehicle or pedestrian) Animal Life Animal Products Waste, Debris & Abandoned Objects Responses to the Weather Sensors & Surveillance
We will begin the quarter by watching Baraka together, accompanied by excerpts from other similar works including Samsara (Baraka’s sequel), the Qaatsi Trilogy, and Edward Burtynsky’s The Anthropocene. We will also as a collective examine, learn and practice with the cameras, lenses, microphones, sliders, tripods, and gimbals available to us at IDEAS. We will design as a group an archive format for sharing our shots on the IDEAS Server available to us.
Sacred Spaces/Events
For each shot you will also record metadata, as well as naming and describing the shot using a convention we establish together so that our collective archive is easy to search and filter.
SupplyWindowsof Goods
Urban Recreation
LABARAKA Schedule
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Weeks 1 & 2 - Fieldwork II: Cinematic Compositions
Working in small groups you will venture out into LA with your newfound tools and start collecting shots and sounds with a focus on finding specific compositions, places and times that reveal visually striking or unexpected perspectives on the city.
Observational Cinema + Toolkit Familiarisation
Over-consumption Commerce
Water Flows
Week 1 - Fieldwork I: Scouting
With sites and subjects of interest chosen within your scouting phase, you will return to document these at full quality with the cinematic camera gear. To ensure that we remain focused on cinematic compositions and also to enable all the shots to add to a studio archive we can all draw on later, any footage shot by the Black Magic Cameras will conform to some key specifications.
For supplemental shots taken with your personal equipment, try to match these specifications where possible. At the end of Field Work II, each individual should have collected 10 cinematic compositions and 10 sonic field recordings minimum.
Still from Fame Factory, 2022. By students, Nour Hassoun, Xinyue Ji, Rashika Jain
Week 4: The Edit - LABARAKA
As our archive builds up, we will also begin to process these shots through quick sketch exercises where you create short sequences of 3 shots with accompanying sound design that begin to juxtapose themes, suggest situations, or heighten our senses of curiosity or tension. These shots should be quick and exploratory and will draw on the ‘Kuleshov Effect’ described in montage theory, where the sequence in which we see shots can vastly impact the meaning we draw between them.
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Weeks 1-2: Parallel Processing - Kuleshov Sketches
Based on the content gathered and the interpretations made in weeks 1 & 2, our third week will give an opportunity to plan visits to gather footage and sounds from areas around LA. You will expand on the themes you have been documenting by researching locations where you may find compelling environments or events, and then schedule in shoot dates to go and capture these with your expanded knowledge and toolkit from weeks 1 & 2.
Week 3: Fieldwork III - Further Afield
Leading up to midterm, in small groups you will edit together a 3-5 minute short film using our collective archive of footage. It will be an opportunity to transform your observations into interpretations of our world, building meaning through the way you choose to cut, sequence and sound design your film. Taking cues from Baraka, these pieces will feature no narration, and should rely purely on visual content and contextual audio to communicate. This week will be an opportunity to build dexterity with editing software, as well as to experience workflows around post-production, including color grading, foley and time-ramping.
For scenes justifying true slow motion, 1920 x 1080 px (at 120 fps is possible)
ManufacturedSamsaraBarakaKoyaanisqatsi Landscapes NomadlandTheWatermarkAnthropocene
Each shot should have a duration of 30-60 seconds Footage should be shot in Black Magic Log
The shots must be recorded in Black Magic RAW, at 4096 x 2160 px (24 or 60 fps)
Camera movement will be restricted to locked off tripod shots, tripod pans/tilts, and automated slider shots
List of Cinematic References
Still from Everything Everywhere All At Once, directed by The Daniels, 2022.
Fall Quarter Part 2 | Building Your Unique World
The Fall midterm marks a shift in the year’s trajectory. The first half of the quarter was spent learning to shoot on site, getting to grips with the camera equipment at Ideas, building and editing a collective film, and learning what it means to think about a set, a world, and a context as a basis for a narrative to unfold.
From this point forward we move into the major and final project - whether that becomes a short film, a game design, an installation, performance, or mixed reality experience. Throughout the rest of the Fall Quarter you will focus on worldbuilding and carve out time to develop a world rich with details and unique characteristics.
PROJECT 2: UNTITLED
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Untitled, because it will be your world, your media, your story
We ask that your world begins in a room, your gateway.
By building the world & room before the narrative, we ask you to first establish a fully formed environment rich with the details of its history, its inhabitants, and rituals from which, later, multiple narratives can emerge. Understanding the logic of the world and its culture enables an audience to enter into that world and become a participant, not merely a passive observer. Once the room is established, it will lead us, through the narrative threads contained in all the objects within it, to the world beyond.
As a means to begin this conceptual work, re-read Margaret Atwood’s quote at the start of this brief and embrace the mindset of imagining the details that fill a room and environment. What follows are prompts that suggest small shifts and changes in the world that we know. These changes are at once seemingly irrelevant, but when imagined through the mindset of Atwood’s breakfast table, signal fundamental changes that can be instantly articulated in both the fine details of daily life, as well as the broad shifts that would occur at regional, and even global levels. Use the prompts that follow to imagine what your room and gateway would look like, what it would contain, how you would use it, move through it, and behave in and out of it.
Still from Ex Machina, directed by Alex Garland, 2015
Imagine a world without methane. Imagine a world with one language spoken by all. Imagine a world in which electronic devices make no sound at all, or one in which cameras cannot register eyes. Or a world in which strangers require more physical contact than friends and family. Imagine a world in which information continues to be shared by spoken words and images, but not in print. Imagine a world in which 80% of world leaders, in politics and corporations, are women, or one in which children have the right to vote.
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A World With & Without
Imagine a world in which we do not fear the dark. Imagine a world without religion, and the rituals, love, community, colonization, war and destruction it brought with it.
Imagine a world that does not value beauty. Or a world without clouds. What would it mean to live in a world in which humans could not hear? Or taste sweetness? Imagine a world with advanced carbon sequestration, or a world in which humans had greater compassion for those suffering mass tragedies. Imagine a world in which our every eye movement is tracked. A world in which humans no longer consume animal productshow would that inform your room and gateway? Imagine a world that only consumed animal products. A world that recognized the importance of not overfishing rivers, seas and oceans. A world without Netflix. A world in which we had no long ter m memory. A world with abundant wheat. A world in which architecture as a discipline does not exist, or the color green. A world in which humans communicate through touch.
Imagine a world without your phone. Imagine a world without your breakfast coffee and all of the industries it spawned, from the family farm in Costa Rica all the way to your morning cup. Imagine a world in which your calendar said there were only 25 days per month, 11 months per year. Or imagine a world in which we had large vibrating sound speakers embedded in every wall surface - what would that suggest? How would a world without the concept of personal property operate? Or a world without land ownership, nationality or money? Or a sky obscured by a thick blanket of cloud, eliminating the light and shadow of the sun. Imagine a world without bananas, banana ice cream, and banana republics. Imagine a world and room without the internet.
A nomad's predawn breakfast in the Inland Odyssey, 2022. A film by Jerry Jiang, Haowen Jiang, Yiran Ye
6 How are global economies/trade/supply affected? How do our artifacts and things in the room (or absent from) register this?
After midterm and equipped with the cinematic visions and contexts of LA from the first mini-project, we will begin research for the worlds that your final projects will take place in. We will start with a world-building case study. As individuals - you will choose from a list of fictional worlds (film, literature, games) and analyze the ways in which these are different from our own, and how these differences manifest.
In a world with/without X;
From here, each of you will bring your own world with and a world without provocations. For each, we will begin to research the answers to the following questions:
9 When were the key moments in history that defined this world with/without?
4 What jobs would emerge/disappear?
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2 How do our bodies adapt differently? How do we clothe our bodies, and negotiate our daily movements? How do we move across the room?
1 What new rituals, habits and social conventions would be perfor med/forgotten?
what way is this world relevant to us today? Does it provide absurd contrast to our own, or does it aspire to a better present and future?
By answering these questions for each world you have brought, we will narrow down to the most compelling and productive worlds and form groups based on common interests and desires.
3 How does this impact an individual’s role within a community, or affect the community at large?
5 What infrastructures would be built/erased and how do we see evidence of this in the gateway?
7 How would our landscapes be changed?
10 Where are the rooms in LA where this world would feel most different from our
8 Who would gain power, and who would lose it?
Weeks 6-7: LA +/-
11own?In
Do we see reference to this on the bookshelves, or in the subtle transformation of once-familiar objects in the room?
Still from Pixel Tide, a film from 2022 students, Chiayu Chen, Kimia Mohammadi, Jingjing Fang
DELIVERABLES:
Custom[printed])designed fragments (multi-format, could be objects, prints, digital images, video snippets, minimum 3 per team member) These might be labels on bottles, a shirt draped over a chair (and the chair itself), sockets in the wall, utensils or devices that result from your world with/without.
*We expressly want to avoid environments that are defined by the availability of downloadable artifacts. These are your worlds.
Emphasis throughout the year will be placed on the distinctive characteristics of your world. Understanding the true and full extent of the logic and features of your world, will ensure your descriptions are original and unique to your world.
Week 8: World in a Room
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With teams formed and provocations chosen, each of you will design and build a room filled with evidence of these alternate worlds. Who does this room belong to, or who lives/works/plays/prays here? How is it lit? Is the air thick with particulates or clear and fresh? Where is this room? What can we see out the window? What is the weather like outside? Can we get a sense of what rooms, if any, are beyond its walls? Refer again to the prompts and answer them within your own world.
In building out your rooms, you will also design the specific objects, textures/marks, pieces of media, and personal items that are found within them. The end of Fall quarter will see these fragments made/printed/rendered and compiled into a creative treatment that sets the scene for narratives you will develop in Winter. If you were a detective bringing back pieces of evidence from the rooms you have designed, what pieces would you bring back with you?
Per Team: 1 Treatment (.pdf, minimum 30 pages, 3840 x 2160 px [digital], 11 x 6.2 inches
Week 9-10: The Full Build
Still from HER, directed by Spike Jonze, 2013.
* Research a case study that best aligns with your proposed media
In this second phase of the program, we operate the studio as a lab and launchpad for you to determine your own trajectory. To that end deliverables will be discussed and reviewed throughout the Winter and Spring Quarters with each team. However, regardless of chosen media / format, the Winter Final will operate as a draft / previs of your final work. See below for suggested format.
* Assemble the previs and draft of your film/game/installation - a visual experience with sound.
Suggested Development and Production for Spring Quarter
Weekly meetings and crits will be dedicated to continued refinement of your media. We will review ongoing development of the craft and elaboration of the world and gateway, refinement of the film editing (and reshoots/rerenders), sound design and foley, color grading, script and presentation / performance.
DELIVERABLES:
Deliver a 5-8 minute experience.
In Winter Quarter we shift into storytelling - both as a narrative, and decision about what media to work with, and the Spring Quarter is dedicated to the production of your piece.
1920 x 816 px .MP4 (h.264 codec), 24 fps Verbal presentation and short written text to document the project.
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* Develop a storyline from your worldbuild.
5-8 minute film (either a linear film or recording of an interactive scene).
Spring Quarter | Production
Winter Quarter | Storytelling and Previs
*Festival submission schedule will be due on the 2nd studio meeting of Spring Quarter (March 30th 2022) and will be updated through to final reviews.
* Per your visual and story medium, determine the scale of your set(s) and build them, whether physical and/or digital.
The spring quarter will be a focused time of intense development of your media. Particular attention will be paid to the high level coherence of your world to develop a narrative and experience that is deeply immersive.
Suggested Concept Development & Production for Winter Quarter
Still from Nomadland, directed by Chloe Zhao, 2020
INSIGHT | ON SITE
Entertainment is a field that demands conversation and engagement as a means to learn, craft and disseminate stories. The studio and your workspace are amazing creative environments to experiment within, and the realities of media production, dissemination and consumption require us all to stay at the front edge of that space with leading industry collaborators. We will engage as much as possible with guests from vfx & media companies, architecture and visualization practices and more.
Still from Wander, a film from Stranger than Fiction: Earthrise 2021 students, Maira Yasir and Yuxin Tian
The Entertainment Studio is committed to exposing students to the diverse ways in which architects crossover into the worlds of media & entertainment. Our location in Culver City allows us to take advantage of the proximity to a slew of vfx and media studios within blocks of the IDEAS campus alongside the huge range of designers and filmmakers across Los Angeles. We will also continue building on the international connections we made during our remote format in 2020/2021. The Insight/OnSite program is a platform to develop enhanced engagement within the discipline and community through which we will host talks and workshops by experts in the field of filmmaking, vfx artists, architecture, production design and more.
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1. What is your story? What are you trying to say with your images, film, experiences?
DESIGNING AUDIENCES
3. Know your format and relevant forms of delivery / 4.distribution.Identifyyour media outlet(s).
A fundamental goal of the Entertainment Studio is to build new, unexpected kinds of architectural worlds. The studio has a goal as well to build the audiences that will inhabit these worlds. In the hyper-mediated environment of the 21st century, architects need to look beyond their normal audience (of other architects) to embrace a larger world now living within the stories and images of our time. To be an architect today is to be an individual able to imagine as well as arrange connections – whether in the literal joints and materials of a physical object’s making, of the subtler and experiential moments of the people, spaces and events architecture has always been made from. That act of imagination, visualization, and communication lies at the center of this studio’s teaching, learning and research.
CONSIDER
6. Identify 3 film festivals (minimum) or other kinds of competitions and exhibitions and submit your work upon graduation.
Without an audience, the stories you tell will disappear inside a cultural vacuum. The Entertainment Studio requires that students consider their audiences alongside the techniques, outlets and pipelines needed to deliver their content to ensure the work has a lifespan beyond the academic calendar of the program.
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2. Who is your intended audience and how do you reach it?
5. How do you deliver your media and ensure visibility?
Breakfast in the 3 Gorges Dam construction canteen by students Jerry Jiang, Haowen Jiang, Yiran Ye
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Harari, Yuval N. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. [Toronto]: Signal, 2014
Apkin, Stephen. The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2013
Truby, John. The Anatomy of Story: 22 steps to becoming a master storyteller. New York, Faber and Faber, 2007
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. How to See the World, Pelican, 2015
Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry For the Future, Orbit, 2020
Wulf, Andrea. The Invention of Nature, Knopf, New York, 2015
ACCESSIBILITY
If you are already registered with the Center for Accessible Education (CAE), please request your Letter of Accommodation on the Student Portal. If you are seeking registration with the CAE, please submit your request for accommodations via the CAE website. Please note that the CAE does not send accommodations letters to instructors--you must request that I view the letter in the online Faculty Portal. Once you have requested your accommodations via the Stu dent Portal, please notify me immediately so I can view your letter. Students with disabilities requiring academic accommodations should submit their request for accommodations as soon as possible, as it may take up to two weeks to review the request. For more information, please visit the CAE website (www.cae.ucla.edu), visit the CAE at A255 Murphy Hall, or contact us by phone at (310) 825-1501.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
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PRIVACY
UCLA CAE (Center for Accessible Education) RECOMMENDATION:
University and/or Department attendance policies will be rigorously enforced. Each unexcused absence will result in the reduction of one letter grade. More than two unexcused absences will result in a failing grade.
SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
Students are required to complete all assignments. Students are required to submit all final project materials (images, model photographs, assets, sound files, animations and videos, etc) digitally by the end of the course. Film / video formats will be outlined by the teaching team. File naming conventions:
ATTENDANCE
PLEASE REFER TO AUD FILE NAMING GUIDE FOR ARCHIVING, WHICH IS DISTRIBUTED AT THE END OF EACH QUARTER.
This program uses video recording or other personal information capture for the purpose of facilitating the course and/or test environment. Pursuant to the terms of the agreement with UCLA, the data is used solely for this purpose and any vendor is prohibited from disclosing this information. UCLA also does not use the data for any other purpose. Students may not distrib ute recordings or other instructional materials provided as part of remote learning by faculty, teaching assistants, or invited guests.”