Jasmina Kallay

If, on an interactive whim, a film buff… Determining Interactive Film via Italo Calvino’s Narrative Constructs

Year: 2008

Keywords: , ,

Information:

Institution:
University College Dublin
(at time of presentation)

Personal profile:

Jasmina Kallay is a screenwriter, script editor, novelist and transmedia creator.  Her vision of the future of storytelling is that of a sprawling, multi-platform fictional universe. In 2012, Jasmina wrote the EMMY-nominated BEAT GIRL, a YA novel which was turned into a webseries, a TV series, and a feature film. Jasmina
has a number of scripts in development, mainly in the crime/thriller genre, and in April 2014 she  launched the first installment in her teen-noir detective Madison MacLane Mysteries series, called TWEET ME DEADLY.

Personal Website: http://jasminakallay.com/

Research Profile: http://www.ucd.ie/research/people/englishdramafilm/msjasminakallay/

Irish Film Board Profile: http://live.moviesite.biz/clients/irishfilmboard/productionguide.cfm?company=Jasmina+Kallay


Publication:

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See also:

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Abstract:

How can we define what constitutes an Interactive Film in the face of the ever-shifting and expanding world of new digital media?

In this paper, I intend to explore the various forms that fall into the category of interactive film, how they differ as well as the new media theorists’ take on interactive film.  Examples will include Façade, an interactive drama/game, which will prompt a look at Italo Calvino’s Prose and Anticombinatorics.  Faintheart, a film collated from MySpace users’ suggestions, will bring into question the aspect of agency and authorship in the interactive sphere.  And what of the YouTube system of suggestions based on your current choice of viewing, leading you onto an interactive path along which you may interrupt your current viewing for something that seems far more tempting, thus involving the viewer or vuser in a disjointed cinematic journey composed of random film segments.  This is comparable to Italo Calvino’s If, on a Winter’s Night character Ludmilla, whose constant change of mind influences the course of the novel’s action, determining genre/style, never completing a story strand.

Apart from Calvino’s literary work, I will be primarily referring to the theories of Lev Manovich, Espen Aarseth and Janet Murray.