Looking Back- Seminar: Art of Developing Plot for Computer Game - July 22, 2004

Review - Seminar: Art of Developing Plot for Comptuer Game - July 22, 2004
 
On July 22, 2004, I've arranged a seminar for my students of my subject SC4383 - Introduction to Game Design and Architecture.  The seminar which I arranged was called the Art of Developing Plot for computer Game in which I've invited a good friend, Lertsiri Boonmee (http://www.cycle-soft.com/~lmb), an aspiring movie director (works at New York Film Festival 2003, Bangkok International Film Festival 2004, First Frame Film Festival 2004, Fat Film Festival) over to help lecture in this special seminar.

As we know, current video games have been reaching a impressive amount of advancement that games nowadays have such high production values, we can observe that the gaming industry is increasing looking towards the more mature Movie Industry as a model in improving production value and overall quality of the video games.  Due to that reason, game designers have to learn more about cross-disciplinary studies - which one of them is lessons that are learnt from the movie industry - like camera terms and methodology.

In this seminar, Lertsiri Boonmee has addressed about some of the techniques used in coming up with plot development.  Later he proceeded to explain about the different type of camera shots - with explanation of what are the intended effect of those type of shots - and how to build up the mood.  Idea of continuity in scenes is also another key idea which was discussed in the seminar - and how little things contribute much to the overall feel.  At the end of the seminar, the audiences were treated with the Other Half - which is Lertsiri Boonmee's short film that entered many international film festival (details at the website), and also a number of different show reels that demonstrate many of the topics that were discussed early on the hour.

After Lertsiri Boomee finished his session, Pisal Setthawong, a lecturer and established game developer (conincidentally me :P) took the floor to address some of the issues that are faced between the integration of the Movie Industry and the Computer Game industry which isn't at all that simple as it sounds.  The talk started with a short history of games using movie license - and the various issues they face - why they fail, and why they succeed.  Later the discussion when on reviewing many of the keypoints of camera usage in games which is a important point, before summarizing of additional issues that are faced when the game developer attempts to use those knowledge on a computer game - which requires a lot of additional work!

In the conclusion of the 3 hour long seminar, the attendees of the seminar (30+ people) had the chance to ask the guest speaker on various topics that range from short films to roles of different people in movie production to soap operas to a lot of other interesting curiosities related with the event, which concluded on a high note for all that attended this rather early seminar :)

Pictures with captions will be attached soon.