Thinking about music again, it is interesting how easy it is to achieve Dynamic Creative Play with sound. The focus, interestingly, is not in any one particular part of the room (a screen, or even multiple screens all showing the same thing). You can even close your eyes and music playing still “works” (as long as you know your instrument sufficiently well). I am trying to think of other collaborative endeavors where people are contributing to a single thing in real-time. Google Docs can be this, although it is ethereal, as mentioned previously.

I’m very interested in “always on” systems. In the case of movies, there would always be motion (playback never stops) and in the case of sound, it is always present/playing. One benefits of the Dynamic Medium seems to be that it is always on, always reactive, and in the case of Dynamic Creative Play, available to multiple people simultaneously.

In general, I refuse to go to meetings without some kind of shared visual, either to put on a screen or to print out for multiple people. It seems frustrating that only person, the person whose laptop is connected, can interact with the visual onscreen.

I also like screen sharing to show people something on their own computer, or so they can show me something. There is often the “Can I take over for a moment?” request, since there is only one cursor.

Consider the case of video and audio timelines—it’s a classic issue in filmmaking that I’m most eager to improve: the picture editor cuts the image, constantly changing the temporal relationship between clips on the timeline. If the editor is careful, the audio tracks along in sync with the picture. Meanwhile, the sound department has a copy of the movie and a much larger audio timeline with richer, more nuanced sound—often hundreds of tracks. The moment the picture editor makes a change, the audio department is working in an outdated version of the movie, and must eventually conform all their work to the newer picture cut, reading arcane change lists saying “move timecode 00:10–01:00 to 03:20, delete timecode 05:00–05:10,” etc.

How can the picture and sound team working on the same movie at the same time? Is it possible? In this case, too much dynamism is seen as a bad thing: “I don’t want the picture constantly changing out from underneath me while I’m working on the sound.” Obviously, there needs to be some kind of protocols as to when decisions in one place update the other, or you could be driven insane by an editor’s incessant trimming. In the movies, the Truth tends to lie in the picture editor’s domain—that is the protocol. Sound follows. But this leads to a lot of missed opportunities for the sound to influence the direction of the picture. There is an efficiency to the current system, and the tools reflect that protocol. But I think the real answer is that such a system is challenging to design, so people don’t go very far. Some of RMO’s work in this area (watching where others are navigating in a sea of media) is very intriguing to me in this way.

Why are there so many tools for real-time music making (few are not real-time) and so little in the video domain? Even Keynote, one of my favorite applications for making realish-time cinema, has a Play button which changes the mode of operation.

Perhaps animation, like live theater improvisation, is a natural first step for such Creative Dynamic Play, and not necessarily precise editing or picture and sound. Likewise, it is strange how little video game design has influenced software tool design. One can feed into the other, without a doubt, if people are willing to explore it.