Films and Games

Making Memories

This is a short 16mm movie I wrote and directed in Maine during the Spring of 2003. The film tells the story of David, a guy in his late 20’s who spends an evening recalling some of the most enjoyable and romantic dates of his past. As we learn more about him, we find that not everything is as it seems. The film was a student project, and the production encountered the usual nightmare of last-second catastrophes due to missing actors, unavailable locations, and broken equipment. Luckily, I had a great crew and we managed to film something close to my original script. (2003, 3.5 min)

Chicken Crossing

The tale of a hapless but optimistic chicken in search of wonderful grain, which just happens to be on the other side of a country road. It’s a funny 3D animated short that’s really just a collection of sight gags, inspired by silent cartoons like The Road Runner. The movie shows off the power of Microsoft’s Talisman rendering architecture for PC graphics. I wrote and directed the film, and led a highly talented interdisciplinary team of artists, programmers, and animators. The film has been shown in international festivals and television programs, including the Electronic Theatre at SIGGRAPH 1996. (1996, 3 min)

Dead Air

I was the creator, writer, and director of this massively multiplayer murder-mystery game. You play a detective in the Video Crime Unit, an underfunded police agency. Each episode presented you and your fellow detectives with a new murder that was accidentally caught on video. Working with your friends, you examine a wide variety of evidence, and participate in online interrogations of persons involved in the crime (played by improv actors). The game used technologies that were novel at the time. I wrote the script and directed the live-action shoots for our pilot episode. The game was designed for the now-extinct original programming unit of The Microsoft Network. We were in mid-production of the first episode when Microsoft canceled all their network productions. (1994, episodes 1/2 hr each)

Starship Mars

I designed this online game for large numbers of players, all cooperating or competing as they wished. Players begin aboard a massive, city-sized spaceship bound for Mars. Communications with Earth have failed, so the ship is isolated in interplanetary space. Worse, the ship is experiencing technical problems, and the social structure among the crew and passengers is in disarray. The overall goal is to get to Mars safely, but along the way players have to figure out how to get along, fix the ship, grow and distribute food, and all the other needs of a functioning society. Gameplay was fluid and undirected; we supplied general structures in the environment and the nature of the ship, but what happened on a day-to-day basis was whatever the players chose for themselves. The game was designed for the now-extinct original programming unit of The Microsoft Network.

Flow

It would be great if there were fewer boring meetings in the world. In this visionary video, we imagine how much better things would be using Flow, our name for a new collection of display, processing, and assisting technologies. We show it in action as a team of people tackles a tough problem. I wrote and directed the film. Because our budget was tight, we shot a large number of still images of our actors in front of green screens, and interacting with green props, which we replaced with computer-generated renderings. The resulting style was unusual and attractive, and it worked great for communicating our ideas. (1994, 6 min)

Red Green Blues

A tradition at the annual SIGGRAPH conference is a video during the Electronic Theatre that highlights some of the most interesting original research in the technical programs. In 1994 I was asked to produce this piece, which is traditionally a series of video clips with a narrated voice-over describing them. But I was bedridden with a 102 degree fever. So I pulled clips from the submitted videos, sequenced them, and wrote an original song describing the work on-screen. I gave the sheet music, lyrics, and edit list to my colleagues at Microsoft Research, and they did a fantastic job of performing and producing the song and cutting the dozens of pieces of video to fit it perfectly. (1994, 2.5min)

Shackleton

The story of Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew of the Endurance in 1914 is an amazing true adventure story. Shackleton intended to be the first to cross the Antarctic. Before before the Endurance even reached the Antarctic coast, it got trapped in pack ice. The ice dragged the ship around for a while, and then crushed it. Abandoning ship onto ice floes, the men had no radio, and nobody would be coming to look for them. They lived thanks to Shackleton’s leadership, the tremendous navigational skills of his ship’s captain, and a few essential strokes of good luck. Through a series of ever-more harrowing adventures, each of which should have killed them, eventually every member of the party survived and was rescued. This unproduced feature screenplay tells the story of “The Boss” and his men as they fought the odds and won.