Interactive Project Proposal

Summary: “Film Producer” will be a website game. Players will go to a website and create their own “film project” by selecting packaging elements from a database, including actors, genre, story elements, director, writer(s), marketing strategies, and so forth. The website will run an algorithm that determines the cost and profit of the film “developed” by the player.

The Model: I grew up playing simple computer games. I remember most vividly Lemonade and Oregon Trail. Lemonade was a simple game packaged with the Apple IIe computer, in which the player operated a lemonade stand and depending on the weather, cost of suger, lemons, cups, etc, chose how many cups of lemonade to make on a given day. The goal of the game was to make as much money as possible, by making enough lemonade to serve the customers, but not too much where you were wasting the raw supplies.

A similar, but more sophisticated game was Oregon Trail, in which the player chose his profession and consequently how much money and resources he began with. The challenge was to lead his family across the Oregon Trail, surviving with limited resources. To eat, the player could buy food, or hunt food (but it took valuable time to hunt and the player needed to purchase ammunition). The player also needed money to buy clothes, medical supplies for the family, or to pay for a ferry across a river. If proper measures were not taken, family members died off, one by one, from sickness or hunger or cold. The goal of the game was to survive the Oregon Trail get the most “points.” A player accumulated points when family members survived and what supplies were left over. A player got double and triple points if you did it as a poorer occupation, because you accomplished the trip with the fewest resources. The game adds an elements of luck, sometimes you lose supplies or Indians attack, but you can increase or decrease the chances of these unlucky events happening by planning well.

The Game: The film producer game would follow these simple models, a free website where players can go to create their own “ideas” for movies. The player or “producer” essentially packages elements from a large database of information.

One of the most fun and important aspects to the game would be to keep up-to-date information on the film industry from resources such as IMDB to accurately predict the “value” of each film product. Incorporating not only film industry information, but news about world events and conditions, competition from other industries, and general trends of public interest, would make the game more pleasurable and dynamic.

The goal of the game would be twofold – first to provide an entertaining game for web surfers to play in their downtime, to package deals they think may be interesting and to see whether their package is profitable. We hope the game will be thorough, accurate, and fun, enough so that studio executives and producers will eventually use the game as a tool to develop films. We already know this how many Hollywood movies are made, by the way the films are marketed and the ways they are developed. For example a simplified version of Wild Wild West (1999) would be conceived as such:

genre1: Western
genre2: Comedy
actor1: Will Smith
character1: studly sheriff
tag: good guy
actor2: Kevin Kline
character2: smart sheriff
tag: good guy
actor3: Salma Hayek
character3: damsel in distress
tag: good girl
tag: character twist
actor4: Dennis Quaid
character4: a confederate general
tag: bad guy
director: Barry Sonnenfeld
screenwriter: Jim Thomas
story element1: hyper-styled technology
story element2: one-line humor
story element3: minor twist at end
rating: PG-13
distributor: Warner Brothers

Each element has a specific valuation assigned, for example:

Will Smith = 100,000,000 (average of prior Will Smith films of similar scale)
Barry Sonnenfield = 50,000,000 (average of prior Sonnenfield films of similar scale)

In addition to a value, each element would be given a “relative value,” that is, a figure that would determine the influence over the entire movie of a given element. For instance:

Will Smith = .4
Barry Sonnenfield = .2
(Martin Scorcese might be a .6, because of the tendency of his films to have his “signature” on them. Same goes for a Warren Beatty movie or a Charlie Kaufman movie).

The combination “relative values” would allow the creation of a “multiplier” for each specific movie project. In the simplified example:

Will Smith multiplier = .4/(.4+.2) = .66
Barry Sonnenfield multiplier = .2/(.4+.2) = .33

The total valuation of the sample project would be:

Will Smith value: 100,000,000 x .66 + Barry Sonnenfield value: 50,000,000 x .33
= 82,500,000.

There would, of course, be more elements to each project to get the final total value of the project. Additionally, there would be a factor of “successful” combinations. For instance, a George Cloony and Steven Soderburgh movie would have a bonus added to the separate valuations of each of their elements. On the flip side, there would also be “negative” valuations for overused combinations. For instance, Freddie Prince Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt.

A final, important factor, would be the market factor. This would be a separate multiplier on the “total valuation” that would incorporate larger trends of movies against other industries and world events that would affect the number of movies people attend.

We would need to work out kinks with the mathematics and ensure the respective valuations were correct, but the basic principles outlined in the above example is how the database will operate.

The second, larger, philosophical reason for the game is to demonstrate how the process of putting together a film resembles a database of selected elements and that a film is nothing more than a construction of preexisting elements rather than an story of universal experience. Influenced by narratogolists Levi Strauss and M.M. Bakhtin, we will attempt to actualize a model for movie-making, helping to demonstrate, through interactive repetition, the codes and myths and structures behind films themselves. Once exposed, we hope filmmakers will be forced to develop new codes and create ways to excite and pleasure an audience in a different manner than the traditional method of Hollywood. The existence of the game is also a parody – the literal embodiment of a mechanized filmmaking process, undermining the idea of telling a true, universal story, but instead highlighting the processes, particularly market processes, that dominate which films are made each year.

The technical models we will emulate are the simplicity of google format, the density of information from IMDB, and the repititious fun of simple role playing games like Lemonade and Oregon Trail.

We will try to keep the game as simple and accurate, with the assumption that the simplicity and accuracy are what will make the game enjoyable. We will “play” with different elements and each element category will be an ongoing data field, constantly being updated with new information. We can use preexisting databases such as IMDB and collect lists of writers, actors, and directors from the WGA, DGA, and SAG.

Perhaps the most exciting element of the “Film Producer” is that it will serve as a starting point. Player data will be stored and can be tested later as to the accuracy of the predictive value. Surely, game players will devise “films” that actually get made by Hollywood. Perhaps a more sophisticated version of the game will be used to develop “pitches” to be taken into Hollywood executives or copyrighted as an original idea.
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Just in case anyone was wondering what I do in my free time.