Michela Ledwidge

MOD Films makes re-mixable films and tools for film re-use and they turn it into a game

Morgwn Rimel interviews Michele Ledwidge from MOD Films

Michela Ledwidge founded MOD Films in 2004 with a NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) Inventions and Innovations award. Inspired by the practice of game modding, she envisaged a 'Sustainable Story System that would allow audiences to modify films through the use of Internet and video game technology.

All digital assets from the original Sanctuary production including production footage, sound effects, dialogue, storyboards, concept drawings and still photos, are being released alongside the commercial release into the Creative Commons for non-commercial distribution and re-use.

Morgwn Rimel: When did you begin Modfilms and what was your inspiration? What are the project's main objectives?

Michela Ledwidge: MOD Films was founded in 2004 as a spin-off company from my consultancy Thequality.com which has been doing media R&D since 1993. After a couple of real-time (live) film projects, Horses for Courses (2001) and Extreme T (2004), I started to research what was going on with re-mix culture world-wide and thought it might be a good idea to set up a dedicated story-telling unit.

There have been so many inspiring developments over the last decade but three stand out - a keynote speech Danny Hillis gave at the SIGGRAPH conference in LA in 2000. I was in the audience listening to this amazing inventor ( e.g. RAID, parallel processing, a bunch of stuff for Disney) talking about the accelerating technical progress, the Singularity, and how difficult it was to visualize concepts like this. He invited the audience to let him know if they had any ideas. I'd just been demo'ing a film in another session and the idea of a massively multi-lingual movie popped into my head - an intelligent narrative format that used every trick in the book to communicate. With all the new developments being explored for new media, all of a sudden it seemed crazy to have to limit your story to any one specific distribution format or platform. What if there was a way to produce a film in a way that better lent itself to future malleability. At the time I didn't quite realize what a Pandora's box this was going to be (the "prototype" is still under development after 3 years) but it was an exciting couple of weeks. Having the chance to talk the idea over afterwards with people like Danny was what got this whole thing started.

I'd been VJ-ing on and off in clubs for a number of years by this stage, so I was pretty familiar with what you could and couldn't do with real-time audio and visuals. It's been clear for some time how more and more control is going to be achievable so there are lots of live A/V groups which were and continue to be inspirational. MIDI-triggered visuals have come a long way in the last five years. The Light Surgeons, an early UK group, were actually the first to use the term "remixable films" that I'm aware of, although they were only interested in creating a remixable experience themselves, not allowing the audience to do so. Only last night I saw The Sancho Plan performing an amazing live cartoon with a posse of drummers triggering real-time animations.

Lastly, the explosive popularity of Counter Strike (a MODification of the 1998 video game Half-Life) was both an inspiration and an eye-opener. Valve Software pretty much pioneered the game MOD culture by being significantly less precious with their published game than people had previously. With a published version of CounterStrike now available for purchase, things have gone full circle - audience members are now part of the next phase of production. That in principle, is what we're trying to do with MOD FIlms - establish a framework by which a two-way relationship with the audience and story can be developed over time if the original work strikes any chords.