EnterFrame: Cage, Deleuze and Macromedia Director - multimedia authoring software - Evaluation

Afterimage, July-August, 2002 by David Goldberg

This is a description of a different register of Interactive media, one where Director's behavior is no longer explicity determined by the choreography inscribed in the score by the author, but by some collaboration between the user and a fluctuating network of programming logic. The question is, can we shift the focus of interactive media away from processing content and get a Director movie to act instead of simply obey? It wouldn't have to act human, or even act Intelligent, it would simply have to suspend the user's expectations of the experience in some non-trivial way. To pursue an answer to this question with the only off-the-shelf sofware that is up to the task would challenge the definitions and critical scope of new mediar. Director has two features that can make this exploration possible the Lingo scripting language, and its ability to pass messages from script to script, creating an internal communications network.

> Lingo.Messages.Chances

Everything in Director has a property associated with it. The stage has its height, width and color depth. Sprites have the channel they reside in and which cast member they reference. Frame properties include the identity of a sprite, a frame-rate or an event that changes the location of the playback head. While authoring one can set properties through a wide variety of fields, double-clicks, keyboard shortcuts and menus of the pull-down and context-sensitive variety. During playback, the use of Lingo is required to modify movie properties, which opens Director objects to a potentially sophisticated awareness of their own states. Without using outside tests, a graphic can know where it is, a text field can know what it says, and a digital video can know when it has reached a certain point and then respond. The Lucasian frame can further perfect itself. Scripting in Director comes down to conceiving of truth and falsehood at varying scales and at different points in time, from simple if-then decisions to comp lex conditional and iterative structures. Once the flow of the logic is designed, the possibilities for what actually occurs when different states of truth and falsehood are realized is limited only by the set of Director properties that Lingo can actually access.

Custom and pre-written Lingo dramatically extends the horizons of Director's ability to handle interactivity, assuming that the system can be described in terms of programming methodologies. Lingo can detect sprite collisions and change their size or position. It can alter the pitch and balance of a sound and shuttle through a QuickTime movie. Imaging Lingo is dedicated to the pixel-level generation and editing of graphics. There is word-processing Lingo that can search text and change fonts, and Lingo for designing object-oriented data structures that can describe complex states. There is Lingo for spawning new windows with other Director movies in them that can communicate with each other, and Lingo for connecting Director movies via the Internet. The list of capabilities literally goes on, but the ones outlined here should sketch a field of potential applications that might begin to prototype Director's acting lessons.