The World Building Institute launches Rilao at BAM Columbia
July 14, 2015. Bogotá. The exploration continues. The Rilao Project, focused on the fictional city of Rilao formed on a small archipelago from the chance encounter of the DNA of Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles, continues to expand around the world.
In the frame of the BOGOTA AUDIOVISUAL MARKET, one of the most important cinema markets in Latin America, game designer Joseph Unger (Pigeonhole Productions Chief Design Officer) joined Juan DiazB (Colombian filmmaker, world builder and lead curator for World Building Institute Europe), to collaborate in the first WBi event at the BAM, in a vast immersive world building workshop.
The event started with a World Building panel and introduction to world building to over 200 participants of the BAM, causing great excitement around world building as the definitive narrative practice for the challenging and exciting new media landscape.
Following the panel, over 50 filmmakers from all over Colombia and Mexico engaged in the exploration of Rilao, during a two day session that increased our knowledge of the Island and added to the continuing development of the Museum of Rilao and its Universalis Encyclopedia, a master guide to the discoveries of our various expeditions to unveil Rilao´s mysteries. The workshop made rich use of the dynamic game structure and prompts of Jeff Watson's
Rilao Remote Viewing Protocol, initially co-designed with Alex McDowell for the Rilao Project at the Wbi 2015 Science of Fiction Festival.
These evolving World Building workshops continue to challenge the traditional film narrative practice, creating a holistic network between dynamic & highly collaborative world building ‘cells’ that together develop multi-stranded woven narratives for a unique world. The interconnecting groups tap the various perspectives and approaches to allow a deeper knowledge of the Storyworld and the emergence of more complex exploratory vectors of the world of Rilao.
Starting with a remote online overview of Rilao´s history by USC professor Alex McDowell RDI, the first day was set to explore Rilao´s past, culminating the session with a shared overview of the multiple findings of the world across several domains. Building on that exploratory base we engaged in prototyping Rilao´s future during the second day, connecting past history to the research of the future of the South Pacific archipelago. The conjoined groups created a fluid and volumetric narrative development, highlighting the organic and emergent nature of stories in a worldbuilding process.
We finished the two days with a group session to share all the encyclopedic entries and to revise the connection of the multiple stories, evaluating the pollinating process of intended ideas. We also engaged in a group conversation to evaluate the process that radically challenges roles within a traditional production model and develops new possibilities for multiple and mixed reality narrative platforms.
[Juan DiazB, July 20th 2015]