Although interactive programming is creating the latest buzz in the production industry, Shane Lunny of Lunny Productions insists most programs currently being produced are ‘dumb, slow and just plain obvious. ‘

Back in 1985 when Vancouver-based Lunny and production/ design consultant Randy Ormston began their first interactive project for the United Nations pavilion at Expo ’86 in Vancouver, Lunny says they were held back by the existing technology.

‘We were pushing the edge of the envelope and trying to engineer new ways of doing things to take it a little further. Because the technology just wasn’t there at an affordable price, we’ve had to invent things.’

He points to an inverse relationship between technology and creativity. In the future, the technology will not be matched by the people to deliver creatively. ‘It’s a matter of merging the best of film technique, educational structural design, creative vision and technology,’ he says.

‘In education today,’ says Lunny ‘they are using new technology to implement old approaches. This is not where the medium’s strengths lie. We prefer to push the medium to its visual and interactive strength.’

Last year, Lunny and Ormston along with their creative and computer team started work on a new type of interactive project for the Vancouver school system and Science World. Their task was to create a kiosk at Science World that would interface with a cd-rom computer so that it could also be taken to schools to teach students about environmental issues, yet still maintain their interest.

‘In developing the project entitled Creating Our Future,’ says Ormston, ‘we tried to put in a solid entertainment element so that we can teach people by keeping them entertained.’

This is particularly important in the Science World kiosk because Science World has found through its research that children have a 90-second attention span before they move on to something else. For this program to work, the children must be engaged for five to 15 minutes.

Realizing kids like video games, Lunny and his team sought technology that would have a triple spin on the cd-rom so it could respond very fast, not like most normal computers that are slow.

‘So we took the best elements of video games and simulations and put them together in a fun context using an Alice in Wonderland type of fictional character that engages the kid’s interest in a conspiratorial way.’

The idea, he says, is to empower the kids using the machine to make real choices about real things and do it in a fun context.

To create excitement, a `virus’ was designed into the program, which is activated as soon as the users make their first choice. It starts hunting the user out because it knows someone has entered the program illegally and forces them to continually make choices.

Sitting in the background, Lunny yells over the speaker phone, ‘It’s showbiz! We don’t bore the kids with boring junk.’

Other interactive projects by Lunny Productions include Dinosaur! The World Tour, the world’s largest traveling exhibit. It employs a fictional character who takes the user through an unusual world of circumstances and surroundings with potentially endless possibilities.

The fictional character drives the action ‘with an entertainment element,’ says Lunny. ‘It’s someone you can relate to and they get to respond to your actions rather than just interacting with a machine.’

Ormston says of the central character Alice in the Science World project: ‘We digitized her into the program using computer animation which livens up the action. We have created city noises of the Lower Mainland that have been replicated on the computer.’

From a technological standpoint, Lunny is learning more about how to process video and get it digitized and onto the cd-rom. To this end, the company has spent time on research and development as well as extensive tests to get the process down pat.

‘Previously, video was done crudely,’ says Ormston. ‘We’re trying to refine it to make the images look more real. This is difficult because the cd-rom is not a video disc with those inherent video capacities, so a lot of the playback units are computers with low resolution. We’re looking at the limitations of the medium and trying to use that to our advantage.’