The tone of InterActive 96 and the mood of its 250 corporeal delegates seemed more positive than many an earlier multimedia confab. The cyber world is becoming more concrete.

The event, organized by the Cultech Research Centre, Canadian Film Center and Apple Canada, opened with a cyber soiree which featured traditional artforms – music, comedy, painting from different remote locations – brought together via the digital world to Toronto’s BamBoo club.

A virtual dance whose inventive choreography blew away the creators of the technology (originally designed for scientific/medical applications), describes in a nutshell the intended mindmerge at the root of the premiere networking event. Plugging the artists into the system, and vice versa.

The keynote from Buffy Sainte-Marie on digital artistry set the tone at the two-day multimedia conference (February 19-20 at Toronto’s Sheraton Hotel), where art met commerce and where crtc chair Keith Spicer virtually rubbed shoulders with Peter Gabriel well, he was rumored to be coming.

While attendees still expressed difficulties getting financing (or even proving interactive entertainment is a lucrative market), and many of the imponderables remain cloaked in mystery – like the details of rights, royalties and which bottom line you’re looking at when figuring out the percentages – at least the issues are being negotiated, such as the t’s in actra rules about to be crossed, and escape from the dgc’s Declared Use Basis clause pending.

In order to further hone a good multimedia deal model, Blaine McMurtry’s Stephen Selznick, speaking at one of the business panels, urged producers to overcome a natural tendency to guard details of their contracts, and to discuss deal structure and points amongst one another.

In addition to law, more of the core sectors surrounding the entertainment industries, such as agents and venture capital funds, are now embracing the interactive realm. Ron Proulx with S.L. Feldman & Associates, a Toronto firm that represents music clients, recently signed Yellow Hat Media, his first multimedia artists, and expects to have half a dozen game/Web development clients shortly. Proulx, likening it to the music biz, says many multimedia artists are very young, and says it’s important to help hook them up with venture capital or some of the big players, adding that otherwise: ‘there’s a real possibility that people will treat them as worker bees.’

Astral Entertainment’s vp distribution Dan Lyons, also on the biz panel, reports that some insurance companies are looking into errors/omission insurance for the interactive publishing industry.

On the cd-rom distribution front, Lyons says the largest problem remains returns – the inordinately high percentage of them. Lyons says the goal is to try to limit returns to the 20% threshold typical of the home video biz, and away from the 100% return policy common with other retailers such as bookstores.

Royalties

Currently royalties to a cd developer run in the 10% to 25% range, with 15% common says Lyons. Leeway continues in how the base figure is calculated – for instance, sometimes certain expenses, such as marketing, are deducted – and how future use rights are assigned. In terms of what type of potential volume would be required to get distributors interested in a product, Lyons says that Astral would want to sell 3,000 to 5,000 units in Canada, and the worldwide benchmark would be 35,000 units.

And on another touchy cd-rom topic – the holy grail of shelf space – Miles Kestin of the Toronto-based CD ROM Store reiterated his open invitation to Canadians with new product, ‘I’m happy to put it on my shelf.’

Plan for new models

And for those developing net-based product, Tom Jurenka, director of Disus, who likens the current Web biz to doing business in Russia – ‘no rules’ – advises producers to plan for new commerce models. With the giant incursion of voice/video data flooding the net, Jurenka predicts a crash, and as a result, envisions a more typical consumer/supplier relationship emerging soon: a professional service with subscriber packages (from telcos or cablecos), probably within the year.

Jurenka, who is content manager for the Intercom Ontario broadband network test in Newmarket, invites participation, and exhorts artists not to be worried about dealing with big co.s, such as Bell, adding the proviso: ‘As long as you don’t get in the business of trying to outspend them.’ As to out-thinking them, he reminds that the big players are now trying to get a handle on ‘what you’re doing.’

At a panel discussing the question, Can Conventional Filmmaking Survive in Cyberspace, most agreed that technology had a long way to go before it could effectively accommodate cinema as it is known and interactive film projects of any depth.

Sara Diamond, artistic director of the media and visual arts department at the Banff Centre for the Arts says trends point to the ‘eruption of cinematic space within the world wide web,’ with the development of virtual reality modelling language (vrml) combined with high end animation software, but says the eruption would be delayed by current bandwidth constraints.

Michael Backes, co-founder of San Francisco’s Rocket Science Games, acknowledged that ‘more horsepower was needed to go where our brains can go.’ Backes, a former motion picture studio exec who designed the first realtime computer storyboarding system for James Cameron’s The Abyss, pegged the missing piece in the cyber film equation as resolution, which is inferior in any applicaton for film on computer networks.

‘There are a lot of talented people working with primitive tools,’ says Backes. One thing that impressed Backes recently was the launch of Silicon Graphics’ Infinite Reality supercomputer: ‘but now I want that power in my Mac.’ Rocket Science is developing four new high end interactive titles for 1996, including Artifact, a puzzle game which imperceptibly adapts itself during play to the skill level of the player.

Atlantis producer Martin Katz discussed the company’s plans to bring the stage play Tamara to an interactive medium, expected to be completed within the next two years, and said the project was shifted from cd-rom to the web delivery to accommodate its high degree of audience mingling.

Ron Baecker, professor of computer science at the University of Toronto says unconventional filmmaking can thrive in cyber space and points to the development of QuickTime vr and the intersection of broadcasting and filmmaking, illustrated by the live Web broadcast of the recent Kasparov/ Big Blue chess match, which was visited by 5 million Web-sters.

Baecker also held a discussion group to demonstrate the movie authoring and design system (mad) being developed at the University of Toronto. mad is a mac-based program for the creation and development of motion picture projects which allows the integrated handling of scripts, music, sound effects, video and story boards. Baecker says mad can be useful as a pitching tool for independent filmmakers as well as a teaching aid and is seeking partners to help refine the program and possibly help bring it to market.