Events
Fund! Your! Game! with Megan Leduc from Canada Council for the Arts
Are you making games? Curious about funding options? Join us for an online conversation with Megan Leduc from The Canada Council for the Arts. Megan Leduc will talk briefly about funding options, then Marie LeBlanc Flanagan will interview them about games funding. Finally, we'll make space for 1-minute pitches, where you can talk about your game! Megan Leduc might have questions or tips for you.
Create your own biomorphic world in Blender with Shonee
Learn the limitlessness of digital space and become a 3D world creator with Shonee (b. Bianca Shonee Arroyo) for an afternoon. Together, we'll explore shiny, slimy, psychedelic iridescence using Blender and ZBrush.
Everyone is welcome, though this is not a "click-by-click" follow-along workshop; it's a wider journey through specific tools and techniques to begin creating your own digital habitats. Have you been using Blender for awhile but can’t figure out how to get past Suzanne, the Blender monkey? Have you been doing 3D for awhile but curious about some other techniques? Let’s play in 3D together!
Fund! Your! Game! with Kim Gibson from Ontario Creates
Are you making games? Curious about funding options? Join us for an online conversation with Kim Gibson from Ontario Creates!
Kim will talk briefly about funding options, then Marie LeBlanc Flanagan will interview Kim about Ontario Creates and game funding. Finally, we'll make space for 1-minute pitches, where you can talk about your game! Kim might have questions or tips for you.
Concentric Fictions
With a focus on postcolonial thought and writing, we will delve into an esoteric collection of ergodic literature including excerpts from magical-realist-fiction, parser-text games, olupian texts and nonsense verse - and trace the structures and techniques that create room within a narrative to challenge the implicit hegemony of an author or an authoritarian tradition. Participants can bring texts with them that we can analyse during the workshop, and Dhruv will prepare a folder of translated poems, writings and games that will be shared prior to the workshop. A writing exercise will be interwoven with the main body of the talk, where the participants will be writing very short sections of a nebulous text that will reassemble each time we read it.
How to Start an Indie Game (Without Going into Debt or Burning Out)
Attendees will hear from studio founder and lead designer Meagan Byrne about what it takes to
START an indie game in Canada. This will include what you need before seeking funding,
possible first-time funding streams to explore, and how much work it all is (before you even
start production!). Meagan will also be sharing insight on how to handle the load and
expectations without going into debt or burning out.
Weird Theatre Games
Join us for this online workshop where we'll be translating difficult emotional experiences into a theatre game with D. Squinkifer on March 9 5-7pm EST.
Bring an emotionally challenging situation and transform it with us into a one-of-a-kind awkward theatre game! In this workshop, we’ll use prompts to free-write about an experience. What happened? How did it feel moment-to-moment to do the thing? What is something you could have done differently? What role did other people play?
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Making It Work: Tools & Modes for Interactive Experiences
Are you an artist making interactive experiences? Are you curious about doing this? Join us for a free, hands-on, intimate, and practice-based workshop, where you'll explore what tools & modes you can use when designing playful experiences.
This workshop is for creators working with interdisciplinary interactive experiences. Each interactive experience requires a different balance of tools and strategies to make it work. "Making it work" doesn't just mean pleasing an audience or gaining critical acclaim. It can also mean making something reproducible without the presence of the original creators, making something that doesn't drain facilitators or performers and offloads some work onto technology instead, or any other number of goals.
In this hands-on, intimate, and practice-based workshop, we will explore what tools and modes you can leverage to think about and improve your experiences. Specifically, we will start with a short overview of strategies and challenges around using digital technology and automated solutions, physical design (of spaces, objects and set design), and having humans as both facilitators and participants in a live experience. From there, we will turn to hearing ideas from participants and workshop them.
Participants are asked to come with an idea for an interactive piece that they would like to explore and share with the group in order to obtain feedback. This could be a performance or theatre piece, a game, an installation, or any other kind of interactive piece that participants can imagine. Participants can arrive with an idea that they have already been working on, or they can bring an idea based on the prompt "Small but Purposeful".
You can use the following questions to organize your thoughts:
What kinds of digital tech and automated solutions do you envision using for your idea?
What kind of physical objects and set design do you have in mind? Is there a specific location or setting you need?
What kind of involvement are you asking of your facilitators and players for this experience?