Masters in Creative Communication and Emerging Media event – “Mobile environments and platforms for expansion of creative proposals”

The meeting brought together experts such as Uruguayan video game designer Gerson Da Silva, creative director of the popular game Iron Marines; Nicolás Rodríguez, director of 7BLab Entertainment Inc. and creator of the Colombian comic Zambo Dendé, and María Cecilia Reyes, Ph.D. in Digital Humanities and researcher at the National Research Council of Genoa, Italy.

The event, held November 20, 2020, organized by the Externado’s new Masters in Creative Communication and Emerging Media program of the Social Communication – Journalism Faculty, drew a large number of attendees interested in the guests’ “creative brainstorms.”

María Cecilia Reyes, an expert in virtual reality and new cinematographic narratives, recounted her experience in the production of the interactive virtual reality film “Zena,” and explained how to interact with these systems.

“The way we can interact with virtual reality is exciting. There is a main division I call cognitive interaction: when the ‘interactor’ makes decisions consciously through different types of interfaces, with the viewer cursor, through voice, gestures, or movement. We also have interaction that is not consciously done, where the virtual reality system is connected to interfaces that measure users’ physiological data; for example, heart rate, perspiration, or temperature.”

For his part, Nicolás Rodríguez spoke about his comic Zambo Dendé, an example of Intellectual Property entrepreneurship in all its dimensions.

“Our great challenge as a company was not to end up having the same content on different platforms, but rather having each platform complementing the content. It is easier to make a road map from the geographical and contextual aspects and, even, each character’s DNA. Thus, we create a whole fictional universe based on each character, and each interacts in its context. You have to invest a lot of time on the road map.”

Gerson Da Silva referred to his experience creating the Iron Marines game, stating that “the challenge was more for the platform than for the genre. We believed the opportunity was to adapt the genre to the mobile world because many solutions work on PC but do not work for a mobile map. So, we found a way to respect the experience the great creators of the genre had achieved on PC, rediscovering how to do it on mobile devices. Sometimes the solution was so ridiculously simple that it was hard to reach that moment of abstraction or simplicity.”

The forum was broadcast via Facebook Live at @ ComunicaciónExternado.