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On October 26, the interactive entertainment industry will gather at the Royal Lancaster Hotel to celebrate yet another banner year. Hosted by comic Phill Jupitus, (our cover photo) BAFTA’s Third Interactive Entertainment Awards, held in associa- tion with ICL, promises to showcase the most innovative and entertaining of all new media - from CDs to DVDs, games to artist installations, WAP to Web... and back.
It’s an exciting time for BAFTA, and for myself, writes Joy Barrett, having just taken the reins of what is now, arguably, the largest and most presti- gious Interactive Entertainment awards event in the world.
Twice the number of entries have been received for the 2000 awards as
were received in 1999, a sign not only of the burgeoning industry but of an increasing desire for competition and the resulting recognition of excellence that is so well-deserved. Due to this rapid expansion, nine categories have been added to this year’s BAFTA Interactive Entertainment awards. They are:
INTERACTIVE ARTS
ENHANCEMENT OF LINEAR MEDIA: ON-LINE LEARNING (in addition to the regular Learning Award) LIFESTYLE & LEISURE SPORTS GAMES - Mobile & Networked GAMES - PC
GAMES - Console
MUSIC
TECHNICAL INNOVATION
I see the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment awards as fast becoming
the undisputed world standard for excellence in this field.
When my Canadian friends asked what I would be doing at BAFTA, the easiest way to explain was that I would be organising the “Interactive Entertainment Oscars”. If the American Academy decides one day to award Interactive Oscars, I’m sure they will have to explain it as their version of the BAFTAs. ■
Joy Barrett (pictured left) recently relocated from Calgary, Canada to London to take the position of Awards Officer - Interactive Entertainment at BAFTA. Previously, she was in charge of Television & New Media Co-produc- tions at The Banff Centre for the Arts and has worked as a producer for com- mercial production companies. She also has a background in design and publishing.
When Film and Television first got together it was, recalls BAFTA Vice- President and trustee Lord Puttnam, “quite an agonising merger.”
As the long debate – about two years’ worth – raged much more recently about the Academy’s stance on Interactive, Puttnam’s own views were quite clear: that BAFTA should be an active part of “leading into life this new child.”
The argument, explained Puttnam, initially centred around whether or not the Interactive world would (a) merge with TV to the point where they became unrecognisably connected, or (b), grow to be every bit as large as TV itself.
“If I look back over my own 30 years of missed opportunities I notice how constantly institutions get obviat- ed by technology and end up looking silly. So we had a BAFTA where film and
TV were only a portion of the media mix. Did we then just stand around and say ‘Fine’? Or should we say, ‘We’re going to take a more inclusive approach.’? We are, after all, in the moving images business.
“Anyway, people like me and Martin Freeth banged on about it and it finally got adopted. It wasn’t, though, the easiest of births. There was quite a lot of tooth-sucking. A lot of people thought we’d do it for a year and then it would somehow go away. The good news is that it’s here to stay, thanks in no small part to ICL who funded it. That was the key. Had it been a cost to the Academy, I don’t think we would have got it through.”
Of course, talk of Interactive is much more than just about inclusion, represen- tation and award ceremonies. It’s to do, said Puttnam, with the whole future of creativity in
this country: “I think it’s absolutely inevitable that just as people like Alan Parker and Ridley Scott came out of advertising, so a number of the signifi- cant film-makers of, say, the year 2020 will have cut their teeth in the Interactive world.
“There’s nothing new in this. Talent usually emerges from the area of the industry it’s easiest to access. Once it was commercials, before that documen- taries. Prior to that it was the BBC trainee scheme. It seems inevitable that Interactive will be the same because of the extraordinary crossover of skills it produces.
‘Now I look forward to that day some- time in the future when some- one stands up with a BAFTA mask for Best Direction having first joined us in the Interactive section,” he smiled.
The other important buzz- word is ‘cross-fertilisation.’
Puttnam explained: “We’re encouraging the notion that people who served their apprenticeship in the Interactive world can move very rapidly across into TV or feature film. That’s one of the great strengths of the British indus- try – that our writers, actors and direc- tors are able to work in a multiplicity of medias. That’s an enormous benefit to us culturally.”
Is then a re-named BAFTIA just around the corner? He neatly side- stepped that particular hot potato and instead preferred to hype what “in just Year Three, it now appears to be the biggest Interactive Awards anywhere in the world.
“It’s turned out to be a very big deal. That’s so good for BAFTA because it extends our reach. But I hope the main message it sends out is that this is a very highly inclusive industry,” said Puttnam. ■ Quentin Falk
SNEAKPREVIEW BAFTA’S 3RD ANNUAL INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT AWARDS PROMISE TO BE THE WORLD’S LARGEST
SENDINGTHERIGHTMESSAGE
LORD PUTTNAM, A PRIME MOVER IN PERSUADING BAFTA TO GO INTERACTIVE, ENTHUSES ABOUT A VERY SUCCESSFUL ‘ADOPTION’
Focus on Interactive
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