Simon Jon Andreasen – Adapting Worlds
In Adapting Worlds, head of the animation programme, Simon Jon Andreasen, together with students, artists, and researchers, examines how the universe can be ‘extracted" from an existing work and through world building and devising/improvisation can expand an existing universe so that it can be used transmedially – across books, theatre, film, games, and other new media.
Period: 1 October 2021 – 1 September 2023
Adaptations are usually something we understand as a narrative that is moved from one medium to another. Typical from book to film. But as with much else, digital reality overtakes our perception, and with the digital explosion within media, texts and fictions are being adapted to non-narrative media and in new ways, we had not imagined. E.g., in games and streamed series.
The global media players are gaining momentum and there have never been as many TV series adaptations as now. These are also exciting and golden times for media researchers. There is a great deal of new research to be done. But for us artists, we lack methods and models that we can use in our practice. Because how do you adapt an existing work if the goal is not to make an adaptation for a single publication but instead for many media, for experiences without narratives, and perhaps even for formats that we are not yet familiar with? Here, several researchers point to universal thinking and transmedial storytelling as solutions and as Linda Hutcheon, the queen of adaptation theory, writes in the foreword of the newest edition of ‘A Theory of Adaptation’:
‘Thematic and narrative persistence is not the name of the new adaptation game; world building is.’
Researcher
Simon Jon Andreasen is a teacher and head of the Film School's director programme for animation and interactive media and head of the academy for DADIU (The National Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment). He has worked as a director of both games, fiction, and documentaries, has been creative director at the games company Deadline Games and worked with digitization in the publishing industry.
Simon's great passion is the development of universes. And alongside his work at the Film School, Simon has continuously explored and experimented with how to develop universes in his artistic development work and together with the Film School's students and students from other art schools and education programmes nationally and abroad.
In his third KUV project, Simon investigates together with students, artists, and researchers how to ‘extract’ the universe from an existing work and through world building and devising/improvisation can expand an existing universe so that it can be used across many media (books, theatre, film, games, and other new media).
KUV Project #1: Storyworlds 2.0 (completed)
The project examines how real-time technology can be used to construct fictional universes for films and games. Historically, the project is placed in the context of universe creators such as the author J.R.R. Tolkien and production designer Alex McDowel, as well as researchers such as Jesper Juul, Henry Jenkins and Marrie Laure Ryan. The project has ambitions to create transmedial universes by using storyworlds.
Read more here about Storyworlds
KUV project #2: Devising worlds (completed)
In the academic world, universes have typically been treated as part of pop culture. In the commercial industry, universe development equals franchise thinking. And in the artistic world, the creation of the universe is treated anecdotally, in contrast to the art of storytelling, where since Aristotle there have been models for narrative structures.
In the Devising Worlds project, Simon, students, and a number of artists investigate a universe model that arose during the previous artistic research project Storyworlds 2.0. The model illustrates a way in which artists across art forms and disciplines can jointly conceptualize universes, create artistic content for the universes and propose ideas for linear, interactive, and transmedia experiences.