Filmatic Keynote : Weaving Mercury

Post Keynote by Gretchen McCourt, Executive Vice President & Chief Content Officer, Arclight Cinemas

Ms. McCourt will discuss the current state of cinematic storytelling and consumer demand for quality content from art installations to 3D, Virtual Reality, and more.

Alex McDowell is one of the most influential designers working in narrative media, with the impact of his ideas extending far beyond his background in cinema. With over 30 years of experience in narrative design, he advocates an immersive design process and the key role of world building in storytelling. Alex is teaching at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Interactive Media Division and Production, with classes on world building and transmedia, and he was a Visiting Artist at MIT’s Media Lab. He is a co-founder and the creative director of the 5D Institute - a global series of distributed events and an education space for an expanding community of storytellers in industry and academia - and the 5D Organization, which is devoted to building tangible worlds and immersive narratives.

Sergei Gepshtein is a scientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, trained in neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and vision science. Before joining the Salk Institute, Sergei investigated stereoscopic vision and the interaction of vision and touch at UC Berkeley, and then he studied the computational principles of visual perceptual organization at RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. His current research concerns visual norms (whose role in perception is similar to the role of laws in physics) and the question of how vision is used for imagining future actions. Sergei is increasingly involved in developing new methods of perceptual continuity for immersive environments and cinema.