A pioneering filmmaker in the realm of interactive cinema, Greg Roach won Best of Show honors at Apple's First Annual QuickTime Film Festival for The Wrong Side of Town, a CD-ROM-based work that the American Film Institute hailed as the world's first truly interactive film. Roach was recently given another Best of Show award at the Second Annual QuickTime Multimedia Film Festival in San Francisco for Big Warm Bear Arms, a collection of video poems and essays subtitled "musings after the birth of a first child."
When Roach graduated from the University of Houston with an MFA in directing, his natural inclinations first led him to the theater in the roles of director, actor, and playwright. Even now he says, "If there was a way to do live theater inside the computer, I would." But, as he puts the finishing touches on Portals, a collection of interactive films available on CD-ROM later this year, one of his students exclaims that "he reminds me a little bit of a preacher" for multimedia.
Roach believes that the challenge he and other multimedia artists face is to "continue to try to create works whose interfaces are the films themselves, where there aren't any buttons or text - none of the usual trappings associated with interactive multimedia. As artists we must give people really compelling reasons to interact in the first place."
Roach plans to move his studios to Northern California this fall - "It's the place to be for multimedia these days," he says. Roach also teaches at the Multimedia Studies Program at San Francisco State University. His next series of seminars is scheduled for July 16-18, 1993. For more information call: +1 (415) 904 7700.
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