Terminus: Gaming the system

Whether you call it gentrification or metamorphosis, Atlanta is changing. Plenty of ink has been spilled over the bougie boom of new money entering the city and Atlanta’s newly minted status as a film and tech hub. A string of mixed-use developments have sprouted seemingly overnight, fungi-like, on North and Ponce. Inside, millennials perch at standing desks and shepherd marketing emails into inboxes. And every day, fresh film call signs flash their bumblebee yellow-and-black along the city’s main drags and byways.
In contrast to the public plaudits and complaints surrounding these developments, far less has been said about the questions that naturally follow: How can Atlanta manage this change responsibly, in a way that empowers the coming generations? And how can the city create economic opportunity for those who were previously excluded?
Upcoming film and gaming expo Terminus suggests an intriguing answer: Nurture the city’s young creative class and let the entertainment industry lead the way. “Something that sets Terminus apart is that we're trying to foster the creative community and put the spotlight on what they're creating, what they're making,” Ideas United CEO and Terminus co-founder David Roemer says. Roemer, an Emory grad, founded Ideas United as the parent company of Campus MovieFest, the world's largest student film festival. Campus MovieFest began at Emory in 2000, and previously hosted its end-of-year gala in Los Angeles. This year the capstone event will instead be held at Atlanta’s downtown Marriott Marquis and rebranded as “Terminus,” Atlanta's old name, hearkening back to when the city was most famous for being a rail hub. (Creative Loafing is a partner organization at this year’s Terminus.)
Finalists in the Campus MovieFest short film competition will hit the big screen at the Landmark Midtown Art Cinema over Terminus' four-day run, Thurs., June 16, through Sun., June 19. The winners will be feted on the expo’s final day — prizes on offer include thousands of dollars worth of A/V gear (courtesy of sponsors like Sennheiser). The top short films will also get the chance to screen at France’s Cannes Film Festival, as part of the Cannes Short Films Corner.
Unlike past years at Campus MovieFest, a track of gaming-related panels and exhibitions will run alongside the film offerings at Terminus. The panels all sport practically-minded titles like "From Idea to Production: Building Your Game Development Team" and "The Great Debates: Film School or Not to Film School." Terminus' promotional material is likewise clean, cute, and geared towards students and young creatives.
Part professional networking mixer, part fan convention, and part technology expo, Terminus will spotlight the people and tech bridging the shrinking gap between the worlds of film and gaming. The connection is natural, since the two industries share plenty in the way of bleeding-edge tech, such as CGI, motion-capture, VR, and 360-degree filmmaking. And Atlanta may be increasingly well-known for film and media, but the city also has a thriving game development scene — since 2000, big-name studios like Hi-Rez ("Smite"), Tripwire ("Killing Floor"), and CCP ("EVE Online") have all set up shop in and around the Atlanta metro area. embed-1 Established actors, designers, and producers regularly hopscotch between film and gaming these days. (Kevin Spacey famously lent his likeness and voice to 2014’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare as the Underwood-esque villain Jonathan Irons.) The easing of entry barriers also spurred a new generation of DIY filmmakers, gamemakers, and critics carving out niches for themselves on YouTube, blogs, and social sites. Playing video games and making strange noises into a public webcam used to get you branded a social pariah. Now, you make a seven-figure salary and they call you PewDiePie.
"For young people especially, there's no one way to have a career in these industries any more, and that's what Terminus is trying to celebrate,” Executive Director of Ideas United Jess Reynoso says. “Atlanta is the perfect place to do this right now, both because the cost of living is so low and because it's a major transit hub. We're going through a really cool renaissance period, with our own creative community and creative voice. We want to foster that and build on that.”
If one word could serve as both the watchword and cri de coeur of Terminus, it’s “storytelling.” “When we started 16 years ago it was all about letting students tell their stories up on the big screen,” Roemer says. “It's been a passion of ours ever since.” Terminus aims to show there's potential for creative expression whether a person is behind the camera, composing a score, or writing a computer program.
In keeping with Atlanta's own status as a majority-minority city, Terminus is making a point to offer panels on making creative industries more inclusive to artists who aren’t white cisgender men: “You can know all about how a camera works or setting up lighting or editing a movie — but if you're not telling a story that people respond to, you can only get so far,” Reynoso says. “Having these conversations about inclusivity is only going to make you a better storyteller.”
To be fair, “storytelling” is one of the most overused marketing buzzwords of the past few years. Accountants and UX developers alike confidently proclaim themselves to be storytellers these days. But in this context, it means something different. It’s about giving people the tools to see themselves represented in positive and constructive ways, something that’s especially important for groups that are traditionally underrepresented in media.
Indeed, if Atlanta is going to survive and thrive in this decade and the next, the city’s increasingly young and diverse population is key. “Atlanta must create the conditions where young people think, ‘I can live and work here, and I can collaborate with the other great artists living here,’” arts consultant and Emory University economics professor Tom Smith says. It's not just enough to offer a generous tax credit, although that certainly helps. Atlanta must first become the kind of place where creative young people choose to set down roots.
To Smith’s mind, this demands a full-throated embrace of the city’s creative community. If it were up to him, Atlanta’s rap/R&B industry would get the same tax breaks as film. In cultivating the conditions by which art and commerce flourish, you encourage the expansion of art and commerce. Put another way: “The more cool people are here, the more cool people will want to live here.”
As a longtime chronicler of demographic trends both national and local, Smith believes Terminus has its finger on the pulse and Atlanta is uniquely poised to thrive. “We're a really awesome petri dish for a lot of this stuff,” he says. “You have, arguably, two of the top 25 schools in the country. Top technology companies, CNN and TBS, and some crazy talented people living here who are already working in the entertainment industry. All you really need is Michelangelo's God-touches-Adam kind of moment, where the right people at the right time make it happen.”
Terminus. $75–$150. 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Thurs., June 16, through Sun., June 19. Atlanta Marriott Marquis, 285 Peachtree Center Ave. N.E. www.terminusevent.com.