Recently I have been talking to a few documentary filmmakers about how video lives in the interactive space. As people are increasingly wondering if the web will supersede television, naturally filmmakers are looking to the web to understand how video projects and stories can work online.
Over the last few years it has been incredibly exciting to see the development and exploration of interactive video. Technology made so many things possible that were impossible before: bandwidth increased and was more widely distributed; more sophisticated codecs (compression/decompression software) enabling delivery of smaller file sizes without compromising quality; and faster computers facilitating the decompression of those video files fast enough to be watchable.
At the same time, Flash programming (the majority of animated and video material you see on the web) grew in leaps and bounds for the first time making it possibly to interact with video in a different way than you could with television.
Beyond simple video players that you can start and stop, programming capabilities now allow you to treat video pieces as objects. This means you can now make those pieces do things and respond to actions you might do with your mouse.
For example, imagine three layers of video sitting on top of one another. The two top layers are each of a person shot on greenscreen, so we are able to make their backgrounds transparent. The bottom layer could be a different background altogether. To the average viewer looking at it, you would see two people in a room as if it had been shot all at once in the same shot.
Depending on how you interact with the video objects – in this case the two people, you could potentially make those video pieces do different things. Click on a person once, he suddenly jumps, click and drag the other person and he walks in the direction you are dragging him. It is even possible that if you caused the two video objects to overlap, a new kind of unexpected action could be programmed to happen, such as they start to dance together. And that is just the simple version.
While it would be complex to plan, you could potentially have a really rich interactive experience blending the best of both worlds: the richly emotional and human aspects of video with the more interactive “learn forward” aspect of the web. People no longer would have to sit and passively watch, but could actually interact, and direct their own experience. This is what is so exciting about the web and why people are drawn to it. People are in control and can make things happen. Ultimately this is the final goal of marketers in particular: Engagement.
But I have been thinking about the experience of content of video itself under the different conditions. People often equate television watching with a passive experience. This has been the main differentiator between television and the video experience online. But in fact, while watching a television series or a film in a cinema, our minds are active and engaged. We are often predicting what will happen next, trying to interpret the meaning of a look, or trying to piece together elements of a story to make sense of it. Storytelling can be a shorthand version of a world that compels our participation in order to fill in the gaps and make meaning.
It lead me to wonder whether the experience of relating to a story that simply plays from beginning to end is quite the same as an interactive video experience. In long form film, story elements are what attract our focus. We hardly notice the edits from one shot to the next, we rarely think about the 20 or so people behind the camera waiting for the director to call cut at the end of the take.
Any time we are distracted from the illusion of the story world, whether it’s a hole of the logic of the narrative, or something technical that doesn’t belong, the integrity of the story breaks, and we develop distance to the story world. Historically, some filmmakers have used this technique to “wake up” the audience from the “spell” they are under. Jean-Luc Godard was famous for this in his films when he challenged our expectations of the traditional narrative process at every turn. Some documentary filmmakers highlight the filmmaking techniques as a way to remind us that we are watching a film and encourage objectivity.
Of course, emotional engagement is not black and white. We are capable to switching back and forth. Even within traditional storytelling, some narrative forms draw us in more tightly than others. Comedies for example, by their very nature, are more distancing. We don’t expect a character to get truly hurt despite being put through seemingly painful situations. But the more we are broken from the world of the story itself, the less relevant the emotional experience is to us, the weaker the spell. Some filmmakers say that when they start to notice the technical aspects of the filmmaking, the film is not working as it should.
The interactive world, then, forces this break on us. The simple act having to reach for your mouse, of seeing and directing the cursor on the screen breaks the illusion and reminds us were are no longer in the story world. The story world becomes distanced, and the figures more like puppets than archetypal reflections of ourselves and the people we know.
It can’t help but bring us crashing back into our own worlds, sitting at our computers and interrupts the emotional experience that the “passive” experience of watching a story provides. Without the emotional experience – which may be a central reason why people see films in the first place, we don’t gain the satisfaction of emotional closure. Emotional closure be key. Narrative helps us make sense of life and reassures us that there is a purpose to all the struggle and conflict we experience.
I’m not suggesting we should avoid the combination interactivity and video. But we might want to more clearly understand what engagement really means rather than blindly accept that the interactivity means engagement.
We might look at under what circumstances interactive video works best. Storytelling through film delivers a particular kind of emotional experience, but obviously is not the only kind of experience there is. Interactive films experiences might lean more towards a gaming model, for example. Empathy with the characters may take a back seat to the play experience, discovery, testing of skills, creating, winning and so on. Interactive video might be a great vehicle for delivering information in a more engaging way such as with teaching modules.
But how does this address questions for filmmakers looking to create dramatic narratives or documentaries?
I think even if IPTV were to entirely highjack television, I think there will still be a market for long form storytelling itself. And the computer may not be its only destination. Television may be losing some of its dominant ground, especially where advertising is concerned, I am not at all convinced its going the way of the dinosaurs. Cinema took quite a beating, but despite a predictions to the contrary, television, videos and DVDs did not entirely eliminate movie theatres as was predicted.
Maybe interactive video just depends on the nature of the project and exactly what you want the user/viewer to experience and the extent that interactivity fits within the experience. I haven’t quite decided. HBO’s Voyeur online campaign was so compelling that people got frustrated when there wasn’t more.
However, it might be interesting to consider that the story world as experienced through the narrative, and the world in which the user may hold in his mind later (or earlier) as being separate. The ideas that resonate stay with us. That mind-world of the story might be expressed or matured more completely through a variety of online experiences. As an example, I wish the web was in the state it is now when the X-files were around. I would have loved to follow Scully or Mulder on Twitter. I would have loved to read more deeply the official “cover-up” tactics in a “press-release” blog, or discovered the smoking man somewhere on a forum. None of this would have detracted from the tv series.
More exciting, is how suited the documentary project is to live through social media. It is always a challenge for filmmakers to leave parts of their films on the cutting room floor, or to not have the opportunity to film the most remarkable parts of the story. Documentary projects might be considered as more than one-off projects, but movements that are embraced by their audience and can continue to live on and develop, whether through forums or through videos responses to the initial project.
It may no longer be how film lives online, so much as how the entire experience of media can work together to develop a richer world of the story.
