Writing | Li Shuangxian
Title Map | Vision China
The lights are dark and the movie begins. Five minutes later, the protagonist is dead, and the whole show ends.
This is not a poor imitation of the film “Seven Neuropathies” directed by Martin McDonald, but the uniqueness of the author when he first watched the “interactive movie” in the theater. Experience.
As one guest mentioned in the post-show sharing session: he has always disliked the so-called “lead aura”, and the form of interactive film gave him the “hand blade protagonist” Pleasure.
After the “ultra-short ending” was unlocked, a burst of laughter broke out in the theater seat. When people are hooked up by this novel film and television form, are they waiting for their good stories one after another?
Recently, director Li An’s “Gemini Killer” shot with new technical specifications is showing up. The Chinese and American critics have given comments on both sides.
A North American film critic believes that “this is an amusement park project packaged into action films.” Many Chinese film critics who respect the “Chinese Light” praised their bold attempts and innovations in exploring the boundaries of filmmaking technology.
From black and white silent films, color audio movies to the current 3D, 4K, 120 frames and interactive film and television, the different presentations of movies have always been the direction that creators and investors are eager to continue to explore.
In 2013, Netflex tested the political thriller “House of Cards” in a hit. Its use of big data tools to guide actors’ casts and episodes is categorized as an efficient “indirect interaction.”
Black Mirror Pandas Niki, which was launched at the end of 2018, is more radical and bold.After the choice of ten key plots, the outcomes seen by the viewer can be quite different.
In July of this year, the domestic video site Bilibili pushed a wave of “interactive video”, attracting many head UP players to participate.
After “Daddy? Be a hero? When the devil? You decide!”, “Control the square aunt to save B station!” and more than a dozen interactive videos are playing more than one million. However, after the heat, most of the content is still difficult to escape the “flow in the form” evaluation.
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Bilibili’s new interactive video editor, image source network
In fact, as early as 38 years ago, there were game designers who seized the “tangled temperament” that humans brought themselves, and produced the world’s first “interactive movie game” – “Rollercoaster”.
Image Source Network
This minimalist interactive game is set at a different point in advance.Players can press different buttons to jump to the specified movie chapter.
In this single-threaded game, the option to make a mistake is directly GAMEOVER. And if you go all the way, you will unlock an egg – watch a long video on the roller coaster.
“Interactive movies” are not new, this form is born out of video games in video games (especially VCR games), but more like the “word-making movement” brought by the mighty “word-making movement” in recent years. Product.
On Wikipedia, the two terms of interactive movie and interactive movie game (VCR game) have been merged, featuring:
“Let’s use a live-action capture of an animation or a live-action movie, with a focus on scriptwriting.”
This interactive movie that I have experienced this time, real-life actors and real scene shooting are enabled, but in order to realize the “interactive” function on the story line, the producer has developed the corresponding package using the game engine cocos2dx. .
“Movies” developed with the game engine can also be seen from the on-site posters
On the other hand, live video of the industry’s excellent interactive games, such as “Rainstorm”, “Superior Twins”, “Detroit: Changing People”, “Until Dawn” and “Quantum Fracture” are all on Youtube. In the classification of “drama movies”, it has long been viewed as a movie by young netizens.
One of the channels named Semenix Gaming (game movie channel), which is a game video that has been carefully edited and finished, set a special Interactive movie categories and indicate “perfect endings”, “worst endings” or “hidden plots”, etc.
In this filming process, whenever the story advances to a selection point, the audience can use the laser pointer to make a selection. The background will determine the direction of the story based on the number of optoelectronics that fall on the options.
This interactive mode is “stupid”, but it is also very effective.
The green track on the screen is for the audience to click
The first scene of a choice point is whether the man chooses to call the police after he knows that his girlfriend has been kidnapped.
At this time most viewers chose the alarm. Then the next scene was played: the female lord was killed, the gangster came to the photo of the murderous process, and then the whole drama ended (unlocking an ending).
After the screen line appeared on the screen, the back office staff turned it back. The viewer then watches the contents of the ten seconds after the chapter again, until the “Alarms” option appears again on the screen.
The story map displayed by the organizer outside the theater
Although there are good people who still choose the alarm option, most of the viewers choose not to alarm in order to advance the story. Sure enough, the plot moved forward again. And in this story line, the woman is still alive, waiting for the man to rescue.
The direction of the story in the future is determined by the audience using a laser pointer to illuminate an option on the screen. You can choose to calm down or anger and fight back, and even give up the rescue.
When faced with some difficult choices, there will be disagreements. But most of the time, people’s herd mentality will make the votes gradually concentrated.
According to the information provided by the event organizers, the film has a total of 2 story lines, 15 story lines, nearly 50 interaction points, and 25 endings. These numbers look great, but the total video duration is only 100 minutes.
The streamlined storyline, the jumping narrative rhythm and the multi-threaded creation of interactive movies have greatly increased the workload of the scriptwriter. How to ensure that every ending is reasonable and exciting, and every interaction point is difficult to choose, which is almost a brand new scriptwriting discipline.
In order to make the story more rational, The creator of the interactive game “Until the Dawn” even designed a character table, following each character’s character to make a choice, you can play it out. Wrong ending. EnthusiasticAccording to netizen statistics, if you explore the full story line, “Until Dawn” can present 256 different endings. The screenshots are from the opening animation of the game “Until Dawn”
The script of interactive film is a lot of work, from the “interactive novel” (I believe: according to the definition of “interactive film” in the industry) Borchs “The Garden of the Trails” A little know one or two:
This novel by Peng Yu has been written for thirteen years, but he can never finish it. He is equivalent to all the choices made by the protagonist, and all the plots caused are written in order. If the protagonist has only two options for each choice (actually far more than that), then all possible choices of the protagonist can be represented by a binary tree. And this novel is a traversal of a binary tree according to some rules. The protagonist naturally has an infinite variety of choices, and this traversal will never end.
Off-topic, “The Garden of Paths” may be one of the most “great” in interactive stories.
But it is more in line with the “great” to meet the needs of ordinary audiences. It is that people are willing to sit on the chair for two hours and feel uncomfortable. I feel that the time is quite fast. I feel that the story is smooth and the people in the drama are you. I can understand even if you don’t like it. (This paragraph is quoted from the tiger sniffing author Li Wei)
So does the interactive movie I watched have the above viewing experience?
In terms of the novelty of form, there is indeed it.
But the novelty of this kind of laser pointer is rapidly declining, and attention immediately shifts to the story itself. When I began to think about the legitimacy and rationality of each decision of the protagonist, the good experience of watching movies collapsed.
The “new form” may be a gimmick, but the “good story” is always the core of the film.
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The founder of the filming event, Ma Xiaodao, the co-founder of the dance knife, said: “With the blessing of Internet technology in the 5G era, the film will have a new interactive future. Compared with traditional movies, interactive movies can Provide humans with deeper and more immersiveSpiritual experience. ”
The interactive film and television content industry is still in the grassroots period, and industry standards such as data format specifications are still under development. The relevant talents are scarce, and the consumption scene of interactive movies is scarce.
Perhaps the most noteworthy thing is that in the face of the “interaction problem of whether to try interactive movies”, more and more film and television practitioners and user audiences are making their own choices.