Friday, September 21, 2012

Interactive Filmmaking on the Internet

The Internet is revolutionary. We all know that. Look at YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter and imagine your daily life without them.

It's a new medium that opens up huge possibilities for filmmakers. However, the web is often an afterthought for many filmmakers and especially student filmmakers.

Pretty much every feature length film has a website. Some of them are standalone works of interactive art. ParaNorman, a recent animated film, has an amazing interactive website built in HTML5 that allows audiences to get a feel for its characters and animation.



ParaNorman's site lets audiences take a virtual tour of the movie even before it was released last month. It's built on HTML5, which is the new internet standard for replacing Adobe's Flash.

HTML5 is completely run inside of the browser and is therefore more stable than Flash, making it possible for better and faster interactive animations.



Flash still has its uses of course. It's also been used in the past by many websites that haven't updated.



Released in 2008, CrimeFace is an interactive movie built on Flash. It adds a new depth to the film using a controllable interface around the actual film to provide more information about characters, props, and other elements of the fim.

A new genre of interactive films has entered the market: interactive music videos. Bands and musicians like Arcade Fire, ABBYBobby WombackChairliftEllie Goulding and Miranda Lambert have all released impressive interactive HTML5 songs. 

Old Spice teamed up with Vimeo to make an interactive short video where you can make music by moving Terry Crews's muscles in different ways.


If you're interested in creating an interactive film, a handy web script called Popcorn.js works wonders and is worth a checkout.


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