Best Interactive Video I've Ever Seen

I've seen many interactive videos, some are good, some are bad, and some are really bad. Today I watched the best interactive video I've ever seen. Unlike most interactive videos out there, it is actually practical, without a huge network of links to different scenarios on YouTube. It is the most entertaining, and lends itself to be re-playable over and over again. It is an interactive music video to Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone. I absolutely love Bob Dylan, but even if you aren't a fan you will still enjoy the interactive video. The video has a sidebar, which resembles a TV set menu with channel buttons, volume, play, pause, and stop. You are able to change the channels, and no matter what channel you change it to the talent is always in sync with the song! Basically there are a bunch of different music videos on each channel and when you change to one of them, it syncs up to the part of the song you are at. It features channels such as the news, the history channel, the shopping channel, etc. It parodies shows such as The Bachelorette, and Pawn Stars. You should check it out, you will not regret it!

Check it out here:

http://video.bobdylan.com/desktop.html

Bear 71

Alright, so I've posted about interactive filmmaking and storytelling before, but I just found about a really cool interactive online documentary named Bear 71. Done in partnership with Canada's National Film Board, the project debuted at Sundance Film Festival in January 2012.

At the age of 3, 71 was collared with a GPS tracking chip. Directors Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison then used trail cameras to record 71 throughout her entire life. Revealing some really interesting things.

The twenty minute 'experience' allows viewers (users?) to follow the bear throughout her entire life in Canada's Banff National Park. You are guided along the bear's path through the park in a video game style. Along the way, you can stop and watch footage collected by the cameras.

It tells a story in an engaging way, making the audience active. It provides context in a non-linear way, making it really really cool.

If you're interested in this story, check out Journey To The End of Coal. It's a make-your-own-story experience that lets you simulate a journalist's experience in China who is doing research on coal mines.

If you want to make one of these, you can try out PopCorn.js. It's a free tool in beta by Mozilla that allows you to create interactive HTML5 videos using a simple timeline interface. I know that I'm interested in making an interactive film, is anyone else? Let me know!

[Related post]

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, ABBY, Bobby Womback,  Chairlift, Ellie 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.

Interactive Tourism Application

Last week I wrote a long post about the reading, this week I decided to focus my post on our project. For my project I was originally planning on doing an interactive tourism environment that was almost game like. Then a few days ago, I read an article (the link is below) about Apple’s plan for their new tablet. It made me consider a few good points about creating the project. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Use resources that are available to you.
You should be filling a void in the market. I discovered through research there were environments that did exactly what I intended to do already available. Additionally, I discovered that Facebook doesn’t have any really good travel applications. The best one available is Going Places, which only has a few hundred users (less then 200 active users). Thus, creating an interactive travel application for Facebook would fill the void in the marketplace.
Products can have multiple uses. These uses can be from educational to fun. I realized that what I create should be interactive and fun while still having some educational value. Having a product with multiple uses will expand the market of people who would be interested in the product.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703405704575015362653644260.html?mod=dist_smartbrief

Blogging and Interactive Technology

The last several years I have heard the benefits of blogging. I understand it allows everyone to be a ‘journalist.’ Blogs allow people to tell stories and disperse information with just a few stokes of the keys and a few clicks. The problem with this is there are no ethical guidelines nor a system in place to check facts. There have been some guidelines proposed, but you can’t get the entire world on the Web into agreement and compliance. As someone who has written for traditional media and a Webzine, I strongly value the journalism system of writers and editors.

Through the years I have been given various reasons why I should start blogging. That everyone was doing it now never was enough for me to start blogging. When I believed it might be beneficial professionally, I strongly considered it. The idea that there are lots of people who actually care what I write seems a little arrogant to me since there are billions of other people in the world. There are some positive aspects of blogging that I recognize. The use of a blog as a way to interactively exchange information (much like a forum) is definitely a positive of a blog. The use of a blog as a place to gather your opinions and thoughts is an good enough idea. Although, I still don’t understand why a person doesn’t use a private journal to express their thoughts. I’m starting to blog for my graduate visualization class.

Even though, I am apprehensive about blogging I am interested to see how it works as a informal/semi-formal means of class discussion. Now, back to the idea of visualization. We live in a world filled with visuals, which we assess in order to get a sense of scale, size, number, and amount as stated in this week’s reading. It is interesting how we use frames of reference for making judgements on quantity.

This is interesting article I found about a projector that can make visuals interactive on a variety of surfaces: Interactive Projector

The Maps of Our Time

In 1748, Giambattista Nolli, made one of the most accurate ichnographic (ground plan) maps of Rome, the Pianta Grande di Roma commonly known as the Nolli Map.

Pope Benedict XIV commissioned the map in order to survey Rome, and ever since then this map has been used for government planning as recently as 1970!

You can see an "interactive" Nolli map here.

“…And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I inquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well…”

— Lewis Carroll. The complete Sylvie and Bruno. 1893. San Francisco: Mercury House, c1991. pg. 265

In 2006, the SENSEable city lab at MIT created many Real-Time Rome maps as its contribution to the Venice Biennale

The map below shows the movement and concentration of mobile phone users during important events in the city of Rome. In this case the events happen to be the controversial Madonna concert and the World Cup final between Italy and France.

See a big version of this movie here where you can actually see the timeline.