Arcade Fire's Live Music Video

While I was relaxing during my down time between classes, I stumbled upon news from the YouTube Music Awards. I had heard ads about this event, but I never got around to watching it. I discovered, to my surprise, that Arcade Fire had recorded a live music video of their new song "Afterlife". This music video was directed by Spike Jonze, director of films like "Being John Malcovich", "Adaptation.", and "Where the Wild Things Are". 

This music video was a low-budget production that happened right on stage as the band was performing. The video stars Greta Gerwig who plays a woman who has just dealt with a bad breakup. It involves her running through a forest on stage doing a choreographed dance and in the end dancing with a bunch of younger girls. This sounds pretty lame when I describe it so check out the video for more. 

Even though the dancing comes off as mildly cheesy, the video in whole just puts a smile on your face. You are taken into this world within the contents of the video framing, leaving the viewer almost completely unaware of the stage and audience that is just a few feet away. This video is a totally new concept for how music awards can run. A production is made on stage and it is live. It is high-stakes, but it could be the opportunity to create something really special. 

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.