Interactive film offers billions of potential story combinations

It seems few new movies warrant repeat views. Directors may hope that a second look will add greater meaning to the story and fans may watch and re-watch films to find inconsistencies, but many movie-goers will only see a film once. In order to fully experience Late Fragment, however, audiences will have to sit through multiple screenings. And that's exactly what the producers, writers and directors intended for the feature that premiered at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival.Co-produced by the Canadian Film Centre (CFC) and National Film Board (NFB), the film being dubbed as North America's first interactive full-length drama puts the story in the hands of the viewer. It was designed specifically for DVD viewing, enabling viewers to navigate the interlocking narratives of the film with a simple click of a remote. Late Fragment follows the lives of three protagonists - Kevin (Michael Healey), Faye (Krista Bridges) and Theo (Jeff Parazzo) - who take part in a restorative justice process, which is a form of group therapy where criminals and victims of crimes share their stories. All the principles' lives have been intimately connected with violence and each take on a dual role of victim and offender. Viewers can click "enter" on their remote controls as often and whenever they like and be taken to a different, seemingly random scene. There are no menus; the film itself is the interface. "Depending on where you click, in terms of times in a scene, it'll take you to a different scene. Each set of frames are only associated with one click and one non-click," explains the NFB's Anita Lee, a co-producer of the film. So viewers that don't click during the first 100 frames, for example, will have missed the opportunity to view specific alternate scenes. The inaugural project of the CFC Media Lab's Interactive Narrative Feature Program, Late Fragment was filmed in Toronto and Montreal. It consists of three acts, nine chapters, three endings, 139 scenes, 380 components, 380 clicks and 380 non-clicks, resulting in billions of story trajectories combined, all on a $1.3 million production budget. In chapter five alone, for instance, there are 3.26 billion trajectories that audiences can follow.Ensuring that the story maintained a solid narrative flow, and actually made sense, was no easy feat. Thirteen digital tools were created and used for quality assurance purposes and an expert in matrix algebra was consulted. It's no wonder; the story map is a highly complex flow chart with dizzying lines and curves.Serrano does, however, acknowledge the long and arduous creation process behind the film. "The whole process started in 2003, when I saw the Danish interactive film called Switching at the Festival International du Nouveau Cinema and Nouveaux Medias (International Festival of New Film and New Media) in Montreal," says Ana Serrano, CFC interactive architect and another one of the film's producers. "It was the first film that I saw that really married interaction and immersion. I thought it showed some very simple solutions to a lot of the problems we were grappling with (in creating an interactive film)."Switching is a non-linear, interactive feature that focuses on a Danish couple in the face of change. Viewers can similarly navigate back and forth through the film by clicking on a remote. In contrast to Late Fragment, however, the narrative is structured around a circular system in which everything repeats itself. Linear control and logic disappear. The film has no ending and can continue on infinitely."A lot of people look at interactive media and can't see the brilliance behind the projects because the production values aren't as high as (the audience is) used to," Serrano explains. "Switching took (the production values) to an acceptable level for most audiences, but the content and the form still felt too experimental for a lot of audiences. You could literally get stuck inside the model and not know how to get out. It was very difficult to follow the story. There's no ending, there's nothing like that.""One of the things we wanted to do was make sure (Late Fragment) wasn't just another media lab experiment and that it had some sort of mass appeal," she adds. In order to achieve this, they recruited some of Canada's most promising and celebrated writer-directors, including two-time Norman Jewison Award winner Anita Doran, seasoned interactive digital video director Daryl Cloran and Mateo Guez, who is responsible for such innovative films as The Dreamers, L'Ultima Notte and the mobile phone film Labour Day.Late Fragment is a compelling, if dark and disturbing, film. Some audience members at the September 12th screening were visibly squeamish during certain scenes. But that didn't stop many from returning to Toronto's Camera Bar and Screening Lounge for a second look later that night. The viewing experience, Serrano explains, is always different. Through the audience's navigational clicks, Guez derived an entirely different meaning from a scene in his story line, she says. While Serrano concedes that the current market for interactive films is limited, she is optimistic. "I think mass market is long-term, but I think there is a commercial appeal." They are already exploring stories for a second interactive feature.A commercial release of Late Fragment is scheduled for December.

Interactive film offers billions of potential story combinations

Broadcast | September 18, 2007

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