With hundreds of people as a "screenwriter", are you the leader or the obedient?
"This is the world's first interactive cinema film, and you are the first audience in China to experience it. This time you made 66-68 choices, but also chose a very small probability of the plot, so that the heroine fell in love with the male protagonist. ”
At the screening site of the Interactive Film "Night Shift" Beijing Theater (August 28 evening) at the Beijing Film Festival, the film representative quipped after the screening that the audience was too violent, so that 60 minutes came to the end of the heroine's death.
This year, the Beijing Film Festival introduced a new form of interactive film "Night Shift", which is also the first time that interactive films have been publicly screened in Chinese mainland theaters.
With hundreds of people working as "screenwriters" on the big screen, how does this fresh interactive movie experience feel?
Unlike other movies, which prompt you to turn off your phone when you enter, all viewers are asked to download an APP called CtrlMovie when they enter the night shift: before the movie is screened, scan the QR code on the screen to link the APP to make A/B selections, and each choice will bring the story into a different plot and decide the final ending.
The crime suspense interactive film Night Shift was released in 2016 and is directed by Tobias Weber, with Michael Robert Johnson and Tobias Webber, who have produced the film "Sherlock Holmes", as the screenwriters, and actors Joe Sovobuts and Haruka Abe. The film tells the story of Matt, a college student majoring in mathematics, who is involved in an auction house theft for no reason, and in order to prove his innocence, he is faced with a series of choices, and in the process he gradually discovers that even if some decisions seem to be minimal, they will lead to very different results.
As an audience, you hold the fate of the male protagonist in your hands, and each choice will lead him to a different fork in the road.
Like what:
Should the heroine interrupt her when she keeps bidding at the auction? A group of hinder the male protagonist's way forward, do you want to fight it? In the face of the hypocritical "philanthropist" of the old treacherous giant, do you want to shoot?
The film has more than 180 key multiple-choice questions that determine the fate of the characters, moving towards different character relationships and 7 endings. When making a choice, the movie doesn't pause, the frame doesn't start over, and any complete story line that connects it all requires 60 to 80 choices.
The rules that determine the direction of the plot are simple, and the minority obeys the majority. But the time to make decisions is only a few seconds, and many times there is no time to think, only intuition and habits.
It's more like a social practice — our distance from evil. In this adventure, whether to resort to violence, insatiable greed, or to believe in human nature and help fraternity... Compared with the traditional film audience and the role is mostly empathetic relationship, interactive movies give more possibilities, some audiences are ruthless viewers, watching hilarity is not too big; some audiences are kind passers-by, trying to help the protagonist get out of danger; some audiences automatically bring into the role and interpret their fate in the movie.
The hilarity of the audience after each selection also highlights another special attribute of interactive movies - sociality. The cinema is like a large living room, hundreds of people sit in front of the screen as "screenwriters", but not everyone can get a sense of interaction and decision-making, when the plot direction is contrary to their own choices, the sense of participation is significantly reduced, and then hope to brush again in the second week. This also allows the value of interactive film content to have a new direction of extension - in the mobile device, OTT platform in the mode of single payment for revenue. In fact, "Night Shift" has also launched Steam, App Store, Apple TV, PlayStation, XBox and other terminals, and on the Chinese version of Steam, the game charges 42 yuan and has more than 5,000 special reviews.
Is offline a movie, online a game or a movie?
For the discussion of interactive films, there is no need to stick to the form, the boundaries between film and game have been opened. As far as the content of "Night Shift" is concerned, judging from the dimensions of picture texture, plot logic, character performance, etc., this is indeed a smooth movie with a special audiovisual language of the film. However, the growth of gameplay, interactivity and other attributes in movies has also brought about the weakening of thinking and fluency.
What exactly is an interactive movie? Let's take a look at the definition of this new word:
Interactive film refers to a new film mode in which the audience becomes a character in the movie, chooses the fate of the character, writes the exclusive movie plot, and continuously interacts. In interactive movies, the audience can choose the next story direction for the characters through the mobile APP, setting the plot and the limited time, so as to bring the audience a new immersive experience to the greatest extent. Its appearance allows the audience to no longer be just a moviegoer, but to personally participate in the plot and become the controller who dominates the direction of the plot.
"Night Shift", which is connected to the APP to make a choice, is known as the world's first cinema interactive film. At the click of the red and green buttons next to the seat, the Czech comedy film Noir Film, born in 1967, is the world's first interactive film. The film sets up 9 interactive nodes, and when each node is reached, the movie will be paused, the host will take the stage, let the audience choose one of the two, and the scene that gets a higher number of votes will continue to play as the next plot.
Over the past few decades, the rapid technological development has brought about technological changes in interactive films, but the choice logic behind the plot development has not changed much. The form has changed, the content remains the same, but the narrative means and audiovisual language of film art are "higher".
Another milestone in the development of interactive cinema is Netflix's Black Mirror: Pandasnake (launched in 2018), which won the 71st Emmy Award for Best TELEVISION Movie. Directed by David Sred and starring Finn Whitehead, Black Mirror: Pandasnake tells the story of a young programmer, Stefan, who adapts the fantasy novel Pandasnake into a game, and the mixing of real and virtual worlds begins to form a chaotic story. Under the audience's choice, the driven Stefan will go to five different endings.
On the other side, Stefan in the picture fiercely resists the control of the "audience", and he realizes that he is under the control of others. The author of the novel Pandasnake suspects that he is controlled by demons, and Stefan, who made the Pandasnake game, realizes that he is controlled by the audience, questioning the interaction itself in the form of interaction, while alluding to the social issues of "the interaction between technology and humans" throughout the seasons of Black Mirror.
To a certain extent, there is more room for discussion on the ideological connotation of streaming media platforms and personalized interactive movies, while cinema interactive movies for the public need to create more entertaining or "cool" content in the storyline and fun.
As for the development status of interactive cinema films, some doubts still exist:
1: The plot trend of interactive movies is to obey the majority according to the minority, so how to ensure the interactive experience of individuals? 2: How do interactive films converge at the "technology + content" level? What are the update requirements for cinema devices? 3: The development of new technologies such as AI and VR will bring what imagination space will be brought to interactive movies? 4: What is the difference between interactive movies and AVG games? Is it just audiovisual? 5: How will the audience interact with the movie outside the theater? What else is there to expand the business model?
Whether it is the foreign interactive animation film "Cat in Boots: Trapped in epic legends" (Netflix, 2017), the interactive drama "Mosaic" (HBO, 2018), the interactive film "I Am Strong" (Netflix, 2020), or the domestic interactive mini-series "The Origin of the Buddha's Head in the Antique Bureau" (Tencent, 2019), the interactive documentary "Tomb Pie" (Youku, 2020), the first domestic interactive cinema film "Golden Pupil" (not yet released), etc., The layout of interactive tracks has become a new outlet in the recent content market, but the development of interactive films is still in the "early shift": the market scale and user habits have not yet been formed, and large-scale projects and mass production works have still not yet appeared.
No matter how interactive it is, it is ultimately to make the movie look better.
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Rotating Editor-in-Chief: Yi Wu
Author: Siberia
Edit: Curry
(Some of the pictures come from the Internet)