Tribeca poses interactive challenge

Tribeca Film Festival’s recently announced filmmaker competition, Tribeca Interactive Interlude: A Music Film Challenge, is a call for entries that are something of a cross between music videos, videogames, and cinematic choose-your-own-adventure stories. Seeking to not only simply keep up with evolving technology, but to place itself in the midst of a growing movement that emphasizes collaborative storytelling on a populous scale (a movement that can claim actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with his hitRECord series, and Zach Braff, with his Kickstarter-funded film Wish I Was Here, as famous proponents), Tribeca has partnered with digital platform Genero.tv for this, its latest contest.

Using  a program called Treehouse hosted on the website Interlude.fm, participants are tasked with creating “an interactive music film” to one of three songs by either Ellie Goulding (“Dead in the Water”), Aloe Blacc (“Ticking Bomb”) or Damon Albarn (“Heavy Seas of Love”). What is an interactive film? A video that allows the viewer to choose which turn the story will take next. For example, one video on the Interlude website takes place at a crowded party. Our initial guide walks in wearing a pair of headphones, mingles a bit, and then encounters two partygoers. Whom will he pass the headphones to? You choose. The video then continues from the point of view of whichever character you have selected – until he or she encounters two more people, and you have to choose again. And so on.

 

There are a number of videos on the Interlude website from mega companies such as Disney and Madewell, and you can see the marketing appeal. The Madewell video’s narrative “choices” appear in the form of outfit options, and allow you to spend several minutes styling and dressing a pretty model in Madewell raiment while bouncy music plays in the background. Disney’s short film isn’t an interactive take on a commercial but rather a music video, in which viewers direct the goings on of a ‘50’s style beach party attended by a singing tween star.

 

Sponsored by the Lincoln Motor Company, Tribeca’s music film challenge begins today and closes on March 27, a little less than a month before the film festival opens. The finalists’ projects will be showcased throughout the event and the winners – three in total, one for each song – will individually receive $10,000.

Many pop-culture or at least music enthusiasts will likely already be well-aware of the interactive video phenomenon. The very first music video for Bob Dylan’s classic song “Like A Rolling Stone” was released this past fall in the form of, yes, an interactive film. Dylan’s very cool concept turns your browser into a TV screen, replete with channel buttons. The song is the only sound and constant, and as you flip through the different channels at will – a cooking network, a history channel, a fashion news segment, a (most ingeniously, if you time it just right) reality show, etc. – the actors all lip-sync Dylan’s words in character. It’s a lot of fun, and has us thinking the organizers over at Tribeca have picked a very cool, and not just trendy, concept to run with.

Here’s a link to the Bob Dylan video and, for all you would-be interactive filmmakers, here’s where you can learn more about Tribeca Interactive Interlude: A Music Film Challenge.

The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival will run Wednesday, April 16^th through Sunday, April 27^th.

'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' on its way to a magical weekend

By Sarah Sluis

This weekend, it's all about Potter. The 6th film in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, earned $100 million in 24 hours. $58.2 million came from its 4,235 U.S. theatres, and the other $45.8 million came from theatres abroad. No wonder Warner Bros. has decided to make the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, into two films. Most critics enjoyed the latest trip to Hogwarts, and took particular interest in seeing how the stars have grown up. Our reviewer Doris Toumarkine found the "packed" film to be "great fun and engaging populist movie entertainment, even at 153 minutes and even for those of voting age." By appealing to fans and casual viewers alike, I suspect that it will do business for much longer than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which slightly bested Half-Blood Prince's debut. Plus, next weekend the film will open on IMAX screens, after Transformers finishes its one-month run, which will boost its box office. Fan response, too, has been overwhelming. I'm getting a huge kick out of the "hp6" Twitter search, a multilingual homage to the muggles' excitement.

Releasing on just 27 screens, (500) Days of Summer is opening small in the hopes of setting off a snowball of word-of-mouth endorsement. I interviewed director Marc Webb before the film's release, and blogged my initial reaction back in April. One of the big pluses of (500) Days is that it allows you to watch a romantic comedy without having to endure the exact same contrivances with only slightly different set-ups. While A. O. Scott from the New York Times is quick to point out all the ways (500) Days hews to the generic conventions of a romantic comedy, he also concedes that the Memento-type plot structure "restores a measure of the suspense that is usually missing from the romantic-comedy genre, which relies on climactic chases to the airport and ridiculously contrived choices between rival mates." Our critic Doris Toumarkine suspects that "(500) Days should emerge a summer winner. The little film that could and does is smart, funny, real, surprising, and hits the bull's-eye on all production counts." While almost everything about this film is positive, up until the point some people declare it treacly and syrupy sweet, I'm curious as to how, and when, this film will really catch on. Fox Searchlight would certainly like Juno, Little Miss Sunshine or Garden State-type success. Unlike with films that release wide, Searchlight will have the opportunity to tweak their marketing campaign over the coming weeks to make sure this film sparks. Each of those three films slowly increased the theatres in their release over a period of eight weeks, so it may be until the end of summer before (500) Days of Summer can be evaluated on the indie success scale.

I will be on vacation next week, so I'll see you back on July 27th.