Music videos and film get interactive - Canada.com (blog)

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Music videos and film get interactive - Canada.com (blog) Posted: 13 Jun 2012 04:11 PM PDT Music videos have changed quite a bit in the past decade. Instead of flocking to MuchMusic, which was once "the nation's music station," viewers now head online since we can see what they want, when they want instead of having to sit by the TV, waiting for their favourite video to appear in the rotation. Vincent Morisset, who describes himself as a "web-friendly director," is helping to reinvent the modern-day music video as an interactive experience. Morisset has had a long-standing professional and personal relationship with Arcade Fire, producing their first website, multiple music videos and the 2009 documentary, Miroir Noir. By 2007, Morisset and the band knew that MTV was "crashing" due to reality TV and that whatever music video they were going to make was going to end up on YouTube. Instead of releasing a video, Morisset created an interactive clip for "Neon Bible" in October of that year, which allowed users to interact with lead singer Win Butler's face and hands. Morisset says the decline of music videos on television stations wasn't the only reason for the shift. "Kids were watching clips online because you had that possibility of instantaneous access. We didn't have to wait, like back in the day for the full round up of having your favourite music video air," said Morisset at this year's FITC design and technology conference in Toronto in April. Morisset also felt the digital platform also offered new possibilities and wanted to take advantage of that medium. "At that time, the resolution [of the YouTube videos] was tiny. I didn't want to put energy into something that would ruin the end result. Morisset's latest project with Arcade Fire was another interactive music video, this time for the song "Sprawl II (Moutains Beyond Mountains)," which was released last fall. The characters in the video mimicked the actions of the audience thanks to the movement detected by the user's web cam. If the viewer danced quickly, the video characters would do the same. If the audience danced slowly, so did the characters. This type of user/character interaction is also featured in BLA BLA: A Film for Computer, Morisset's project for the NFB, where his goal was to sustain the audience's attention for at least 5-7 minutes and to trigger some sort of emotion.  What was meant to be a personal viewing experience ended up becoming a social experience as BLA BLA became an art installation in select galleries across Europe and America. "There's always something a bit abstract about doing a web project, because you never get in contact with your public," says Morisset. "There was a secret desire that BLA BLA could make people laugh together and create an exchange between people. There was also satisfaction in being able to meet the public. When you develop interactive stuff, you leave a big place to the spectator between codes. It's a bit like alchemy: you think in a wide sense about human nature and how people deal with stuff. But at the same time, people all have a different background. We don't have the same age or are in the same country. It was our challenge to create something that my mother, a three year-old and a geek could all experience and relate to." For Morisett, he'd like for the users to forget they're in front of a computer and "go beyond that relation that we normally have when we browse. I want to skip all that. Most of my projects don't have any buttons. It's just images. You do stuff and the images react. That's it. There's no rules. For me, that's the technique to reach more of an emotional level. I want to tell stories, I want to touch people. A bit like what I wanted to do with films, but now I'm using a different platform." Morisset wants users to do away with their other tasks while experiencing his work. "I know that people are multitasking these days, and if you're multitasking, then maybe one thing isn't interesting enough. I believe that you can be totally focused on something and we don't need to develop content with the intention that everyone is multitasking when viewing things online. BLA BLA was this desire to create this connection between the spectator and this virtual character – and build on that in a really straightforward and primitive way." Vincent Morisset will be participating in a panel at Thursday's North by Northeast conference in Toronto called the Future of the Music Video. For more information visit nxne.com. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.

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