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What’s the future of interactive cinema?

Written by Jenny Wong
Thursday, 07 August 2008 00:00

Have you ever watched a film and ended up screaming at the screen because what happens didn’t match your expectations? Your favourite character ends up getting killed, albeit heroically, by their nemesis. The girl you’ve cheered on throughout the film ends up in the arms of the villain. Or perhaps the film finishes on a cliffhanger that won’t be resolved until the sequel which is expected to come out in 2012. Well, if you want a chance to make right all of those wrongs then interactive cinema could be for you.

Interactive cinema breaks down the barrier between the audience and the film by providing the audience with an immersive environment that they can control. The medium is being pioneered with the technology developed at the iCinema Research Centre in the University of South Wales (UNSW), Australia.

The technology will let audiences interact with 3D humanoid characters that are projected on the world’s first stereoscopic 360-degree cinematic theatre. Audiences, wearing 3D glasses, will be able to explore and edit a multitude of stories by wandering through a projected space and interacting with projected information as if it was real.

"Digital media systems offer extraordinary new opportunities in terms of creative expression and experience," says iCinema's Director, Jeffrey Shaw. "Our objective is to enable people to take on innovative and critical roles in the way they engage with audiovisual media."

In iCinema’s T_Visionarium project, presented at the Sydney Festival 2008, 28 hours of digital free-to-air Australian television from one week was captured then converted into a large database of 20,000 video clips. Afterwards each clip was tagged with metadata then coded with information such as the gender of the actors and the type of emotions experienced in the scene. This allows the clips to be used as raw tools that audiences can select and use to construct their own narratives. As UNSW’s Associate Professor Dennis Del Favero says, "It's like an evolving digital tapestry. Viewers who enter the space can re-thread this material in an infinite number of ways, constructing their own individual stories within the televisual universe."

Stephen Sewell, one of Australia’s most provocative and successful playwrights and the 2008–2009 UNSW Literary Fellow, is currently working on a script for Scenario that will utilise the iCinema technology. Del Favero says, "Stephen’s Scenario script represents cutting edge research on the development of interactive narrative for digital humanoid characters that are able to interpret human behaviour and interact with iCinema audiences."

The plot for Scenario hasn’t been confirmed yet but it may involve an interactive cricket match where the viewer throws a virtual ball to animated characters. Sewell isn’t going to include any dialogue in Scenario and the plot will be simpler than the majority of his previous work.

Sewell is very positive about interactive cinema because he believes that it will offer a medium that has fewer constraints. "As a screen or theatre writer, you're imprisoned by the existing environments of the theatre or the cinema. With alternate reality, the world becomes your stage and the audience cobbles together the story through their actions."

After the success of critically acclaimed T_Visionarium at the Sydney Festival 2008, iCinema and Sewell are planning for Scenario to be presented at the Sydney Festival 2009/10.

The work of iCinema is taking interactive cinema to another level but the first interactive cinema was presented in Expo ’67 by Czechoslovakian director Radúz Činčera. The film Kino-Automak lets the audience play an active role in cinema by combining a projected film with interventions from two stage moderators in a one-hour show. The action is centred around Mr. Novák (played by Miroslav Horníček, a famous Czech personality) who is caught up in a variety of moral dilemmas that the audience can influence the outcome of. Audience members vote with their red and green buttons on their seats then the most popular outcome will be showed by the projection control room.

North America premiered its first interactive film called Late Fragment at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. The film allowed the audience to create a cinematic narrative by clicking ’enter‘on a remote control. The number of times that the audience member would click ‘enter‘ and also the time that they would click would have a large impact on the way the story unfolded.

Late Fragment is a non-linear 160-minute film that consists of three separate but interwoven plotlines about three people whose lives are affected by crime and tragedy. The three main characters are linked together through a group therapy session where incarcerated criminals are brought face to face with victims of crime to share their experiences. The film took over two years to make and editing it was one of the hardest parts of the production process because, as Mateo Guez, one of the three writer-directors, said, “It took us two or three months of only doing that to be able to find the structure and the links in between the structures and keep the story cohesive and entertaining.“

Another writer and producer of Late Fragment, Anita Doran, believes that it is more fun for the audience to become an active participant in a film because it gives them the freedom to "turn the film into a fast-paced thriller, or an artsy character study, or a Japanese horror film."

With interactive films like T_Visionarium generating critical acclaim and the iCinema Research Centre’s continued work and technological advancements, interactive cinema looks like it is a medium that can only develop further in the future.

The unique participatory experience that interactive cinema can offer reflects the trend of users having greater control over the media that they consume. Also the medium lets anyone take a seat in the much-coveted director’s chair and create the film that they want to see.