Directors: Daryl Cloran, Anita Doran, Mateo Guez
Interactive Narrative
out of 5 stars

I caught the interactive narrative “Late Fragment” during SXSW’s Global Doc Days series — which Jaman sponsored this year — and I’m so glad I did. Producers Ana Serrano of the CFC Media Lab and Anita Lee of the National Film Board of Canada commissioned three writer/directors (Darly Cloran, Anita Doron, and Mateo Guez) to fashion interweaving narratives, all involving either the perpetrators or victims of crimes, coming to terms with their inner demons. You can read about the stories in depth at the “Late Fragment” website. They’re downer stories, I admit, but the cinematography, acting, and overall design of “Late Fragment” are so hypnotic and textured, clearly the work of passionate professionals, that I forgot how depressing they were, and flowed along to the rhythms of the stories.

And here’s where it differs from your run-of-the-mill movie experience. While watching it, audience members passed a remote from one to the other so that we each could get a chance to “interact” with the narrative. By hitting a button, we could turn the direction of the narrative so that it followed a particular character, deepening his/her story. My main critique is that it made for choppy, jarring transitions, as the story seemed to shift back and forth in time, and feel discontinuous, but, in a way, that added to the non-linear, non-traditional feel of the whole project. Let me add, this is not a kick-back experience; the movie demands a higher-than-normal level of attention so that you can actively engage with it by way of the remote.

But is there a future for interactive cinema? Viewers have gotten so sophisticated, Serrano explained, that interactive movies are the inevitable and adventurous next step. Maybe, but TV, movies, all art, is already interactive in the way it’s meant to engage the viewer, right? The problem — and it’s practically an epidemic — happens when we watch bad movies and TV, that require no interpretation, that are so predictable and non-challenging that they turn our brains to mush. That’s perhaps where interactive films can jump-start us, and turn us into active participants in the artistic process again. It’s a theory, anyway

Brilliantly atmospheric, beautifully and lyrically made, “Late Fragment” might’ve been a strong movie, even without the interactive element. As it stands, it could be the prototype for a new kind of narrative experience, that is, if the viewer is up for the challenge. My guess is we’ll be hearing a lot about this movie in the months ahead, as it premieres worldwide on DVD this June or July.

Jay

First published on http://blog.jaman.com/?p=383

PRODUCED BY THE CANADIAN FILM CENTRE IN CO-PRODUCTION WITH THE NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA ,"LATE FRAGMENT" AN INTERACTIVE FILM BY DARYL CLORAN, ANITA DORON, MATEO GUEZ, ANITA LEE AND ANA SERRANO STARRING KRISTA BRIDGES, MICHAEL HEALEY, JEFF PARAZZO EXECUTIVE PRODUCER (NFB) SILVA BASMAJIAN EXECUTIVE PRODUCER (CFC) ANA SERRANO COMPOSER DAVID WALL PRODUCTION DESIGNER JORDAN ESTALL EDITOR ROSLYN KALLOO DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY FRANÇOIS DAGENAIS PRODUCER ANA SERRANO PRODUCER ANITA LEE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY DARYL CLORAN, ANITA DORON AND MATEO GUEZ PRODUCED WITH THE PARTICIPATION OF CANADIAN HERITAGE, THE ONTARIO GOVERNMENT MINISTRY OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND TRADE AND THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE

Eyelids smeared with black shadow, a teenage girl stands at the foot of the bed and pulls the trigger. The man waking from sleep barely knows what has just happened to him. In a single moment, lives can shatter:

An oblivious and regretful mother is haunted by love, lust, betrayal and memories of a dead man. She lives in a world of denial.

A repressed middle-aged security guard has lost everything - his marriage, a thriving career, and the respect of his teenage son. He sees real blood on the floor. Then it's gone.

A beautiful young man has a penchant for cutting himself in ritual sessions of self-abuse. Onstage in a nightclub, he dances provocatively for an older man. He could be a lover. Or a father. Or a stranger.

Faye, Kevin and Théo - three troubled strangers, three lives fractured by thoughts and acts of violence. In the interactive feature film Late Fragment, their narratives interlock in a unique cinematic experience in which you play a creative and interactive role. Navigating through the movie, you uncover their stories, and their secrets, at will, controlling the flow and direction of the elaborate sequencing with a simple click.

These characters, unknown to one another as well as to themselves, would never have met were it not for their participation in a series of Restorative Justice group sessions. In this process, perpetrators and victims of violent crime, broken by their lives, look for wholeness, balance, forgiveness, safety - and perhaps even redemption. In just such a setting, Faye, Kevin and Théo are compelled to confront their histories and unravel their secrets. The truth can be plain but it is not often simple.

Restorative Justice is one thing; personal amnesty, quite another. You, the audience, piece together, both literally and figuratively, the cinematic narrative in front of you.

Late Fragment allows you to watch the film in your own way. With a traditional film, the story unravels as the director intends. With this interactive film, you click enter on your remote control to change scenes. There are no page numbers or menus to chart your course: you decide which storylines you wish to follow, when you want to dig deeper into the history of a character, or when you want to move away. You become the director of the film you are watching. This is a completely new cinematic experience.

How do you know when to click your remote? As you watch the story unfold, there may be repeated s (...)

In 2003, the CFC Media Lab initiated a program called the Interactive Narrative Feature Program (INFP) to experiment with the creation, development, production, financing, marketing and distribution of interactive feature films. As the natural evolution of CFC Media Lab's ten year history of development, research and production of interactive prototypes, the INFP was created to increase Canadian capacity and talent in interactive narrative production.

For the INFP's inaugural project, the CFC Media Lab sought a partner that has a history of pushing boundaries and finding new ways to tell stories. The National Film Board of Canada was a natural fit - as Canada's public film producer, the NFB is known worldwide for its innovation and creativity in storytelling through documentary, animation and alternative drama.

Together, the CFC Media Lab and the NFB have joined forces to collaborate on this revolutionary dramatic interactive feature film.

By touching on the sensitive theme of restorative justice, Late Fragment also retains the focus on complex character-driven stories surrounding love, hate, death, revelation and justice. The interactive film thus not only serves as new form of cinema, but also becomes a best practice case from which industry, academia, and others can learn how the nature of storytelling changes with the advent of interactive technologies.

Late Fragment, which is designed for a DVD platform and presented as a live VeeJay'd performance theatrically, was shot in Toronto with an HD camera and recorded directly onto a digital card which went straight into the computer. The $1.3-million production involved a traditional filmmaking process as well as the creation and implementation of up to thirteen different digital tools to complete.

Notwithstanding the digital process, making a film that lets viewers interrupt the story at any time and switch to another scene while still following a three-act narrative structure also meant that a whole new way of thinking about cinema and story had to be invented. "Components, clicks, non-clicks, rabbit-holes and loops" were words that peppered the conversation in the edit suites.

To share and execute the vision, the producers needed to find three writer-directors willing to embark on this new journey. "We were looking for a particular breed of director," said Ana Serrano (CFC producer), "essentially a structuralist, with a high sensitivity of how narrative is structured in space and time, who was unafraid of innovation and taking risks, and who had a distinct enough voice not to mind other voices crowding theirs."

It was a tall order — filled by young writer-directors Daryl Cloran, Anita Doron and Mateo Guez. Along with Serrano and Anita Lee (NFB Producer), the three met and attended a restorative justice process in Montreal that gave them the inspiration and frame for the related stories. Then they went off separately and came back

The future of cinema will not be defined by a single direction. Old genres will live alongside new genres. But it is increasingly becoming clear that at least one of these directions will take the form of cinema as some kind of participatory experience, where the audience of one or many may impact how a narrative unfolds itself over space or time. These new forms should not be reduced as simply "choose your own adventure" models but instead should be seen as the coming to life of post-modern preoccupations with multiplicity, diversity, open-endedness, spatial conceptions of self, and story puzzles explicitly expressed through interactive technology.

Late Fragment is an interactive film that lets audiences piece together, both literally and figuratively, the cinematic narrative in front of them. The physical experience is not unlike channel surfing in front of the television, except imagine that each channel presents different scenes from the same story. Sitting on the couch, remote control in hand, audiences can click "enter" on their remote control, and impact the way the story unfolds, sequencing the events of the story depending on when and how often they click "enter." Late Fragment is like many of the non-linear movies we have come to love including Crash, Short Cuts, and Amores Perros. But with Late Fragment audiences now impact what scene they may get next.

Interactive narrative has been explored in many different ways by artists, filmmakers, and designers from all over the world. From Mike Figgis' Timecode to Peter Greenaway's VJ Tulse Luper Performance, from Lev Manovich's Soft Cinema, to Marsha Kinder's Bleeding Through the Layers of Los Angeles. But with the numerous experiments in form, interactive structure and interface designs, Late Fragment was most inspired by Switching, an interactive film directed by Morten Schjodt of Oncotype and produced by the Danish Film Institute.

While the notion of interactive cinema is not entirely new, Late Fragment is North America's first interactive dramatic feature film and is an important model of collaboration in leading-edge experimental dramatic content and format that will be engrained into Canada's filmmaking history.