These days, just about everything on the web can be customized to your own preferences. It makes sense that the next advancement in music videos is to discover unique ways to make the viewer part of the experience. Combine that with good indie rock and smooth web transitions (courtesy of HTML5) and you have a winner.
Check out Arcade Fire’s new video experience, The Wilderness Downtown, off of their latest album, The Suburbs.
Like a scene from Donnie Darko, this video experiment attempts to pull viewers in by presenting familiar images from the past. Upon arriving at the ‘experiment’, viewers will be prompted to enter a childhood home address. If you’re concerned about privacy, enter the address of your worst living situation from college like I did. Or if you really just want to observe through the glass, watch a screen recording of my video here:
At about 4 minutes, I get to write my younger self a note and draw a pretty cool cat… just sayin’.
While I commend the overall experience for being truly unique and a cutting edge way to utilize new and open source technologies, I found certain moments to be clunky and predictable. I’ve looked at enough Google Earth and Street View images to not be blown away when the video took me right to the address I had typed in.
Regardless, there is some great animation toward the end when trees begin growing throughout the street view maps. The conclusion of the viewing offers interesting share options as well.
Viewers can simply ‘share your film’, which creates a link to the video with your address programmed in. Viewers can also ‘send your postcard downtown’:“It can go to the Wilderness Machine, the Arcade Fire tour visuals, or another Wilderness Downtown User.” This is not exactly clear, but my understanding is that Arcade Fire is going to be sharing physical copies of these postcards on tour, and if you receive one you can plant it and a tree will grow, utilizing germinated seeds embedded into compostable paper. You can also respond to other people’s postcards but you need the code from that postcard if you happen to ‘find’ it.
This interactive film is a very convincing example of how HTML5 when written for Chrome will be a game changer for developers. Pulling in open source technologies and public databases has not been a feat that many Flash developers have wanted to tackle. This collaboration was done between director Chris Milk (U2, Green Day, Modest Mouse, Gnarles Barkley), Google and of course, Arcade Fire.
To best understand the technology being utilized here, best take it straight from the horse’s mouth:
“It features a mash-up of Google Maps and Google Street View with HTML5 canvas, HTML5 audio and video, an interactive drawing tool, and choreographed windows that dance around the screen.”
Do you have any other examples of how HTML5 is a game changer? Please share.
Tags: Arcade Fire, Google Chrome, html5, interactive video, music
