Interactivity and YouTube (a brief history)
The internet has opened up the potential for interactive film, and there have been several imaginative, popular and very cool interactive films specifically designed for Youtube.
One of the interesting things about Youtube is that they constantly add new features without really publicising them, so users often find things out unexpectedly (e.g. nobody seems to know when a hidden "Snake" minigame was added to Youtube videos). In a way it tacitly encourages people to decide for themselves the best way to use new features, whether it's adding a huge blinking "SUBSCRIBE" button or something more interesting. We thought we'd give a bit of background on them, and how they might relate to Fuzzy Head.
So here's a couple of different kinds of interactive video. You'll need to have annotations switched on to try many of them.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Filmic adaptations of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" game book format. First you watch a video, then when the video ends buttons pop up, allowing the viewer to choose what should happen next. Normally there's two choices: a "right" one leading to more videos, and a "wrong" one that leads to a dead end (many game books offer more options, as well as other things like lives or puzzles, but it's hard to recreate that level of complexity when you have to shoot and link together every option).
They're fun, they tell a story with basic interactivity, and they use Youtube's annotations as a vital feature of the film .
E.G. The Time Machine: A Chad, Matt & Rob Interactive Adventure (1.8 million views):
Deliver Me To Hell, a zombie-themed viral for Hell's Pizza (4.5 million views):
If you like your zombies serious there's also Survive The Outbreak, a popular non-Youtube but similarly constructed film, with much higher production values and a darker, more Night of the Living Dead-ish story.
These are more simple conceptually, but often very creative: take one of Youtube's features, and do something cool with it. Instead of a "full" narrative film, you give viewers something fun to play with.
The brilliant MysteryGuitarMan does a lot of these. Several are based around the ability to skip around/pause a single video using annotations:
Make Me Play A Song (2 million views):
Interactive Voodoo Doll (1.7 million views):
Or there's his Interactive Youtube Keyboard (2.8 million views), based on viewers' ability to skip around a Youtube video using the 0-9 keys on their keyboard (you can also do this using the left and right arrow keys, which for some reason will skip to a slightly different point in the same video):
A bit like the above, these interactive videos have a slight gameplay element. They're not really narrative, but still entertaining.
E.G. Patrick Boivin's Bboy Joker (4 million views), which uses beautiful stop motion animation for a Simon Says-style dance game:
Or if you like scantily clad women and expired giveaways, there's Dress Us (3 million views), a web toy with a competitive element:
Or if you like throwing poop at Chris Brown, there's Throw Poop At Chris Brown (4 million views):
There are also people (almost always advertising companies) that pay Youtube to add interactive elements specific to their video. They're interesting, and they work as long as Youtube don't change anything on that particular page (it also means I can't embed a couple of examples).
The most famous is probably Tippex 's A Hunter Shoots A Bear (17 million views), a clever update on a very early viral for Burker King called Subservient Chicken , with a bigger budget and more options (including rude ones):
Professor Green had an absolutely incredible 360° music video, Coming to Get Me, that for some reason was tied in with Doritos Youtube page - unfortunately that meant that as soon as Doritos put something else on their Youtube page (as they have now), it stops working. So here's an embed of it from somewhere else. (Also Youtube should allow 360° films in general, that would be amazing).
There was also a brief fad for "destructive" Youtube pages, in which all the elements gradually fall apart as the video goes on - e.g. this ad for Wario Land, or Sly Stallone destroying stuff to promote The Expendables . As they're basically "microsites" I don't think I can embed them.
What we want to do with Fuzzy Head is a little different. The plan is to create a narrative live action film that viewers will be able to almost constantly interact with, like a video game. Choose Your Own Adventure films (while fun) present long stretches of uninteractive video, then basic choices, then more long stretches of uninteractive video. With Fuzzy Head, we want users to be able to control where the protagonist goes, what he does, what he says to other characters. If you don't want him to leave an area, he doesn't have to. If you want him to wander off and explore random details and pick up elements of backstory, he can. This will happen entirely within Youtube, using the standard set of tools that Youtube offers, and featuring as many different interactive techniques, games and puzzles as we can fit into the story.
There have already been lots of brilliant ideas for interactive films, but we want to create a full, high production value short film which viewers will be able to interact with in significant, varied and most of all fun way. It'll be a film, but also a game. And it'll be on Youtube. For free.
Also it's about a man with a fuzzy box for a head. But that's a different story.
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