The Old Market: STORY HACK

Brighton Digital Festival 2015

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How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine

Chris Milk uses cutting edge technology to produce astonishing films that delight and enchant. But for Milk, the human story is the driving force behind everything he does. In this short, charming talk, he shows some of his collaborations with musicians including Kanye West and Arcade Fire, and describes his latest, mind-bending experiments with virtual reality.

Chris Milk on using digital tools to build empathy in film.  

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Dustbin Distribution & The Blair Witch Effect

Sixteen years ago I made a film called D.I.C.K.I.E which utilised a somewhat conceptual and convoluted approach to distribution involving recycled VHS porn tapes and dustbins late at night. I cannot provide statistical proof for the effectiveness of that particular effort in terms of numbers, in fact I'm pretty sure almost no-one benefited at all but if even one person did, then like a Christian saving souls, I am deluded enough to think it was worth it.

The film was a static and glitch ridden VHS documentary about the suspicious death of an eminent scientist from the LDD Research Group who had discovered a dementia like syndrome caused by excessive repetition. The syndrome, it had been proposed, was a healthcare time bomb affecting those whose jobs required them to surrender their intellect and freedom of expression in favour of imposed scripts and routines serving the corporate agenda of whichever organisation was paying them their filthy lucre. The scientist who discovered the syndrome was found cut up into tiny pieces in the bath tub of his hotel room shortly after presenting his findings at a conference of academics; his severed head was wrapped inside a Tescos plastic bag which hung from the shower head, in his mouth a ten euro note.

This was the story; a story on VHS tape with a beginning and an end; but what was interesting to me at the time was a consideration of how the viewer of the story should receive it and how the manner of that reception affected the impact of the story.

A year before in 1998 The Blair Witch Project had been released in the US and the PR campaign that accompanied it had created quite a buzz. However, for me, there was a problem with the way in which the film had been presented to the audience because the narrative of the film and the narrative of the PR campaign ran contrary to one another.

The film told us that in the October of 1994, a group of film makers had gone missing in the woods around Burkittsville whilst shooting a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch. A year later their film and video reels had been discovered hidden under a rock and those reels formed the basis of the movie. The film makers themselves, it told us, were never found.

The PR, however, told us that the film had been created on an extremely low budget, that the director had sent four actors into the woods with cheap cameras, that they used GPS to track and leave messages for the actors in milk crates and that the team who created the movie were now raking in the cash and were the toast of Hollywood. In fact, boiled down to its essence the PR narrative told us that a small bunch of clever dicks just made a massive bunch of cash with a low budget horror which we should go and see.

A friend of mine in New York was kind enough to mail over a copy of the film on VHS and a group of us set up a projector in a dank Brighton basement to watch it. To cut a long story short the experience of watching Blair Witch, for me, consisted of an hour of boredom and nausea followed by one genuinely disturbing scene and a general sense of limp dissatisfaction and bewilderment.

I tried to imagine what it would have been like if I'd discovered the movie myself somehow; no marketing, no PR, just an unmarked VHS tape sitting on a dusty shelf whilst clearing out that same Brighton basement maybe. Then, I imagined, the opening scenes would have genuinely intrigued me, the shaky cam footage would have given that intrigue an enhanced sense of legitimacy and the outcome would, no doubt, have scared the living shit out of me and, almost certainly, would have compelled me to find out more; I would have gone to Dogpile or Lycos to see what the internet had to say, I would have called up my friends to share the experience – in short it would have been, I imagined, a significant cultural moment instead of a just another Hollywood disappointment..

Which is why I decided to distribute D.I.C.K.I.E on VHS tapes via dustbins. Late one night I stalked the neighbourhood with a bag full of these VHS tapes, the spine of each had a porn title crossed out and the title D.I.C.K.I.E scrawled over the top in marker pen. Each dustbin I found I would open and place a tape neatly on top of whatever bags of rubbish lay inside. The tapes sat their waiting to be found, to intrigue the finder and to be watched.

I imagined that most of these tapes would lay undiscovered but that at least a couple would be picked up and inspected. I visualised the owner of the bin coming outside with a bag full of crap, opening up the wheelie bin and seeing the VHS tape lying there. A certain percentage of people I imagined would stop momentarily, read the spine, then dump the trash on top of it; I reckoned, though, that at least one individual would take the bait; and D.I.C.K.I.E was a film which had been made for that one individual viewer.

I suppose the question here is why the team behind the Blair Witch Project didn't stick with the film's narrative when it came to the PR. Why didn't they tell us that a film had been constructed out of film and video footage found hidden in woodland around Burkittsville and that the people who shot the footage had been missing for over a year? Why didn't they tell us that they had been trying to make a documentary about a local legend, about a ritual killing in which five men in the 19th century had been slaughtered, a true story known in those parts as the Blair Witch Legend?

Whatever the answer [and it probably has something to do with litigation] the point of the question is to say that a story can be seriously diminished by the way in which it is sold and presented to an audience; that the telling of a story and its underlying subtext can, and perhaps should, be consistent at every point of contact with its audience, across all platforms from the moment we first hear about it to the moment we have devoured it completely and moved on.

Simon Wilkinson

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About the Story Hack

Investigating how performance based storytelling responds to hyperlink culture and an era of interactive, immersive, convergent and multi-platform media.

Alongside our programme of shows for Brighton Digital Festival 2015, we want to bring together storytellers from across the creative industries to explore how narrative structure; audience behaviour and multi-platform working can enhance theatre practice. We will work with a theatre artist and, through a series of provocations, unpick the tools used by specialists in computer games design, PR agencies and academic research.  Join in the conversation here.