The New Venue

20.March.2001 Volt Interactivity is a much-ballyhooed and little-explored variant of digital filmmaking. These two excerpts from "Volt" demonstrate Trapeze Media's dedication to interactive storytelling, by offering multiple camera angles and story lines to create a multilayered experience. Created and produced for TVOntario/TFO by Daryl Cloran Michael Humphries Michael Kasprow Rebecca Scott Jos Yule Stills from "Volt" Interview with the filmmakers. New Venue: What is the appeal of interactive filmmaking? Trapeze: The appeal is the new potential of broadband, and interactivity is one of the characteristics of this new medium. Conventions around how to tell a story in film, television, a comic strip or a novel have already been established, but broadband is wide open. New Venue: How do you approach interactivity? Trapeze: Our goal is always to use interactivity as a part of the story. When we come up with a concept for a new production, we ask ourselves how the interactivity will be used to add to the story experience. We aren't fans of the "choose your own adventure" style of branching narrative. Instead, we walk the fine line between making a story interactive, while still delivering a story with a beginning, middle and an end. The creative tension between these ideas forces us to come up with exciting new relationships between interactivity, plot and character. New Venue: What are the two clips about? Trapeze: These two clips are excerpts from the interactive broadband story "Volt", which accompanied the daily teen magazine television show of the same name on TVOntario/TFO here in Canada. The new medium of broadband allows us to use multi-perspective and interactive technologies to create the ultimate spy-cam for "Volt" followers. The audience follows cast members from the "Volt" television show as they try to solve the mystery of the switched briefcases. They can observe them from a variety of different perspectives: viewing them through security cameras and candid photographs; reading their private e-mails and ransom notes; listening to private voice-mails; and also solving puzzles along the way. These two excerpts are examples of that. While the always has the same beginning and ending, the journey is always different depending on which path the user chooses to view the various scenes of the story. New Venue: What exactly is "Volt"? Trapeze: "Volt" is now in its sixth television season and the TV network wanted to build a new interactive broadband entertainment experience. We all wanted to create a new environment for the audience where they could navigate with their wits and intuition. One of TFO's key objectives is to reach new markets within their broadcast area in Quebec, Ontario and the Atlantic provinces and attract new viewers as well as extend the "Volt" experience for their regular viewers. New Venue: What is Trapeze all about? Trapeze: Trapeze is a privately owned studio focused on creating interactive broadband entertainment for the Internet that instantly turns audiences into active participants. The Trapeze creative team combines extensive expertise in film, TV and theatre with a deep understanding of emerging technologies and trends, resulting in the creation of interactive stories that capture the imagination, deepen the story experience and keep audiences coming back for more. Trapeze works with entertainment companies, Internet portals, television production houses, ad agencies and consumer brands to develop unique broadband entertainment packages. Our production SafehouseLive won the Gold NewMedia INVISION 2000 award for Best Broadband Content. New Venue: How do you come up with interactivite elements? Trapeze: We produce our stories in combinations of Flash and digital video. Consequently, we are always coming up with new ways to combine these assets to create the smallest file sizes. What must be video? What can be created in Flash instead? By asking these questions, we try to make our stories easy to view, although you still need a broadband connection to see them. The website, itself, for "Volt" was also designed to escape the metaphor or the "page" online. Instead of clicking from one "page" to another, the audience is invited to slip and slide from one section of the story to the next. In this way, I think we've escaped from one of the perceived constraints of the internet. New Venue: What technology did you use? Trapeze: We used Flash 4 and QuickTime 4 with the addition of the authoring tool, LiveStage. The digital video was shot on a Cannon XL-1. New Venue: Where can we see more of your work? Trapeze: The entire "Volt" story in French (or an expanded English demo) can be seen at our web site at trapeze.com, just go to the production section. View these movies. You can find out about other digital flicks in the New Venue Archives.