Great Guns Takes Subaru For An Interactive Ride

GreatGuns Takes Subaru For An Interactive Ride

It's safe to say that the art of interactive filmmaking, especially in the commercial scene, is a much-attempted, rarely-mastered form. Whether it's the 'choose-your-own-adventure' style of storytelling, the freedom to manipulate the viewpoint or non-linear narrative arrangement, the delicate balance between coherence, connection and quality seems incredibly tough to master - too much choice and you've got an endless shot-list, too little and you lack the important interactivity.

However, with their 'The Big Night' campaign, Japanese agency ADK and GreatGuns Interactive (the interactive arm of global production house GreatGuns) have collaborated to create a truly seamless branching-narrative experience for Subaru. Written by the GGi team under the supervision of ADK's Creative Director Miura Yoshihiro and directed by GreatGuns' Jeremy Haccoun, the film tells the simple-sounding tale of a hapless chap on his way to a vital meeting. Guiding the experience is the viewer, who can make decisions throughout using an impressively subtle invisible interface (basically, everything in red can be clicked on) and exploring the potential outcomes. It's these potential outcomes that mark the campaign as different, with 40 prospective endings and 174 individual film segments to navigate.

One of the campaign's benefits is the steering force of GGi's Sheridan Thomas – writer/producer on the project and keen gamer. In fact, it's Thomas' previous experience in gaming (he was a producer on the 'Headhunter' games for Amuze and Sega) that led to the film's innate control style and enjoyable replayability. We caught a few moments with Sheridan to chat through the complexities of the project, the complicated planning process and his views on how interactive filmmaking can up its game.

How did you guys get involved in the Subaru project?

Great Guns had shot some work for ADK Japan and Subaru before and had a great time working with them. Having heard about what we were doing with our interactive division, GGi, and wanting a film with a distinct Western flavour, they asked us to collaborate with them on the project. So, under the supervision of ADK's Creative Director, Miura Yoshihiro, we started coming up with ideas together.

Was the project always imagined as an interactive piece of film?

Well the initial brief was simply to create a 'web film' that highlighted several features of the car in an interesting way. It was a pretty open brief, as I don't think the client wanted to constrain us. So from their point of view, I don't think making something interactive was a mandate. As far as ADK and Great Guns were concerned, however, making the film interactive was probably the first thing we knew we wanted to do. Narrative branching is something that has fascinated me since I worked in video games so I, for one, was pretty keen to push that as the principal kind of interactivity we employed for the project. The fairly broad comic tone that we all decided the film should have seemed to lend itself very well to that too so we all agreed to go down that route almost immediately.

What do you see as the essential flaw in many pieces of interactive? How have you combated this in yours?

Wow. That's a big question.

I think there are two fundamental flaws in many (actually I'd say most) pieces of 'interactive film' specifically.

The first is that I feel the narrative often serves the tech rather than the other way around, resulting in work that ends up feeling like glorified tech demos and not films that you can just watch and enjoy on an emotionally engaging, narrative level. For 'The Big Night' we wanted the narrative to be the core experience and have the tech engine be no more than the platform to carry and enhance that experience. In fact, as far as I was concerned, I wanted the film to be an enjoyable watch whether you chose to interact with it or not, hence our choice to let the film make random decisions for you should you choose not make one yourself.

Somewhat connected, the other major flaw in many pieces of interactive, I feel, is the need to pause the experience and/or have overlaid graphical prompts to tell you when to interact with the film. For me this just takes you right out of the experience – you don't want to make a choice, you're being forced to, so the choice you make isn't an instinctive one. We wanted to break down the user interface into something far more transparent and instinctive, so we came up with the idea that anything that was coloured red in the film's physical world could be clicked on to steer the film.

You're a gamer at heart and have worked in the industry. What skills do you think you brought to the table because of this?

It's an undeniable fact that the worlds of films and games are colliding in a number of interesting ways. We're at a moment in time where the filmed content we watch has gone from being scheduled for us to being up to us to schedule for ourselves. Choice has become paramount, so it's a logical extension of this that we would want to steer the course of this content too. On the other side of the coin, the games industry, whose fundamental core has always been built on user choice, has become more narratively rich and filmic in recent years. Whilst I think the film world still has the edge on traditional, linear narrative structure, games developers definitely have the edge when it comes to branching narrative and creating the illusion of freedom of choice within that structure.

So, to answer your question, whilst being a gamer and having worked in that industry definitely helped me personally get my head around the film's structure and gave me the faith to stick to my guns about the subtlety of the user interface, I think most of all it taught me that there are some amazing people out there in the games world with skillsets that complement those in the film world, hence our insistence at GGi that we include a games writer in our script development team and a director who was game-savvy himself, which is why it was so great that we got Jeremy (Haccoun – the film's director) on board at the writing stage too.

What was the planning process? Could you leave anything up to chance?

There's always an element of chance and Jeremy wanted to maintain as much of that as he could, particularly in the actors' performances, as often that is what gives a film its magic.

Similarly we were all rewriting the script every night after scouting, to accommodate the advantages or disadvantages of certain locations, until literally the morning of the shoot so, in that respect, we were able to adapt to circumstance. But once we started shooting we tried to stick to the structure of the film, and its decision tree, pretty rigidly.

The one significant difference between this kind of project and a film with a traditional, linear narrative is that there isn't the option to drop a shot if you find yourself running behind on the day of the shoot. Otherwise the whole interactive blueprint falls apart.

How was the shoot? Did you run into many problems?

Well, we had to shoot a 45 page script in a very short space of time. So, on the one hand, we had to shoot furiously quickly. On the other hand we had to be incredibly precise and careful so as not to break the interactive rules we had set ourselves. This meant that Jeremy had to get all blocking and timing absolutely perfect, often within only one or two takes, with no rehearsal time. In many ways the process was actually very liberating for him I think. He chose, for example, to light the whole room for each set so that we wouldn't waste a second re-lighting between shots allowing him to focus almost exclusively on working with the actors for the entirety of each shoot day.

We shot with three separate units every day, each one working to a very specific set of instructions as to how each shot should work. It was a pretty ambitious undertaking that actually required two producers on board the project from start to finish. Jeremy (McWilliams – the film's other producer) was constantly leap-frogging ahead of the main unit to set up the next location with the second unit, with us sending each other photos via text to show one unit how a shot should start or finish to connect with one that the other unit was currently shooting.

That actually all worked pretty smoothly because we'd been so meticulous in our planning but, with the best will in the world, you can't plan for weather and that's where we ran into a few problems. I think it's safe to say that we encountered pretty much every possible weather condition over the course of the shoot – from bright sunshine, to torrential rain, even blizzards - which was a fairly big issue to work around as the whole film is meant to take place over the course of a single day's journey.

How does the editing / sound design differ on a project like this?

This was probably the trickiest part of the project, to be honest. The film is actually made up of 174 individual sections of film that seamlessly flow into each other, depending on the choices made by the user.

From an editorial standpoint it was a bit of a challenge to say the least, as each one of these sections had to, essentially, be completed as its own standalone edit. Each one then had to be labelled as per the naming convention designed for the complex interactive decision tree and join seamlessly with every piece of film that might come either before or after it. Luckily Jeremy Haccoun was editing the film himself so we didn't have to go through the process of explaining everything to someone new at that point in the project. Given the schedule we were working to, this was a godsend.

The sound FX and the music also had to be composed in a modular way, yet appear to be one continuous, seamlessly streamed score. Luckily for us we had Siddartha Barhoorn, an amazing composer who just completely got what we were doing straight away.

Then take into consideration that nearly the whole film can be played in either model of car.

And it all had to be subtitled in nine languages!

From a client's point of view, this must have been awesomely frustrating as they were never really able to see the film as a whole until the entire jigsaw puzzle was put together. So they were having to approve chunks of film for us to finish, whilst never being able to see the context that each piece sat within. We can only commend both ADK and Subaru for being so incredibly trusting and open-minded and allowing us to work through this process with the absolute minimum amount of fuss.

What have you learnt from the project?

That man can indeed live on a combination of Coca-Cola, Haribo and 2 hours of sleep every night for a sustained period of over 4 months.

How many different playthroughs of the film are there? Give us some stats that would make Carol Vorderman cry?

Well, whilst we tried to be as simple and unintrusive as possible with regards to the user interface, we conversely wanted to make the interactive branching that works beneath the surface way more complex than has been attempted before. Whilst each choice the user makes has its own immediate consequence, so too do different combinations of choices which, in turn, alter the dynamically changing clocks in the game, that then alter the player's mood as he nears his destination and the way he is greeted when he arrives etc. Some of the differences are big and many of them are very subtle. As a result the interactive decision tree we built was ridiculously complex, allowing for 98,304 potential permutations of the film. To put that in perspective, you could technically play the film for around 1.68 years continuously without ever seeing the same exact version twice.

What would be your ideal user response to the project?

In terms of stats, the ideal is pretty much the response we've had so far. The film is currently seeing average engagement rates of 80 – 85% and retention rates of around 160% which, for a near 10 minute film, is pretty remarkable.

In terms of creative response, I hope that the film acts as a small step towards encouraging us, as an industry, to be more adventurous and subtle in the way we allow users to interact with our films, whilst not being afraid to be as complex as we can be beneath the surface.

What's up next for you guys?

I'm afraid that I can't go into specifics (got to love those NDAs!) but what I can tell you is that what GGi did with Subaru is barely scratching the surface of what's possible and what we have planned next in this arena.

You can play the interactive movie here.

Posted on 9th July 2013