Pushing Innovation and Interaction: Tribeca Storyscapes

Now toasting a successful second year, Tribeca Storyscapes is a program at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival that aims to bring together some of the most interesting projects by artists and digital media innovators from across the globe. Featuring everything from virtual reality to live performance, Tribeca Storyscapes is a haven for powerful interactive storytelling and transmedia projects.  With their sophomore event having wrapped up just over two weeks ago, we take a closer look at the unique programs that made up this year’s lineup. What can we learn about how interactivity and technology is being used to power storytelling and audience interaction.

Circa 1948

In recent years the National Film Board of Canada have proven themselves to be masters of transmedia productions and it’s perhaps no surprise to see them here at Storyscapes with Circa 1948. An immensely immersive virtual reality experience boasting 3D stereo sound and 360-degree video that the user can control with their body movements, Circa 1948 presents audiences with an incredibly  rich portrait of post-war Vancouver. The interactive aspect is accompanied by an interactive app for iPad and iPhone as well as an interactive photo essay co-created by artist Stan Douglas and NFB Digital Studio.  Circa 1948 allows audiences to explore the changing communities and neighborhoods of a lost-Vancouver in a truly unparalleled way.

Choose Your Own Documentary

How exactly do you describe Choose Your Own Documentary? The hybrid project – created by writer Nathan Penlington with filmmakers Fernando Gutierrez de Jesus, Sam Smaïl and Nick Watson – is a part-film, part-live performance. A unique spin on the classic ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books of the 1980s, this is an i-Doc of a different kind. Penlington hands control of the narrative over to the audience who are given remote controls at the beginning of the show and whose responses to questions throughout directly affect the arc of the story. With over 1,500 paths and multiple endings, Choose Your Own Documentary is a fascinating exercise in audience interaction.

Use of Force

The projects that make up Tribeca Storyscapes are certainly no strangers of harnessing technology to elevate the narratives through new levels of interaction. Use of Force is no exception. Making use of a custom virtual reality set-up, the immersive documentary by producer Nonny de la Pena recreates the moment a migrant was killed by border patrol on the infamous US-Mexico borderline. Making use of 3D animations of cell phone videos captured during the incident, together with real eyewitness testimonies and audio segments, Use of Force puts users on the scene in a way that offers – given the subject matter – an immensely profound  experience.

Clouds

Representing the new generation of artists and hackers engaging in socially-engaged storytelling and art experiments, Clouds sees coders riffing on code, in a question-and-answer session that’s represented by data-driven graphics. While sounding enormously meta, Clouds reaches out to an audience beyond the data geeks by presenting all of this in a truly unique way. Presented both as an interactive installation and as an Oculus Rift-based documentary, Clouds manages to turn a documentary on code-based creators into something genuinely moving and engaging. Even for those with no technical background.

On A Human Scale

On A Human Scale re-imagines the people of New York City as a fully-interactive, playable instrument. The project presents the user with a piano keyboard, with each key activating videos of that note sung by strangers on the streets of New York. Created by Matthew Matthew presents the city in completely new light; a ‘singing tapestry of humanity’.