Interactive website takes new media up a notch

It’s easy to think you’ve seen everything there is to see on the Internet these days. After all, a lot of the things you see online are very similar

There are the always-interesting viral videos, ads with slick production values and web pages with gorgeous layouts — all things that we take for granted. Innovation is always the goal in today’s world of online development, but it is an elusive one. We tend to forget what true flashes of genius look like. But, when all the pieces fall together perfectly, the results can be astonishing.

Take, for example, The Wilderness Downtown.

It’s a simple link (thewildernessdowntown.com) with an enigmatic name. What is it? It’s hard to tell at first.

The home page gives a few hints: It is an interactive film by Chris Milk, it features the Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait” and, in the lower left corner, the site calls itself a “Chrome Experiment” made with the help of “some friends from Google.” A small flock of animated birds drifts lazily around and across the page. There is only one instruction: “Enter the address of the home where you grew up.”

You follow the instruction, of course. And then it begins.

The music: “We Used To Wait” is an incredible single, one that builds and soars in all the right places with lead singer Win Butler’s wistful crooning weaving in and out of smartly orchestrated instruments.

The video is a progression of conventional clips that make way for sophisticated uses of technology that showcase the amazing ability of cutting edge new media to stay emotionally relevant instead of just being technology. Google Maps and Street View make an appearance here, and they seem more amazing because of it.

Go ahead, follow the movie’s instructions and draw something for your former self. It’s fantastic.

Yet, even for all of this, the magic of The Wilderness Downtown is more than the sum of its parts. It works on so many levels that the result is at least mildly mind-boggling.

First of all, it’s an artistic achievement that highlights filmmaker Chris Milk’s abilities as well as Arcade Fire’s musical talent.

But it’s not just art; simultaneously it’s a cold, hard showcase of what technology (in this case, HTML5) can accomplish. And it’s not just a showcase, but a disturbingly effective advertisement for Google Chrome, as HTML5 runs optimally on that browser, even warning visitors using other browsers that the video might not work as smoothly as possible and  giving them an option to download Chrome — genius.

And to top it all off, it’s a sort of gauntlet thrown down by Google to show off the power of Chrome, a trump card that says exactly what kind of establishment Google is.

Through all that cleverness and gee-whiz fireworks, the viewer is still able to stand up from the desk feeling something else. Maybe wonder, maybe loneliness, perhaps a longing for childhood or a hometown. Some two-hour feature films that have a tough time being thought-provoking — Michael Bay films come to mind. Chris Milk stepped up to quite a challenge on this one.

“I love trying to tell stories in new ways using technology,” Milk said in an interview with Time.com. “My biggest concern, though, was finding something that would emotionally resonate with people without getting them bogged down in that technology.”

The short film, however, is a success.

“This music video collaboration is a fascinating combination of things,” said Yoshie Suzuki, who teaches Digital Storytelling (IML 140) for USC’s Institute of Multimedia Literacy. “It’s the blend of the song’s nostalgic topic, married with the newness of the technological world we live in that makes this a compelling work.”

The Wilderness Downtown isn’t the only noteworthy example of interactive media on the Web. Another clever, albeit less serious, demonstration comes in the form of a white-out commercial.

Tipp-Ex, a branded product of the BIC Corporation, has an interesting video on YouTube titled “NSFW. A hunter shoots a bear!”

In the video, a bear sneaking into the campsite of two hunters surprises them, one of whom reaches for a gun. The viewer is eventually left with a decision: shoot the bear or not?

What unfolds is a clever twist that makes advertising sense and leaves the viewer positively associating Tipp-Ex white-out with a great Internet video. It’s similar to Burger King’s 2004 “The Subservient Chicken” campaign but potentially more effective because of the surprise manipulation of the YouTube page. In any case, the whole thing just works.

Is this the new face of media in the age of developing technologies? It’s hard to believe that the very disparate worlds of art, technology and corporate promotion can combine to form an amalgam that successfully highlights all the players involved. And yet The Wilderness Downtown and, to a lesser extent, the advertisement for Tipp-Ex, prove that such a thing is possible.

These achievements raise the bar for those who are caught in yesterday’s conventional methods of dictating practices of the audience and consumers. Although interactive multimedia might not work in all formats, it shows signs of brilliance at the crossroads of low pop culture.

Erin Loadvine, an IML student majoring in cinema-television critical studies, points out an important result of all of this.

“The amount of choice offered by both videos is refreshing,” she said.

Refreshing. That’s an adjective that should be used for the media more often. The Wilderness Downtown and inspired ads such as Tipp-Ex’s video show that thinking outside the box can win big. With a little luck, the future will bring more refreshing content that ultimately leaves us thinking about the artistic and technological world that we live in today.