Cinema Game

By Mikaprok for SouthFront

News from the Hollywood Hills.

Stephen Soderbergh introduced his new project and it’s not a movie, not a series, but … a mobile application.

It’s called Mosaic (as the first browser, which is not an accident) and it’s already available in the Apple Store.

The program implements the old idea: “a narrative like hypertext”, which was extremely popular in the 80’s and 90’s.

By the way, it turned out to be: 7 hours of video, a 500-page script, the assembly of which required to completely write out all the story lines on the giant whiteboard.

Casey Silver, the former head of Universal Pictures, called Soderbergh in 2012 and share the idea to tell the traditional film scenario in an form adopted for modern devices.

As the director admits, he did not want to do anything “game-ey”. Nevertheless, we have exactly the opposite.

Mr. Silver and his companions, one of whom is a psychiatrist from UCLA Dan Siegel, developed the concept of interactive television back in the early 2000s on the basis of a very old idea, beginning in the late 1980s. Remember at least “Afternoon, a Story”.

At that time there was no technology to implement all their ideas. When it appeared, so main characters began to act.

Soderbergh concluded that the public is already prepared to be able to look at a nonlinear plot with a huge number of branches.

Ed Solomon, a well-known screenwriter, and the team found the investor: HBO CEO Richard Plipler.

It took more than 3 years to shoot, produce applications and scripted efforts.

Several versions of scenarios were written from beginning to end for all the characters. In fact, every incarnation for the actors took place in a separate world, and not in the context of their scene.

Soderbergh asked HBO for more money to finish the project and provide the whole new series separately on the footage.

$ 20 million for the 6-series show doesn’t look like a giant sum against $ 15 million for each of the series of “Games of Thrones” :-)

The “Mosaics” slogan: “The experience of storytelling, which will allow you to choose your own path.”

In general, this is a classical quest game pretending to be movie with Sharon Stone.

The viewers have a choice of two variants of the events’ streams, by which they discard parallel-emerging branches and can not return to them.

Unfortunately, the idea did not grow into complete freedom of action. The director keeps a binding to the script :-)

The fixed size of the universe also warns “player” from passing it in different ways. Soderbergh believes that “Mosaic” is more like a film, not a series, because it doesn’t have a division at the stage of achieving heroes’ goals.

Although the viewers themselves can pause the phone and watch it in the mode of the series.

This, according to the maitre, allows you to make an infinite number of moves in the direction of rethinking and the depth of the plot.

The creators of the application, of course, have the ability to accurately measure both the spectator interest, the voltage points, and the main direction of maneuvering.

It seems that the most valuable idea would be to give a chance to use this platform for everyone who wants to make an author’s “film-game”.

Then we could talk about changing the paradigm and trying to democratize both types of interactive entertainment.