Future of Cinema

Late Fragment -- interactive script wall 2nd draft

For the past ten years, Canadian Film Centre Media Lab has been in the forefront of the thrust toward
interactive media, having developed original content for a variety of platforms, including cellphones, digital
cinema broadband and gaming consoles. It was time to take it to the people.

But how do you make an innovative interactive feature film with two producers, three writer-directors, multiple
storylines, and the opportunity for the viewer to click and change the scene at any time? It was a challenging
exercise as remarkable and complex as the end product itself because the methodological process, tools and
techniques all had to be created.

As Ana Serrano CFC interactive architect and producer of Late Fragment explained, “The greatest challenge
was to devise a hybrid form with a mainstream audience in mind, and working with a creative team from both
traditional and new media. We intended the interactive film to be easily apprehensible, emotionally engaging
and intellectually satisfying as well.” All these factors interact to create something fresh for interactive viewers.”

Serrano and the teams at the CFC and the co-producing National Film Board of Canada planned a dual focus
on a traditional story frame and the new technology. “It’s been an exhilarating partnership,” said NFB producer
Anita Lee. “The whole idea of multiple POVs, coupled with the notion of interactive media and the
collaborative nature of the project allowed for intense discussion and ingenious ways of thinking about
narrative.” Like the CFC, the NFB has long been interested in new media, interactive technologies and digital
platforms, all offering distinctive educational and new media program possibilities. “I think there will be
multiple audiences for it,” added Lee.

Late Fragment, which will be delivered via DVD-video and presented as a live VJ-d performance theatrically,
was shot in Toronto with an HD camera and recorded directly onto a digital card which went straight into the
computer. The $1.3-million production involved a traditional filmmaking process as well as the creation and
implementation of up to thirteen different digital tools to complete.

Notwithstanding the digital process, making a film that lets viewers interrupt the story at any time and switch
to another scene while still following a three-act narrative structure also meant that a whole new way of
thinking about cinema and story had to be invented. “Components, clicks, non-clicks, rabbit-holes and loops”
were words that peppered the conversation in the edit suites.

To share and execute the vision, the producers needed to find three writer-directors willing to embark on this
new journey. “We were looking for a particular breed of director,” said Serrano, “essentially a structuralist, with
a high sensitivity of how narrative is structured in space and time, who was unafraid of innovation and taking
risks, and who had a distinct enough voice not to mind other voices crowding theirs.”

It was a tall order — filled by young writer-directors Daryl Cloran, Anita Doron and Mateo Guez. Along with
Serrano and Lee, the three met and attended a restorative justice process in Montreal that gave them the
inspiration and frame for the related stories. Then they went off separately and came back together with ideas
in order to write a script connecting their stories.

Daryl Cloran, who directed “Kevin’s Story,” worked on an experimental, interactive film during his residency
at CFC Media Lab in 2000. “We agreed the story was about redemption, about characters trying to break free
of self-imposed traps and finding a new story for themselves,” he said. “With new media experiments, often
the technology leads. But with this project, story was important from the beginning, so how best to tell it in
this medium?”

Anita Doron, who wrote and directed “Faye’s Story,” sees the project process as a mixture of trusting each
other, believing in the others’ style and approach, sharing ideas, and feeling the theme as one. She explained
that the structure lends itself to all sorts of different interpretations. “We had a new language and new tools to
play with in our storytelling,” she said. “You can actually alter your way of experiencing the story.” Each scene
had to exist on its own, because it could come at any point in the film. And each character required its own
kind of style and filmmaking.

Mateo Guez, who contributed “Théo’s Story,” said: “Playing with these scenes was like a puzzle, and the audience
is always smarter than you think. That’s the beauty of the game, just to play. Of the director collaboration, he
added, “We had something in common — emotion, a sensibility, how we look at the world. The project was
ambitious and complicated. We needed to be clear and brave and generous and just go for it.”

Now that’s interactivity at work.