Sundance’s Interactive Outbreak Movie [Video]

Essentially the most experimental story told at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah wasn’t just on a movie screen. Pandemic 1.0, a transmedia project including film, phones, actors, interaction, tweets and multitouch, made the whole town its set.

Pandemic, the creation of writer and director Lance Weiler, is the story of a mysterious viral outbreak in Park City, making 40,000 Sundance attendants its actors (many, presumably, unwittingly). The players on the ground used NFC-equipped Nexus S’s and a specially developed Microsoft Surface displays to search out artifacts and piece together the story around the town, sometimes directed by online participants working remotely. Actors were given scripts of tweets to send over a five day period, encouraged to improvise from those leads.

What it all amounts to is something distinctly new, part high-tech scavenger hunt, part Choose Your personal Adventure outbreak movie. And as the devices we supply with us everyday get an increasing number of powerful, it’s exciting to work out that they could allow us to play a more active role inside the entertainment we enjoy. [ Vector Form ]

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This post is tagged: experimental story, microsoft surface, outbreak movie, personal adventure, scavenger hunt, sundance film festival