May 2013
6 posts
8 tags
Dumb Ways to Die
“Keep a rattlesnake as a pet…sell both your kidneys on the internet!” These are just what they sound like-–Dumb Ways to Die, featured in a video of the same name. In it, a variety of cute characters manage to kill themselves in idiotic ways, after which they cheerfully sing and dance about it. The video, along with accompanying song and website, are part of an effort by Metro Trains in Melbourne,...
8 tags
A Boy and His Atom
This delightful, one-minute short film, “A Boy and His Atom“, has an incredible making-of story: it was created by moving individual atoms frame-by-frame, and the end result is magnified 100 million times in order to become visible. Created by IBM’s research group, this video now holds the Guinness World Record for the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion film. Behind the scenes footage...
8 tags
I Love Your Work
Jonathan Harris, a next-gen storyteller who was part of the inaugural Future of StoryTelling in 2012 and featured in Story Arcade for Cowbird, has just released his latest project. I Love Your Work is an interactive portrait of the lives of nine women who make lesbian pornography. The format and interface are non-traditional, featuring 2,202 10-second video clips taken at five-minute...
9 tags
Mirror World
Enchanted storybooks usually appear only in fantasies and fairy tales, but we get one step closer in the real life with Mirror World, an iPad companion app to Cornelia Funke’s Reckless & Fearless book series. Mirror World takes you into Ogre’s tavern, a fully-realized 360-degree space which you navigate by holding your iPad up as if it’s a window to another world. As you turn...
8 tags
#ComedyFest
Twitter is playing host to more than the usual status updates, promotional links, and links to cat Vines this week. Starting Monday April 29, it has also been the mainstage for Comedy Central’s #ComedyFest, the first comedy festival contained entirely on Twitter. With heavy hitters like Mel Brooks and Judd Apatow tweeting, #ComedyFest doesn’t use the brevity of the form as an excuse to...
April 2013
8 posts
9 tags
The Wider Image
Reuters’ global network of 600 photographers distributes over half a million pictures each year of world events and breaking news. In The Wider Image, their free iPad app, you can gain access to most of them. With a beautiful interface that puts images front and center, The Wider Image is an engaging place to learn about what’s going on in places as far-flung as Bangladesh and...
9 tags
Perrier Secret Place
You approach a nondescript laundromat and hold out a ticket. The woman sees the tattoo on your wrist, nods knowingly, and lets you behind the counter. You push past racks of clothes, open a door, and enter…Perrier Secret Place, where you experience one wild party from the points of view of 60 different characters. You’re able to see all of your surroundings, interact with others,...
Daybreak
At the end of FOX’s TV thriller Touch, viewers were introduced to a mysterious object: the glowing, powerful dodecahedron. With just a glimpse of the object during the show and associated commercials, intrigued viewers could follow clues to Daybreak, a transmedia spinoff that told its own story about the wonders of technology. There, viewers watched web episodes, explored two websites,...
10 tags
Do Not Touch
Catch the Dot. Stay in the Green Zone. Make a Mask. Play the Bass. Do all these things and more at Do Not Touch, an interactive music video by Amsterdam design studio Moniker for the song Kilo by Dutch band Light Light. As you watch the video, your mouse cursor’s location is recorded as you follow the instructions that appear at the top of the screen. Making it more fun, you can see the...
6 tags
StoryPress
Have you ever wished you could permanently capture your grandparents’ memories? Or save your great-aunt’s amazing suffragette story for your children to hear? Collect your own oral histories using your iPad with StoryPress, an app that makes it easy to record, organize, and archive spoken stories. After recording, you can organize stories into audiobooks, interactive tours, audio...
11 tags
Times Haiku
Can computers be poets? Times Haiku makes a pretty good argument for the case. Jacob Harris, senior software architect at the New York Times, has programmed a bot to find haikus in the front page of the newspaper. The algorithm counts syllables and finds naturally-occuring 5-7-5 combinations within articles, and while you might expect (and get) pure randomness, the results can also be surprisingly...
8 tags
Recalling 1993
The New Museum’s show “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” elevates that year, two decades ago, to a pivotal moment that shaped the art and cultural zeitgeist of the city and the world. With work from artists such as Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney, and Kiki Smith, the show is a vivid evocation of the ferment of the early 1990s. ReCalling 1993, created by Droga5 and The...
17 tags
Gallery One at the Cleveland Museum of Art
You enter the room and are greeted by a 40-foot-wide screen filled with 3,000 glowing images inviting you to touch, swipe through, and explore. As you tap each one, the images reconfigure, grouping similar images together and highlighting trends in art and relationships between objects. If you like what you see, you can save the images to your iPad, take them home, and create customized...
March 2013
6 posts
14 tags
The Monster That Won't Let Children Go To School
At the beginning of The Monster That Won’t Let Children Go To School, all seems well—the titular children travel happily through charming landscapes, backpacks on. However, it’s not long before each group of children is besieged by a monster that sends them running back home. Finally, at one critical moment in this interactive film and fundraising campaign by Unicef, ING Direct, and Ogilvy Spain,...
6 tags
BioShock Infinite
BioShock Infinite, the third installment of the enormously popular BioShock franchise, comes out today to the delight of its many fans. From the beginning, BioShock has owed much of its success to the unusual depth of its in-game narratives and the sophistication of its themes. Perhaps owing from creator Ken Levine’s background as a screenwriter, plots were complex and rich, featuring...
13 tags
The Talking Shoe at Art, Copy, & Code
Google’s Art, Copy, & Code is “a series of experiments to re-imagine advertising.” Where the last revolution in advertising in the 1960’s brought Art and Copy together, today we are witnessing the unprecedented creative intersection of Art, Copy, and Code.
The first experiment is a talking shoe—“an experiment in connected objects.” A custom pair of Adidas trainers senses your level of...
9 tags
Year Walk
You set off from your cabin into the night. Tentatively, you move to the next screen, not sure what kind of unsettling omen might await you…this is Year Walk, an iOS game by Simon Flesser and Magnus “Gordon” Gardeback of the gaming studio Simogo. The game takes you through a vision quest ritual whose object is to catch a glimpse of the future. However, by going on a year walk you...
10 tags
Hello Again
Weren’t able to make it to Beck’s live performance of David Bowie’s ‘Sound and Vision’? No problem—you can experience it just as well in Chris Milk’s interactive recording of the concert “Hello Again.” Using technology like state-of-the-art 360 degree cameras and binaural microphones, Chris Milk has created an immersive virtual experience where...
6 tags
Cart Life
Cart Life by Richard Hofmeier is a “retail simulation for Windows” where you play as one of three down-and-out food cart vendors, each trying to make their way in the world and create a thriving business while dealing with personal problems. Gameplay involves tasks such as selling coffees, making bagels, and taking the bus. Deliberately immersing you in the mundanity of these...
February 2013
1 post
7 tags
The Carp and the Seagull
“The Carp and the Seagull,” created by Nexus Interactive Arts and directed by Evan Boehm, is an interactive short film about Masato the fisherman’s encounter with the spirit world. Though the story evokes a time-worn fable, the method of its telling is as modern as can be—using cutting edge web technologies, we experience the story in a futuristic 3D environment. Our...
January 2013
1 post
Fahrenheit 451 gets closer
We remembered Bradbury’s vision of digital walls at home in Fahrenheit 451 when this demo reel came out this week at CES, showing Microsoft Research’s IllumiRoom — a projector-plus-Kinect experience that promises to make a whole room into a screen. The results look immersive, amazing, and fun.
December 2012
3 posts
Avalanche at Tunnel Creek
We are thrilled to see a top-notch execution of long-form illustrated narrative in the New York Times’s Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. It’s full of nice, fresh-feeling tricks, including the kind of A/B layers familiar to Mag+ readers, and built on a great story. The stark loop of blowing snow shows how simple but essential some design and moving image can be. Part two to...
Pro Publica and Frontline's A Perfect Terrorist
Pro Publica and Frontline’s “A Perfect Terrorist” is an illuminating companion to the Frontline film of the same name investigating the mysterious circumstances of David Headley, a plotter of the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai. Through a direct video narrative augmented with interactive links to the people and history referenced, the website allows a deeper dive into the...
Craig Mod on Subcompact Publishing and The...
Inimitable writer and designer Craig Mod, whose occasional lengthy posts on the nature, state of the art, and future of digital reading, writing, and publishing are both milestones and guideposts — recently wrote about “Subcompact Publishing.” Smaller, more nimble, and built to serve a purpose — the essay explores the failures of new tablet publishing and new models —...
November 2012
3 posts
3 tags
the wind map
The boundaries separating data from story get more porous all the time. hint.fm’s real-time visualization of wind data from the National Digital Forecast Database is a favorite example. During Hurricane Sandy, it told a weather story in ways we’d never seen.
3 tags
512 Paths to the White House
Fun, simple election-visualization from the New York Times that dispenses with the red/blue map metaphor to let us explore 512 alternate futures (or possible futures, depending on when you read this).
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/02/us/politics/paths-to-the-white-house.html?smid=tu-share
And, the behind the scenes story of making the infographic.
Bastion
Supergiant’s debut effort Bastion has been widely praised for its poignant and purposeful use of narration. In this action-packed role-playing game, the player is challenged to save the last remnants of a post-apocalyptic world. As the player embarks on his quest, a mesmerizing voice offers insights into the “Calamity” that destroyed the world and the challenges that lie ahead. The intricate...
October 2012
18 posts
Bear 71
Produced by NFB Interactive, National Film Board of Canada’s pioneering digital studio, Bear 71 offers a compelling blend of linear storytelling and viewer-controlled exploration. This innovative web documentary uses surveillance footage to explore the connections between humans and animals in Canada’s Banff National Park. Viewers navigate an interactive map to discover the Park’s various animal...
Interactive Music Videos
From Facebook integration to live geo-location, next-generation music videos
swap passive listening for active engagement. Through creative genre mashups, artists and producers like Aaron Koblin, Chris Milk, and m ss ng p eces are inventing new interactive and participatory forms of musical storytelling. Take your part in these five musical adventures. (Some of these require Chrome.)
Aaron...
Toontastic
Created in partnership with Stanford University’s School of Education and Zeum: the San Francisco Children’s Museum, this iTunes App Store “Hall of Famer” is an easy-to-use animation authoring tool that immerses kids in the art and practice of storytelling. With Toontastic, kids learn key storytelling principles as they create their own cartoon animations. Young players are prompted to create a...
Mass Effect 3
The epic conclusion to the Mass Effect trilogy challenges the player to save Earth from total destruction by an alien race. Taking on the role of Commander Shepherd, the player must think strategically, shape alliances among friends and foes, and make critical decisions that direct the plot. One-hundred-fifty hours of narrative content offers limitless possibilities and outcomes, allowing each...
Journey
Like their previous titles, flOw and flower, thatgamecompany’s latest effort, Journey, breaks from gaming conventions, favoring emotional engagement and free-form exploration over competition, rules, and mastery. In this simple and evocative game, the player guides a robed figure across a vast desert landscape, discovering the mysteries of a lost civilization and encountering other travelers along...
Interactive Printed Media, Interactive Newsprint
While many question the viability of print media in the digital age, Dr. Kate Stone aspires to bring new life to the printed word. Stone’s company, Novalia, combines tactile print and “smart” electronics in engaging and practical ways. Applications range from a pillbox that remembers your last dose to musical concert posters with downloadable tunes, and most recently, an Internet-enabled,...
1 tag
Star Wars Uncut
For the first installment of Star Wars Uncut, users from around the world created 15-second sections of A New Hope, producing a fascinating assortment of live action, animated, and stop-motion clips. When shown online, the film was made up of the highest-rated version of the 473 different scenes, always changing based on real-time ratings. The theatrical cut features creator Casey Pugh’s choices...
2 tags
The Walking Dead
A blend of zombie thriller and choose your own adventure narrative, The Walking Dead game series invites players into an ominous and emotional world where every decision changes the trajectory of the story. Tension mounts as the player’s character must survey the surrounding environment and make quick strategic choices in limited time, while weightier moral decisions have real consequences on...
4 tags
Exquisite Forest
The Exquisite Forest (best in Chrome) is a crowd-sourced art project that lets participants contribute to an ever-growing collection of thematic animations. The website, produced by Google and the Tate Modern, uses the latest browser capabilities to support generative cocreation. Anyone can add to animations curated by prominent artists such as Olafur Eliasson, “branch” existing animations in a...
4 tags
Frankenstein
Dave Morris’s Frankenstein for iPad and iPhone reimagines this classic literary experience for a new generation of readers. Visually and emotionally captivating, this interactive adaptation of Mary Shelley’s tale engages the reader in a dialogue with the main character. By asking questions and guiding Victor Frankenstein’s choices, the reader alters the course of the story. Kirkus Reviews...
3 tags
Kinect Sesame Street TV
Kinect TV signals the arrival of a new kind of television where viewers become active, physical participants in the story. In collaboration with Sesame Workshop, Kinect Sesame Street TV has turned current episodes of the beloved children’s show into “two-way” television experiences, where viewers use their bodies as a controller to physically engage with Sesame Street characters. Kinect’s...
5 tags
Anomaly
The longest full-color graphic novel ever published, Anomaly is an epic sci-fi action adventure that follows a group of explorers as they make first contact with an exotic alien race. The monumental 370-page hardcover book is enhanced by an augmented reality app that brings illustrations to life in animated 3D. A stand-alone digital reader presents all the stunning artwork accompanied by a...
4 tags
Monty Python: The Holy Book of Days
The Holy Book of Days re-creates the 28 days of shooting the Monty Python and the Holy Grail with outtakes, raw audio, never-before-seen sketches and stills, and other gems from the Pythons’ vault. It is a stand-alone app as well as a second screen experience: sync’d with a Blu-ray player, the app allows readers to jump to the exact part of the film, or the particular day of filming, with the...
3 tags
Cowbird
Cowbird is an online community of storytellers where members create beautiful audio-visual diaries of their lives. Participants can focus on personal stories or contribute to collaborative coverage of local and world events. Envisioned as a platform for participatory journalism and “public library of of human experience,” Cowbird produces deeply personal perspectives that are rarely seen on the...
2 tags
Rides TV
A transmedia entertainment platform developed solely for the Internet, Rides weaves storylines across connected devices, placing the viewer at the center of the action. In the horror series Whispers (seen at FoST 2012), the suspense mounts as the tale of a troubled boy unfolds through video, texts, and phone calls delivered in quick succession to the viewer via the Web and his or her smartphone....
4 tags
Wonderbook: Book of Spells
Wonderbook combines reading and augmented-reality gaming in an immersive storytelling adventure. Book of Spells, Wonderbook’s premiere title, features exclusive content by J. K. Rowling. A PlayStation3 with Sony’s Eye and Move accessories transform the blank Wonderbook into an inscribed and illuminated spell book, while the Move controller becomes a magic wand used to practice incantations, turn...
The Silent History
The Silent History explores serial, location-based, and user-generated storytelling for mobile devices. The eerie tale of a generation of silent children unfolds across two narrative layers. Testimonials, daily episodes of the serialized novel, are synced to the reader’s mobile device are supplemented by user-contributed Field Reports, geo-located narrative snippets that extend the fictional story...
5 tags
Welcome to the Story Arcade
Digital tools are fundamentally changing how we create and share stories. For the Future of StoryTelling summit, we created an exhibit of some of the best examples of new ways we are finding to tell our stories. From crowdsourcing to location-based narrative, from augmented reality to adaptive games, we are becoming active participants of stories as we play, create, and share.
The Story Arcade...
