Hasta La Motion!

Back in June 2004, Reason Magazine printed a custom cover for every issue of their magazine (circulation: 40,000). Each subscriber received a magazine with a satellite photo of their neighborhood on the cover, and their home circled in red. An uncomfortable surprise to find in your mailbox, for sure.

More recently, Chris Milk and Google created the interactive musical experience The Wilderness Downtown for Arcade Fire, which utilized HTML5 and Google Maps to put your house directly into the music video.

Hybrid production company B-Reel, who also worked on The Wilderness Downtown, just finished Chaos in Your Town for State Farm Insurance. The experience uses the same “enter your address” starting point to create a customized version of The Mill’s “State of Chaos” campaign. We’ll see if giant robots shooting lasers at your house proves as successful as their last viral hit — OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass” music video.

The New York Times article on the Reason Magazine stunt ends with the quote, “What if you received a magazine that only had stories and ads that you were interested in and pertained to you?” Seven years later, we have RSS readers that bring us only the news we want and iPad apps like FlipBoard and Zite. Not so far off.

For custom content, the inevitable next step is not having to type in your address at all. The applications would just read your computer’s IP address or your mobile device’s GPS location and auto-populate their content with the pertinent data. How hard would it be to have your cable box “know” where it is, and have the commercial streaming to your television integrate your Google Map imagery?

We’re curious to hear your thoughts on how successful this technology is as a marketing tool. How about as a storytelling tool? Will it become another expected facet of production (in the same way we’re often asked to produce complementary TV commercials, internet banners and print ads)? Does anyone find it disconcerting to have their data used to market to them?

Posted on Motionographer

Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin, who brought you The Johnny Cash Project and The Wilderness Downtown, are back with a lovely new dynamic music video for Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi’s Spaghetti Western-inspired concept album ROME. With help from Mirada, North Kingdom, and the folks at Google, the music video for 3 Dreams of Black further tests the realtime dynamic abilities of the web to give unique, artfully directed experiences.

Personally, I’m excited that Milk and Koblin are emphasizing how the open-source nature of these tools can help grow a community that will create even more experiments in the future. On the tech end, it does require Google Chrome and not all graphics cards are supported, including the desktop I first tried this out on :(. There’s still a lot of goodies and documentation on the website, so go explore.

HTML5 “experiences” seem to be popping up more and more, for example the new desktop version of Smith & Foulkes’ The Chase. As we move forward, will learning how to work with dynamic systems, rather than locked thirty or sixty second films become a necessary part of our workflow? Also- what does it say about us when the first thing someone does, after finding out that they can contribute to a landscape, is create a 1-up mushroom?

Posted on Motionographer