At the end of last month, Netflix, the world’s largest streaming video platform, launched a special episode of the series "Black Mirror", "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch". This network university immediately attracted great attention in the industry as soon as it was launched, including " A number of authoritative Hollywood entertainment media, including Variety Show and The Hollywood Reporter, have published relevant content of the film in the headlines. The reason why "Bandersnatch" has gained such attention is based on its title of "the first online interactive movie in history."
As one of Netflix's most famous series, "Black Mirror" has been discussing the topic of the relationship between technology and humans since its inception. And this special "Black Mirror" is still making an essay in a familiar theme. It tells a programmer who was making a game and discovered that some mysterious force was manipulating his behavior. The programmer after awakening The authenticity of his own free will has been greatly questioned. Audiences who have watched the film understand that the source of this mysterious power is not someone else, but the audience themselves. Since the movie requires the audience to choose one of the two behaviors at key points in time during the broadcast, and this choice will affect the subsequent plot and even the final ending of the story, the audience’s behavior is indeed controlling the film. Character. This is not just as simple as clicking on the screen with their fingers. The audience’s behavior breaks the fourth wall in the traditional sense of film and television works in both form and content, making "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" a general. A classic interactive case with the perfect combination of theme, creativity and setting.
Before we continue to talk about it, some people may want to ask: What is interactive? In fact, we can see from the above description that the so-called interaction is a process of input and output. Humans input instructions to the computer through the man-machine interface, and the computer displays the output results to the user after processing. When the computer plays a multimedia program, the programmer can issue instructions to control the operation of the program, instead of unilaterally executing the program, the program responds accordingly after receiving the corresponding instructions from the programmer. This process and behavior , We call it interaction. In the "interactive movie", the audience will no longer play the "witness", but will also play the "participant", and the input and output forms between people and devices are diverse, so the forms of participation are also diverse.化的.
In fact, interactive movies are not a particularly new concept. As early as the 1967 Montreal Expo, there was a movie called "Automatic Movie". The audience can vote to determine the plot direction through the button in their hands; later in theaters and TV networks. Similar interactive works have also appeared on the platform. With the continuous upgrading and development of equipment and networks in the era of mobile internet, interactivity is its greatest advantage, prompting more advanced interactive behaviors. For example, in "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch", there are more than 70 plot choices, as well as seven endings and two easter eggs. It takes 312 minutes to fully watch all the content. This kind of complex plot structure It was unimaginable before.
After the launch of "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch", there were mixed reviews. Some people believed that its interactive method made the film more like a "lazy" game work; others felt that allowing the audience to control the plot is against traditional movies and television. The subversion of the work has led to the ethical issues that define the film; some people have always despised this form of interaction, thinking that although the audience seems to have many choices, in fact it is just that the screenwriters stuffed all the discarded plots into the film. The audience did not obtain the ideal degree of freedom, and their intention to dominate the film has not been truly realized. At the same time, people also lost the sense of unknown being led by a film and television work, which seemed to be quite a loss.
Objectively speaking, since the story of "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" is relatively crude and simple, it is really difficult to give you an unprecedented fresh experience by simply choosing one form, but from the perspective of Netflix, interactive works are very important to the platform. There is more than just content value. First of all, because the progress bar cannot be dragged, and if the webpage or application is closed, the user can only start again when watching the movie again, which artificially increases the user's activity and the number of repeated views; secondly, it is more important. It solves the piracy problem that plagued streaming media platforms. For traditional theaters with window protection, the cost of illegal recording is high and the effect is poor. For streaming media platforms such as Netflix or Amazon, works often encounter piracy after the first time they go online. Crisis, but the interactive design of "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" got rid of this trouble. Want to experience the film in its entirety? That can only be achieved on the Netflix platform. This should also have a lot of inspiration for domestic producers and platforms.
To tell the truth, methods such as "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" that rely on touch screen or remote control to select are just one of the more basic interactive methods. In addition, there is also the most promising method of speech recognition. Because of the advantages of simple, direct and low learning threshold to issue commands through dialogue, some works for young or middle-aged audiences also have the development of interactive experience. possibility. In addition, somatosensory technology and AR augmented reality technology can free viewers from the shackles of device input. Perhaps in the near future, our desire to interact with film and television works anytime and anywhere will become a reality.
In fact, the production of "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" is not as easy as it seems. For example, it is necessary to think twice about the choice of the interactive time node for the film. It is necessary to give the audience time to familiarize themselves with the operation method in the early stage, and it cannot allow the audience (especially the TV audience using the remote control) to pay attention due to the long interval between the two selections. Decline and miss the selection operation. To bring a comfortable experience to viewers and users, it really requires a lot of in-depth and meticulous work! Therefore, although "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" is not perfect as the "first online interactive film", it is after all a "first ancestor" work, looking back to what we have experienced in our way of life in the past two decades. Great changes, who can categorically claim that there must be no future for interactive film and television dramas?
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