via Speakeasy (Wall Street Journal)
Director Chris Milk’s new music video, released yesterday, introduces a young woman roaming a postapocalyptic landscape, and features a song from the coming album “Rome” by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi. But for some viewers the video’s main attraction will be the technology used to create it.
In “3 Dreams of Black,” which Milk prefers to call an interactive film, the viewer takes control in certain sequences, using the computer mouse to steer a stampede of morphing wildlife, or build structures in a vast desert. Five months in the making, the video shows off a burgeoning technology called WebGL, which allows an Internet browser to render 3-D graphics in real time. (Note: Prepare to be thwarted if your computer isn’t running a compatible browser.)
Such geeky stuff may not matter much to average music fans, but Milk says it offers a way to personalize music videos and maybe move the medium forward. “It’s like I just discovered this whole chest of tools in the back of the garage that do all these things I wasn’t able to do before,” said the director.
The new video, like Milk’s last interactive project for Arcade Fire, was financed by Google, which is using his videos to demonstrate that the Internet can be used for more than YouTube clips and Facebook posts. “This is largely about pushing the Web forward with these open, modern technologies,” said Aaron Koblin, a creative director in Google’s Creative Lab. All the programming code used to create “3 Dreams of Black” was released to the public with the video
Featuring the song “Black” with vocals by Norah Jones, the video precedes next week’s release of “Rome,” a collaborative takeoff on Italian cinema soundtracks. Danger Mouse, aka producer Brian Burton, who had previously worked with Milk on a video for his band Gnarls Barkley video, says his biggest contribution to the “Black” video was convincing his label, EMI, not to ask the director what he was up to. “I didn’t tell them that we didn’t know either,” Burton said. As of last week he still hadn’t been shown any of the work in progress, nor had he asked to see it.
Milk isn’t the only one experimenting in this area—today, Bjork launched a website that was designed as an interactive showcase for her new work. It’s all part of the growing exploration of “transmedia,” a catch-all term for tech-driven storytelling that isn’t confined to traditional formats, such as TV and movies.
“I’m constantly jealous that I wasn’t part of the golden age of television and yet I feel like we’re in the golden age of all this new media. No one really knows what it’ll turn into, but radio with pictures didn’t know where it was going either,” said Jon Kamen, CEO of @radical.media, the production company that signed Milk in 2000 and has supported his spate of interactive videos, including the Grammy-nominated Johnny Cash Project.
But despite all the edgy technology that went into Milk’s new video, it has significant limitations. It only works on browsers compatible with WebGL—that means at least the 45% of Internet users who rely on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer would need a different browser to watch it, such as Google’s Chrome. Also, at a time when the music video business is predicated on pumping clips out to every conceivable platform, from iPhone apps to Facebook walls, “3 Dreams of Black” can only play on the website Ro.me.
“From a promotional standpoint, it’s a total nightmare,” Milk said. “The first question was, ‘It’ll work on an iPad right?’ No. ‘Is there mobile version?’ No. ‘Well, there will be a broadcast version for TV right?’ No on that one, too.” The director did, however, produce a trailer for his interactive film—it’s on YouTube.
