Interactive programming

[Oliver Peters]

They did this with “Black Mirror,” too. Tony Kearns, the editor, discussed it with me here.

https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2019/07/20/black-mirror-bandersnatch/

One hitch is that you have to produce a LOT of extra content to make the branching possible.

[Mark Suszko]

I did something vaguely similar a (long) while back in Apple’s DVDStudioPro (pauses, sheds a single tear, resumes story). The hardcore producers used to make this kind of stuff in Macromedia Director back then, but they became hard to find and I didn’t have time for a learning curve, so I built the interactive training in DVDSP, and to get to my point, yes, branching narratives mean you have to create a lot more program than the typical person will ever see, taking every combination into consideration and running actual tests trying to “break” the flow. And consider how the looping will occur, and where it loops back to… Some people only watched Bandersnatch once thru. But, a lot of people with OCD apparently ran it a bajillion times, to explore literally every combination of paths.

I keep this screen cap of the object view for my DVD project to remind me how even a very basic interactive quiz with 13 questions, 3 possible answers each, can get big in a hurry. You start in the center. Each track has an intro, a dramatic vignette, the question posed, three choices to make. Wrong choices loop to a message saying sorry, wrong, try again. Correct choice goes to a “congrats, you got it” message, then the menu options are go to next question, go to main menu, or quit. The menus won’t allow you to go forward unless each level has been answered correctly; your only choices are to keep trying until you get it right, or quit.

Shooting the material for this with local amateur and semi-pro actors was like the kitchen of a fast food joint; move, shoot, re-set, change costumes, do again, fast, fast, fast. The actors were great at improvising characters and keeping them different thru many short changes, it was in a way very much like an improv competition. The host of the show had the most work in terms of recording every possible variation of question and response. His separate studio green screen session took about three hours, I recall. I pre-composed each track before bringing them into DVDSP, even adding menu choices to their outros… I literally learned DVDSP’s every function, from zero, by doing this project, which took me a month. The menu building was the tedious part. Then, 48 hours before delivery, Friday night, clients found a glitch in one path of the game logic and I had to rebuild an entire branch of this map, then burn 200 DVD dubs by Monday morning. The spindles full of disks were literally still warm when the client picked it up.