Trailer For Steven Soderbergh's Cool "Choose Your Own Adventure" HBO Film MOSAIC
I love it when writer and director Steven Soderbergh experiments and takes risks with his projects. The guy is an innovator and he's got a new project coming out from HBO that looks and sounds like it could be a ton of fun.
This is a film project is called Mosaic and what makes it so cool and innovative is that fact that it's a "choose your own adventure" experience! Yeah, these types of stories have been around for a long time, but with the technology we have now, it's more immersive. Soderbergh says:
“It’s a branching narrative piece. Branching narratives have been around forever, but technology now allows, I hope, for a more elegant, intuitive form of engagement than used to be possible. We spent a lot of time on how you touch this thing. I wanted to make sure that it was beautiful and simple, so that when the opportunity arises for you to decide whose perspective you want to follow, it feels organic and not like an interruption—like the thing is just stopping cold. So there was just a lot trial and error about how that would work. I’m really happy with it now. The question now is if a million people log on at the same time, will it crash? It’s supposed to come out in November.”
You can watch a trailer for this film experience below. It does a great job of explaining how this whole thing works and what to expect. Who knows, maybe this experiment will actually turn into something that more and more people do. This seems like something that could be mixed with VR making an ultimate fully immersed movie experience. Here's the synopsis:
Three years in the making, the MOSAIC app allows viewers to choose what point-of-view from which to follow the story and to, in effect, build their own experience from the material Soderbergh and Solomon created. The choices one makes build upon one another, enabling multiple tellings of the story from different perspectives and, sometimes, with different conclusions. Viewers will be able to see how their own versions of the story on the app ultimately compare to Soderbergh’s six-part linear narrative in January.
Mosaic stars Sharon Stone, Garrett Hedlund, Frederick Weller, Beau Bridges, Paul Reubens, Jennifer Ferrin, Devin Ratray, Michael Cerveris, James Ransone, Jeremy Bobb, and Maya Kazan.
The interactive storytelling experience will be available on the Mosaic app, which hits in November. There will also be a more traditional viewing experience as a six-part limited series that will air on HBO in January 2018.
Do you think this is going to be a cutting-edge way to experience films in the future?