Arcade Fire released the music video of their 2010 song “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” yesterday, and as I consider putting together a best music videos of the year list, this video unlike anything I’ve ever seen, or better yet experienced, just jumped to the top of my list.
It’s an interactive web based music video directed by Vincent Morisset (he also directed this year’s “Inni,” an art house concert film) in which the viewer makes the video come alive by dancing or moving in front of a web cam, and it can be found at www.sprawl2.com. It’s constructed using still frames and HTML such that as the user moves faster or slower to the song, the characters on screen move accordingly in their patterned choreography.
“For a long time, I’ve been wanting to do an interactive project without any interface. Something really primitive and fun. A web experience free of clicks or buttons,” Morisset said on his website. “The idea is to affect the pacing of the film with your movements. You are invited to dance in front of your webcam. There is no specific rules, no complicated “minority report” tricks. Just an invitation to move your arms or your butt on the music. The quicker you move, the faster the frames play. You slow down, the characters in the video slow down. You freeze and the video starts to loop on the beat, creating a new choreography in the choreography.”
It’s an entrancing experience, and it practically encourages experimentation and movement to the point that the onscreen choreography and cinematography is so magically mobile and alive in accordance with your interactions. Morisset shows co-lead singer of Arcade Fire Regine Chassange lurching in a shopping mall oddly moving around her, and the magic happens when your movements throughout the crescendo of the song quickly accelerates her to shed her drab clothing into a colorful red frock.
There’s also an opportunity to use a click function rather than activate your webcam and allow it to record you, which on first go I found fairly sketchy. Both videos are equally well made, and the way in which you can click manipulate is still engrossing to the point that it proves the video is not entirely a gimmick of its technology.
Watching this, I feel as if this is an evolution in using the web as a tool to create art. It uses the technology as a different medium, not just a pretty HTML based website with a music video inserted into the middle of it.
Granted, this is not one of a kind, nor the first of its kind. Arcade Fire themselves made another interactive video last year for “We Used to Wait” called “The Wilderness Downtown.” It requires that you put in your hometown (although really any place will do. Again, I found this a bit sketchy) and then it cues up Google Earth to show you your hometown in a series of windows as the music video plays and jumps around the screen. It kind of slowed my processor a bit and there are only two interactions, putting in your hometown and then writing a note that appears on your screen in a text box.
But these are both wonderful songs and a new way to create music videos that I had to discuss as a new, 21st art form.