Sometimes, in the middle of a bad movie, I remember one of modern filmmaking’s biggest what ifs: what would have happened if Mr. Payback, the 1995 movie that was both the first and the last of the choose-your-own-adventure genre, hadn’t been so awful? The plot was idiotic, stuffed with crude humor and hammed up by bad acting. But the idea behind that experiment was fascinating. If the movie had been even a little good – like, say, a film equivalent of Punchdrunk’s choose-your-own-adventure Macbeth adaptation Sleep No More – would we all be getting a chance to crowdsource the plot of Hugo 3D?For now, we have exciting experiments like this fantastic music video for Chairlift’s “Met Before,” which splits off into parallel universes. “We definitely said ‘choice moment’ thousands of times over the course of making this,” says director Jordan Fish, referring to the moments in the video where viewers choose the direction Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek and Patrick Wimberly will travel. In this universe, they’re PhD students searching for love, mind expansion, and the neurological underpinnings of deja vu.Like any good scientific endeavor, the video was the result of a close collaboration between Fish, the creative company m ss ng p eces, Interlude, which makes the interactive technology, and Polachek. “She brought many ideas and an awesome aesthetic sense to the table. She is a true artist.”Though the CYOA format was a challenge, Fish says it was worth it. “It’s the same medium, only now it sometimes asks for input, kind of like a dream or a bedtime story, where you’re not entirely in control and that’s part of the experience.” It’s kind of like deja vu. “I’m excited that it feels both new and familiar at the same time.”Chairlift’s earlier music video experiment, with pixel bleeding in the beautiful “Evident Utensil,” was later borrowed by Kanye, and the idea didn’t go much further. Where will CYOA film go next? (And what happens, say, if IBM decided to enforce its 2003 patent on “Selecting divergent storylines using branching techniques”?) Fish is optimistic, and says he wants to push the choose-your-own-adventure style into longer formats, and wider formats too. “There’s lots more to think about and explore,” he says. And if one path doesn’t work out, there’s always a multitude of other ones, right?
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