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View from The Rear Window
- 16 Aug 07, 11:31 AM
HBO, makers of dramas such as Sex in the City and Six Feet Under, have produced an interactive online show called .
The idea is simple, if a little creepy. In the flash player, pick up a pair of binoculars, and peer into any of 12 apartments and watch what the residents are up to. It’s a pretty quirky affair, especially if you are just jumping in.
When I tuned in, the episode I saw had a woman with a meat clever menacing a couple of incompetent decorators, a party full of scantily clad people, and a couple doing something a bit like morris dancing. Pretty off the wall stuff.
Each episode lasts up to five minutes, and all the storylines are all somehow interconnected. The trick is in finding out how.
All the episodes are silent as well. So if you are hearing impaired, and always secretly harboured the desire to be a peeping tom, then this is one multimedia experience you can enjoy to the full. I suspect that they are silent films is not a conscious attempt at inclusivity, but a device to help keep the storylines mysterious. Not that motivation really matters if the result means you get a kick out of Voyeur.
HBO are treating the web as their playground and have sprinkled clues as to how the stories connect across the internet. There are random (not for the feint hearted, if you take a look at it), and some of the characters have and , providing hints as to how the stories tie together.
I really like interactive projects like this, and the Nine Inch Nails alternative reality game we looked at a while back. They are as much a puzzle or game as content to simply consume. Voyeur is a TV show 2.0 – to coin a phrase.
This is a great idea for an interactive web drama. But quite inaccessible to some. Is it possible to create a high concept drama on the web that is also accessible to all?
That Voyeur is purely visual probably makes it of little interest to a lot of visually impaired people. But if you took something like the ´óÏó´«Ã½â€™s Spooks, that could use both visual clues like CCTV footage and photographs, as well as audio files like phone taps, then we could have something with wide appeal to everyone.
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