From Puss in Boots to Cat Burglar, Black Mirror and beyond
Who
Branching out
July 22, 2022, 12:05 PM (EDT). This may interest you : The Gray Man’s Regé-Jean Page hypes up the violence of the Netflix movie.
To begin with, roughly: the world of streaming has become an incredibly crowded space. Netflix’s longtime streaming launch is starting to fade away as fast-rising competitors HBO Max and Disney Plus learn from its moves, avoiding many of the mistakes it once experienced. This has created uncertainty over Netflix’s future as the leading SVOD service, a title it has held for nearly a decade. However, the company still has one card that no other company has yet been able to pull off: Interactive Entertainment.
While many remember Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch as the first Interactive Entertainment title, the real answer is a show that many on the platform have probably never seen – 2017’s Puss in Boots: Trapped in an Epic Tale. That is, when the Interactive Entertainment initiative was first created, its target audience was really children, not adults.
Former Netflix director of product innovation Carla Fisher spoke to The Verge in 2017, stating that her mission statement is “kids think everything is interactive.” Fisher was brought in by Netflix to develop children’s titles, including Puss in Boots. Although he previously worked at PBS Kids, what set Fisher apart from most is that his background was in game design, and that Netflix was not a streaming service, but an “ecosystem of interactive devices.”
The initiative was launched by Interactive Entertainment founder and now vice president of comedy Andy Weil and Dave Schlafman, current director of content experience design. These two have sought to expand their audience from children’s entertainment to stories for adults, starting with the pioneering Black Mirror special.
From Bandersnatch to You Vs. With Wild, we’ve seen the first interactive reality show with Kimmy Schmidt, Unbreakable as the first Netflix IP to experiment with a playable narrative, and more recently, more playful titles like Cat Burglar and Trivia Quest.
Netflix’s first foreign language Ranveer vs. With the interactive special Wild reaching another milestone in interactive experimentation, I spoke with Weil and Schlafman about what the company has learned over the past five years of interactive experimentation, where interactive entertainment is located. the company’s outlook, and the roadmap for the future of this new streaming channel.
The road to Bandersnatch seemed naively simple to Black Mirror creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones. But when trying to test different branching paths, it quickly became apparent that a simple flowchart wasn’t going to cut it, as Schlafman mentions: “When we did Bandersnatch, we realized there was nothing on the market that would allow Charlie and Annabel to predict their interactive video.”
This led Netflix to create its own bespoke tool, known as Branch Manager, for the pair – essentially Branch Manager acted as a more advanced flowchart, allowing the creative team to actually see the different paths users could take, on a graph of multiple splits. . directs options to their consequences.
This allowed the Black Mirror team to seamlessly integrate the 250 pieces of footage that made up the labyrinthine pathways into clear visualizations. Not only did it help the crew understand the threads and variety of the sequences, but it also helped the actors where their character is at any given moment in a specific sequence. In an interview for a feature film of Bandersnatch, Will Poulter explained the difficulty: “Sometimes I’d give what I thought was version three of the interview and I’d see the actor next to me giving me a look: ‘That’s the version.’ four, man!’” At the time, editor Tony Kearns recalled to PostPerspective the process as “the biggest challenge of my editorial career”; Without Branch Manager, Bandersnatch might be too difficult a challenge. It is now an essential tool in the Interactive Experiences workshop.
Choose your next adventure
Branch Manager has come a long way from its custom-made origins at Bandersnatch, and the program they use today is a far cry from Branch Manager 1.0. “In the early days, you were previewing content from start to finish without knowing which path you took, so QA was actually pretty tedious. Now Branch Manager tracks the choices you’re making, and they can then be exported so you can look back and understand : “Ok, I did this rendering and these are working, but then why did this go wrong, and I got a bad ending”. ?’”
This streamlining of Branch Manager quality assurance allows the Interactive Experiences team to develop their projects at a faster pace than in previous years, learning from the mistakes and troubleshooting of previous titles. The division has conducted formal research with all Interactive Experiences creative teams after development, understanding what the team struggled with and how they can continually improve the development process. Over the past five years, it has become clear to Schlafman and Weil that investing in Interactive Experiences’ technological development and education is critical to renewing their experiential content, especially when it comes to incorporating new creators. Read also : Netflix is giving Cameron Diaz his retirement for a new movie with Jamie Foxx. “We gathered a lot of material from past titles and examples of great choices and UI aesthetics into what we call the Interactive Hub. It’s like a college class for all things Netflix Interactive.
This learning has led to a richer and deeper form of data, which Schlafman and his team processed into “macro-themes”: “We started to notice a number of recurring themes in our titles, so we do a lot of work. After launching the qualitative research, people chose to try to understand other issues that lean toward certain things,” says Schlafman. “In some ways, that data is really valuable, in some cases more valuable than more direct forms of data, because we can understand how they feel when they make these choices.” These “macro-issues” have influenced Netflix teams’ decisions about which projects to greenlight, and have further developed the technical complexity of the interactive experience.
Of course, Interactive Experiences are still a different beast from a typical linear feature; Consolidating their understanding of developing Interactive Experiences has given the team more confidence to expand their horizons and experiment more. That comes with production challenges. Interactive content often shoots twice the amount of content required for a linear feature, along with higher budget requirements due to the higher level of coverage required. There is also a significant challenge in the editing process: an editor must essentially edit multiple mini-stories within a wider and wider web, tracking multiple sequences of order, time, and sometimes space, rather than a linear sequence of events.
While Black Mirror’s concept lends itself well to the tech company’s experimentation with new technologies, when it comes to more traditional, grounded stories, the creative team involved must reconfigure how the idea of user interactivity can work within its story world. In an interview with ScreenRant about Cat Burglar, Charlie Brooker mentioned that the project’s more game-like focus meant that “it’s hard to get the difficulty right in something that isn’t inherently a game platform,” and noted that a rethink is necessary. Interactive experiences.
Choose Love is Netflix’s upcoming interactive romantic comedy, Ranveer Vs. A first for the company along with Wild. Despite the larger challenges of the team, the focus has been on consolidating the simplicity of the technology involved rather than expanding the actual size of the division. “I think because it’s harder, we’ve invested a lot in tools and processes to try to demystify a lot of the technical components that might have hung up our storytellers in the early days.” According to Schlafman, the key to moving the Interactive Experiences team forward is making sure everything is clearly understood and easily received by new and old creators when they come to experience.
To many, Interactive Entertainment seemed like the company’s strongest bet to stay afloat in the increasingly crowded streaming space. Many have speculated that the tech company would shift its focus to developing interactive video games and other focuses. Given the company’s statement of moving away from “expensive vanity projects,” one might think that an emphasis on the still-vibrant novelty of this content’s immersive nature would be the logical next step. But when I ask Weil what percentage of interactive content makes up Netflix’s entire slate of content for next year, he’s surprisingly short: “I think this year, I’d say less than 1% of our efforts are going into interactive content.”
The company seems to be missing a trick by not focusing on this, like the unique style of current content and instead continuing to dub the Hollywood-style blockbuster of The Gray Man or what The New Yorker called “Ambient TV.” Shows like Emily in Paris. The two forms of content feel diametrically opposed: one encourages more active and meaningful participation, while the other is inherently designed to play in the background, able to go on completely unseen or unheard. Given that Emily in Paris has been renewed for a third and fourth season, while interactive content remains a small part of the company’s overall slate, it’s clear where their priorities lie. While Disney Plus and HBO Max have a competitive advantage in the wealth of their back catalogs, Netflix has consistently been rooted in its technological edge: incorporating a 1940s Hanna Barbera-inspired cartoon with cutting-edge interactivity creates more intrigue on a creative and industry level. rather than a mainstream blockbuster vehicle.
Given the growing evolution of playable content, Schlafman explains that the mission statement of Interactive Experiences under him and Weil has changed since Fisher took over. “Over the last year we’ve been trying to explore the whole spectrum of interactivity, from essentially linear content with a bit of interactivity to full games that we’re dipping our toes into – we’re really excited about that.” This has included trying to apply interactive capabilities to sitcoms, reality TV and collaborating with companies such as Headspace.
