The woman’s husband is cheating on her, but she does not know this yet. She stands alone in their dark bedroom. On the floor is her husband’s coat, and a photograph of him with his lover peeks out, just barely, from a pocket. The woman turns, and her eye is caught by the photograph.
Or is it?
With Turbulence, an Israeli interactive film directed by Nitzan Ben-Shaul, the choice at that moment is up to the viewer. Turbulence is one of several recent experiments in interactive filmmaking, given new life by the advent of devices like the iPad. (See our series on Touching Stories, a set of interactive iPad films, from June and July.)
Turbulence, an 80-minute thriller, is about three Israelis who meet by chance in New York 20 years after they were arrested together at a protest in Israel. At various moments in the film, a glowing light will surround an object, indicating that the viewer can interact with it in some way–to choose to press CANCEL on that impassioned text message a character just wrote, but is on the fence about sending; or to tease that photograph out gently from the coat pocket, so that a wife can know the truth about her husband.
Turbulence completed production in December of 2008, and was first screened at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival. Ben-Shaul’s wife canvassed the audience at decision points in the film, while Ben-Shaul executed the decisions. “The audience loved it,” Ben-Shaul tells Fast Company; the film took away an award for Best Experimental Feature.
Others have ventured where Ben-Shaul treads now; on top of Touching Stories, the critically acclaimed PlayStation 3 game Heavy Rain was sometimes billed as an interactive movie, and similarly entailed decision points with icons to prompt the viewer/player.
