Late Fragment

A couple weekends ago I had the opportunity to experience the interactive movie Late Fragment. It is the child of a partnership between the CFC Media Lab and the National Film Board, with Ana Serrano and Anita Lee producing. The piece follows the stories of three individuals taking part in the Restorative Justice Project – a rehabilitative program that invites the perpetrators and victims of crimes to talk, share, and “look for wholeness, balance, forgiveness, safety”. Each story was told by a writer-director team and follows Theo, Faye and Kevin as they recount and revisit their personal tragedies.

It was interesting to finally have some time to sit with the finished work as I was quite involved at one-remove from the making of it. My wife was on the production team and many of the people who worked so hard on it for so long I have the great fortune to call my friends.

It was quite the journey – ambitious and important and flawed. As a work of Canadian interactive art it is groundbreaking, building alliances and experience and tools for the community to build on. In that regard, it is a tremendous success and goes a considerable way to addressing the “provincial backwater” approach that we as a nation take in this industry. As interactive media creators, Canada is stricken with a conservative vision, suspicious money, and inexperienced production and management talent who trickle away to more capably ambitious climes the moment they learn the important lessons of the media but before they have achieved something great. Now that I’ve gone through Late Fragment, I am worried that many of my friends may before long be wooed away.

A considerable effort went in to tracking and interweaving the story lines. Tools needed to be created to allow the team to visualize and enable audience movement through the madly branching script. There are some great photos out there of the early days of development where a riot of coloured papers line the walls of a room, a thread-and-thumbtack spiderweb describing the different kinds of moment and destinations. (Please read the Making of Late Fragment).

On the whole Late Fragment tried to do a few too many things starting with so many unanswered questions about how to do any of it. That they answered as many as they did is testament to their talent. Cinematically it is great, with lovely performances and undertold, well-paced stories that work well the non-linear architecture. The emplottment of Theo’s story is especially interesting, possible to completely misread if not explored, and is a particularly good use of this medium.

One barrier to fully exploring it was “pain”. Late Fragment is not fun. The stories are not light. They are very human and touching and beautifully realized but they are painful, the lives of these individuals fundamentally traumatized. It is a lot of emotional work to keep asking and wanting to understand, moving through and back again until you understand – it’s a hard place to spend several hours, or to desire to revisit. An adventure or rom-com would lighten the burden on the user, something to consider when gaining literacy in the medium has already been added to the cognitive load of the audience.

The project brought together three writers and three directors in a common structure. I believe this was less successful than it could have been. Unless you are making a collection of short films, it is more interesting to interweave narratives and it really needs more commonality than “people telling their stories to each other”. If they don’t impact upon one another – and I don’t mean in “the audience can create meaning in their own juxtapositions” sense – it creates noise in the experience of any single narrative. This could be made to work if there was a game in it, some configurative/interpretive puzzle the audience can work away on when they are washing dishes or commuting, something to draw them back to the experience to test their theory. Then it would become a narrative-media Rubik’s Cube, with something more revealed in the unlocking. Without wanting to spoil the experience, I believe Theo’s Story accomplished this within its own structure. I think the experience would be more satisfying overall if there was some element like this being attempted across the stories as well.

I found motivation a challenge. Mixing the conventions of linear cinema with the user agency of interactive media creates conflict. How do you rework the conventions of cinema with its editing techniques of non-chronological, dramatically-ordered emplottment and preserve narrative tension in a story? LF played with it to varying degrees of success but the fundamental problem remains and is a constant question of this format. If you strip out directed plot you have a linear account, or a user-driven emplottment. Presumably the screenwriter, director, and editor of a cinematic work – with their skills, experience and familiarity with the material – have selected the most dramatically satisfying route to experience the plot points. Why would the user want to navigate unless they can take their own route, ask their own questions?

The navigation fights this agency. Delivered on a DVD player, the user has the single interaction of press the “enter” button to “learn more”. This doesn’t begin to set up expectations of what you will actually get by clicking so you create your own reasons and – if the response doesn’t meet the expectation you created – you are disappointed. You have also left a scene you were interested in – one you wanted to learn more about – with no reliable way to get back to it. This makes it hard to build trust between the audience and the director. You need trust for the user to feel confident about interacting otherwise the tendency is for the audience to revert to the cinematic position of surrendering authorship to the director and only interact when the movie forces it by looping.

One of the successful implementations of the interaction results from the complexity of the work. The story gaps and the distraction introduced by cutting between narrative lines is disorienting. This disorientation continually invites the question “where are we?” and when I click to learn more and receive usefully orienting information and then click and am returned to the scene I left, my expectations were well met. I was pleased and surprised at how effective this simple action was.

If I had to build on their considerable base, I think I would try telling a single story, multiple points of view around a caper. Maybe more blending with interactive media – work in some other non-cinematic approaches to the material. This could be something as simple as geographically or temporally organized chapter menus – context cues that borrow some of the understandings of narrative arrangement in video games. But there are other options as well. I agree with their decision to not build the experience on a GUI that provides a range of explicit choices but the use of some clues that help me frame my expectations would help build trust and raise enjoyment. Perhaps use colour or composition within the shot, or editing conventions that hint more expressly at the response audience action will cause would work. To encourage interacting without raising the fear that you won’t get to finish the scene could perhaps be facilitated with a back-button that functions with a “cut-back” cinematic feel. With the greater prevalence of DVD-enabled game consoles perhaps there exists other platform opportunities than the traditional DVD player that would untangle some of the challenges of connecting agency, expectation and outcome.

And those are my fragments of Late Fragments. I’m still thinking of it many days later in an age of disposable media experiences and I want to congratulate everyone involved. There’s something compelling in there and they went searching for it. I hope they do it again.