An illustration of "The Future of Visual Storytelling is Interactive - Or is it?" panel by local cartoonist Austin Kleon (www.austinkleon.com)

I have to be honest. I started writing this article, and realized how boring it was. I tried to relay the events of creating and presenting a panel at SXSW this year. The panel wasn't boring, the article was. That's probably because you had to be there.

Despite this, I thought I'd take a bit of a different slant on this and give a bit of brain dump on what it was like to give a panel, as opposed to a blow by blow of the ‘action' so to speak.

The panel was called The Future of Visual Storytelling is Interactive - Or is it?

Big topic, not a lot of time. When I proposed it, I basically just created a panel that I'd been dying to see for a while. I've been down to SXSW the last two years, and it was something I thought was lacking.

Interactive filmmaking is something I'm fascinated with. I want to be able to crack the egg. To make a film that a viewer can play with and affect that actually feels enthralling, satisfying and exciting. In all honesty, I haven't seen one yet that does this and I'm not convinced it's possible. I was hoping that getting people smarter than me on a panel might yield some insight that I'd be able to take away and pull into projects I'm working on. I'm selfish. But also I figured that anyone who showed up to the panel would probably get same thing out of it, so maybe I'm not that selfish.

The panelists were: Rick Webb, COO of the Barbarian Group; Mark Pytlik, Head of Digital, Stink Digital; Phil Stuart, Creative Director, Preloaded; and Victoria Ha, Senior Producer, Stitch Digital.

Before the panel we all collected our thoughts in a Google doc to focus the discussion. When we all met at Southby to talk before the panel, we ended up having an hour-and-a-half discussion. It was awesome.

To my surprise, the room for the panel was large - probably like 150-200 people and all the chairs were full. People were standing two deep all along the back of the room.

The conversation began with some definitions the get everyone on the same page, and quickly moved into examples.

Phil went through his CDX game they did for the BBC, Mark went through the Diesel Heidi's project, Rick went through Waking Hannah, which they did for Ogilvy and Dove, and Victoria went through some awesome ARG stuff they had done for ABC, Terminator, and the CBC in Canada.

What made all of these example so good was that they all had the core basis of interactive stories, (or stories that the viewer could affect, choose or change the plot,) but they also were so different and opened up the discussion to debate over whether interactive films were even really possible.

It's kind of crazy that this is what it came down to, but really, this is a fundamental question at this point. Is interactive film possible, or is it just a game?

Mark was the first to really bring this up and it gathered steam, as I argued that to me a game meant that there was competition, scoring and a goal, or a way to win or lose.

I believe that interactive with a story doesn't really include these elements most of the time, so while it might feel like play, they don't really cross the boundary into games.

Mark wasn't convinced. To be frank, I'm not either.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the discussion came up when we all started discussing the challenges in creating these stories and producing them. Rick Webb had some awesome images they'd taken when they were producing Waking Up Hannah and their Anyfilms project for Samsung. It was a huge board covered in cue cards that made up their ‘script'. Phil had some awesome diagrams from CDX, showing the way they mapped out the story along with the points of interaction. They looked both terrifying, super complicated, and yet so clean and simple that they were inspiring.

Victoria and Mark talked about producing their projects with an audience that was actually able to make choices during the shoot itself. That's the kind of scary concept that throws the whole idea of control over production for a major loop. Mark raised the great point that perhaps the only way to truly do this was to tightly control the parameters of the shoot, so that the actual moving parts weren't really that wide open. I agree.

I brought up the point that sometimes just the perception of interaction and choice is good enough, and perhaps a lesser amount of actual control is acceptable, if we make the context fun enough.

At the end of the panel, we took questions and it was spirited to say the least. We got hammered by the first person, who apparently had just finished her master's thesis on this very subject. It was basically my nightmare. I had had a couple of weeks to prepare; this lady had just spent years on this topic.

All I can say is thank God for Rick Webb. He jumped in and argued right back that what she was yelling about was just semantics. As soon as we got through her, we actually got to some really good questions that expanded the discussion greatly and opened up some points that we hadn't talked about yet.

Overall, the panel went really well and was exciting to produce and be a part of. I'm not sure if I have any more questions answered, but probably the best part (believe it or not) was realizing that no one else did either. The fact is we're all just stumbling thought this together, all trying to answer the same questions and dealing with the same problems. There's safety in numbers and somehow knowing that no one else has the secret sauce allowed me to feel more empowered to try and figure it out myself.

Go figure.

James Milward is the Executive Producer at Secret Location, a creative, digital production company in Toronto.
www.thesecretlocation.com