Interactive Storytelling
Busy times at Haxan indeed.
Most of you know that anything we touch is going to have a serious internet component to it, whether it’s feature films like ‘Altered‘, or Dan’s webisode project ‘The Strand’. Ever since The Blair Witch Project‘s wildly successful website it is what we are known for, of course.
What you may not know, however, is that we also do quite a bit of envelope-pushing interactive narrative work that is sponsored by advertising clients.
Currently, I have a major piece running right now, sponsored by Audi and called ‘The Art of the Heist’.
‘The Art of the Heist’ is a completely interactive story about two art-retrieval experts, Ian and Nisha, caught in mystery surrounding stolen cars and plans for one of the largest art heists ever conceived. The security of their company’s website, Last Resort Retrieval, has been compromised (just click on the box to enter a “name” and gain access to their intranet), and regular people are crawling through their personal files, trying to figure out who is responsible.
Meanwhile, famous video game designer Virgil Tatum is in the process of designing a new game based on Nisha’s real-life exploits, and this most recent adventure is causing him serious trouble.
It’s all being documented on StolenA3.com by a guy who witnessed a strange event in New York last April and has been compiling the known facts as they come in.
There are mysteries to ponder, puzzles to solve, and as an audience member you can interact with the main characters via email or leave a message on their answering service for them. What information you choose to share with them could change the direction of the story, as it has multiple times.
And if you are lucky, you might even get to work alongside Nisha, as many already have in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
If you want to come along for the ride, these chapter synopses are a great place to start. It’s a completely new type of entertainment experience, a hybrid between story and game, really, and since it’s sponsored by Audi it doesn’t cost you a thing to experience it.
I’ll be writing more about these projects right here — one thing you might want to know is how many longtime Haxan collaborators are working on this project, not just Gregg and I from Haxan but also Brian Clark and GMD Studios, Steve Wax and the gang at Chelsea Pictures, Brian Cain, who ran the Freakylinks website back in the day, Jim Gunshanan who worked on the award winning ‘Beta-7′ project we did back in 2003, Ben Rock, who worked on Blair Witch and many other projects too numerous to mention, our pals at Juicy Temples, who have done such amazing work on Altered, and more.
The agency is an excellent group of folks from McKinney+Silver. Projects like ‘The Art of the Heist’ that push the envelope are incredibly difficult, as you can imagine, and they have been really great — their willingness (and that of Audi, of course), to jump into spaces where others fear to tread is what makes projects like this possible.
There are so many more people to name and I will do that in another post, but I hope you take some time to check out The Art of the Heist and let me know what you think.
