Interactive Film: Choose A Different Ending

Written by Marc Metekohy on August 2nd, 2009 | 5 comments

Choose A Different Ending is an interactive film that allows you to decide what happens next. You can interact with it, choose what to do and decide how it ends. Through the use of annotations the viewer decides how the story develops.

British filmmaker Simon Ellis based in Nottingham recently finished directing the commercial for a big anti knife campaign that is running both online and on TV in the UK. The online commercial is different in that it’s interactive, allowing the viewer to decide the destiny of the main character.

The key to this is it puts you straight in the centre of a world and you decide what choices the main character makes. Through great acting and camera-work, the result is something very effective. The point is to show you the consequences of the multitude of different choices when it comes to knife crime.

Annotations are not new, take the Interactive Card Trick, or the Interactive Easter Egg, but using this in a campaign such as the Drop The Weapons campaign gives it the opportunity to tell a story.

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5 Comments

• Griffin Farley says:

  August 3, 2009 at 01:34

  My agency did something similar last month. We created a ‘choose your own adventure’ for our back to school campaign. However, ours is a little less tame than knife or no knife

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfDNoM2q9xc

  I like the idea of YouTube as a gaming or interactive storytelling platform.

  Reply
• Marc Metekohy says:

  August 4, 2009 at 10:45

  Hi Griffin,

  the campaign your agency has done looks great as well. I hope to see more of such storytelling campaigns.

  Reply
• Iamkiai (Christian Joyal) says:

  August 4, 2009 at 23:16

  love this idea of interactive storytelling campaign – Interactive Film: Choose A Different Ending http://tinyurl.com/nhdac2 #FB

  Reply
• Griffin Farley says:

  August 7, 2009 at 14:36

  Another quick question, do you know of any other brands that have used this YouTube function in marketing campaigns?

  Reply
• Marc says:

  August 7, 2009 at 15:42

  Hi Griffin,

  Yes there are. One of the best examples is the one made for Street Fighter. We covered it in Viral Friday.

  Reply