It's in the nature of filmmaking to want to pull your audience into a deep, immersive world and as more of the population tips into the bracket of 'always connected', it makes sense to extend that emersion to multi-platform experiences. Imagine the all encompassing stories that could be told if attention could be captured at every blink of the eye as it is in possible future short Sight:
The graduation project of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design students Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo, Sight taps into the pair's love of the overlapping fields of sci-fi and technology:
At first we were set on making a film that had augmented reality in it. We did some research, delved into every kind of augmented tech out there today, and somewhere along the way we thought ‘Hey, I wonder how augmented reality would be like without the device or apparatus barrier. What if we could just SEE augmented reality?’ So we kind of tried to envision the world and how it would act after this kind of technology is standard, and it rolled on from there.
Whilst much of the discussion around the film seems to have focussed on its relation to recent Project Glass demonstrations from Google or similarities to Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, Sight's true strengths lay not in the prescient nature of its narrative but in its design. Hands down, the 'on eye' menu system is one of the best designed, real or imagined, you're likely to see, with May-raz and Lazo's choice of apps and how their protagonist gamifies his world seeming all too plausible -- doesn't Wingman feel troublingly like a kindred spirit to the much maligned pulled app Girls Around Me? There's also great attention to detail throughout, from the actors' focus shifts as they toggle between app and human interaction, to the apartment full of nothing outside of the bare essentials. It's a world full of seductive distractions and information enablers, but perhaps not one you should leave your admin password laying around in.
Do you think the use of technology in Sight was effective? How have you deployed believable tech in your own stories?
[via Venture Beat]
