Caution: Music Videos Ahead, Interactivity Varies: Egadz, Moones, Califone
It's weird how certain themes appear in product clusters, in this case, multimedia projects that are described in various media outlets as interactive music videos. The following projects from Egadz, Califone and Moones are all well worth a look though only one actually fits the description of interactive music video. However all three have interactive elements that draw on the distinctive platforms on which they're presented including a mobile game, a YouTube video and a Tumblr multimedia project.
Note: It's tough writing about the world especially if you have to stop and think about what words actually mean. Or if you care about them being specific enough that they'll remain valuable in the future. But what are you going to do? A rose by any other name is simply called something else.
Music Made With Buttons Reboot: Egadz – "Ghost"
Egadz created an instrument, put out some music, videos and a game, but there's not an interactive video here unless you want to dumb interactive down to YouTube annotations that take you to a different page.
Note: he's not the one calling it an interactive video from what I can tell.
Nevertheless Egadz sounds like an interesting artist whose most recent work is illustrated above with links out to related products.
You can download the game for iOS and Android for free.
Moones – Better Energy – Drunk In Session
The above video from Moones is the only video of these three that I would truly call interactive. Judging from the current oddness on their home page, they're working with some really interesting video artists.
In the above video you can see the same song from different angles with different versions that are affected by the numbers of beers consumed by the band. If the links in the embedded version above aren't working smoothly click through to YouTube to see how they've done a nice job of creating a video that you can watch all the way through with changes or choose angles and inebriation levels from the embedded links.
Califone.Stiches
Califone.Stitches is an interactive Tumblr project with "music video" in quotes so they bypassed my language game. The project:
"creates itself on the fly using imagery and animated GIFs drawn from a curated set of blogs within the Tumblr ecosystem."
Like the Moones' video above, it makes really smart use of the platform on which it's presented.
Tumblr Undermines Its Own Immersive Potential
Unfortunately Tumblr now does this self-promo maneuver in which a sidebar randumbly appears when you move your cursor a certain way. It's not the end of the world but I find it jarring and it undermines the sense of immersion that was previously more easily achieved on Tumblr than on other platforms.
Animal New York was not so impressed with Califone's work but, rather than pretending to be surprised by a New Yorker not being impressed, I'll just say Galperina's article does have links to other interactive projects if you're digging this kind of work.
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch/@crowdfundingm) also blogs at Flux Research and Crowdfunding For Musicians. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
