On the website The Wilderness Downtown the über-indie band Arcade Fire offers fans personalized music videos, labeling them a “Chrome Experiment” that are “[m]ade with some friends from Google.” (Chrome is Google’s web browser and the site recommends that you use Chrome to get the whole experience of the video.) Visitors to the site are instructed to type the address of the home where they grew up. What ensues are a series of videos interacting with one another, personalized to the address the user put it using Google map images, as well as a page for viewers to interact with the video and write a message of their own, all set to the song “We Used To Wait” by Arcade Fire.
Whether or not you’re a fan of Arcade Fire, or of Google for that matter, this is a pretty interesting step for music video. And a pretty wild ride.
Get your own personalized video, or check out the video for Utne‘s offices.
This isn’t Arcade Fire’s first foray into interactive music video, though. An article in the January 2010 issue of Creative Review profiles Vincent Morisset (article not available online) and his work with the band on the interactive websites for Neon Bible and the song Black Mirror.
Source:The Wilderness Downtown
Image from an interactive film by Chris Milk.
