SPEED_THE MOVIE

It's an amazing art form. A series of scenes put in a particular order designed to leave the viewer with no choice but to feel one particular way.
F. Scott Fitzgerald on Hollywood

The production SPEED investigates how the role of the moving image have shifted in our age of digital technology. How the linear structure of traditional film/video media have transformed into an interactive narration based on hyperstructure and association.
The main concern of SPEED has not been to create a model for building "hyper-fiction" or "hyper-movies" based on the moving image. The object has been to focus on how the experience of a filmed material can change when implemented into "state-of-the-art" digital technology. How our identity in a narrative context changes when we move from a passive role as reciever, into taking an active role in shaping the narrative structure.

The image material in SPEED are based upon a 30 minutes short story, a serie of personal written notes, still sequences and sounds. The moving images are created as thoughts and remembrance, scenes from a mans everyday life, reflexions inside his thoughts, fictionalized diaries; associative thematic elements that shape this man´s life.

SPEED focuses on viewer experience, the interaction with the story is based on randomness, we devised a metaphoric model which we call a "a memory machine"; the main strategy behind this was to leave choices of viewing order to the computer. A central tool for this should be a JUKEBOX, a narrative machine that creates an everchanging story based on an initial choice. The experience of interacting with SPEED should be intuitive and associative.

The medium we choose for the production was CD-rom, with film clips as quicktime movies, playable on both PC and MAC. We never intended to investigate the "high" end of multimedia technology with DVD and streaming media as delivery platforms. Instead, deliberately, we chose a "low" but widely spread technology.

© THORE SONESON / PER LINDE 2001

The Cinema screen

Mindmap over narrative structure in SPEED_the movie