latefragment

In 2003, the CFC Media Lab initiated a program called the Interactive Narrative Feature Program (INFP) to experiment with the creation, development, production, financing, marketing and distribution of interactive feature films. As the natural evolution of CFC Media Lab's ten year history of development, research and production of interactive prototypes, the INFP was created to increase Canadian capacity and talent in interactive narrative production.

For the INFP's inaugural project, the CFC Media Lab sought a partner that has a history of pushing boundaries and finding new ways to tell stories. The National Film Board of Canada was a natural fit - as Canada's public film producer, the NFB is known worldwide for its innovation and creativity in storytelling through documentary, animation and alternative drama.

Together, the CFC Media Lab and the NFB have joined forces to collaborate on this revolutionary dramatic interactive feature film.

By touching on the sensitive theme of restorative justice, Late Fragment also retains the focus on complex character-driven stories surrounding love, hate, death, revelation and justice. The interactive film thus not only serves as new form of cinema, but also becomes a best practice case from which industry, academia, and others can learn how the nature of storytelling changes with the advent of interactive technologies.

Late Fragment, which is designed for a DVD platform and presented as a live VeeJay'd performance theatrically, was shot in Toronto with an HD camera and recorded directly onto a digital card which went straight into the computer. The $1.3-million production involved a traditional filmmaking process as well as the creation and implementation of up to thirteen different digital tools to complete.

Notwithstanding the digital process, making a film that lets viewers interrupt the story at any time and switch to another scene while still following a three-act narrative structure also meant that a whole new way of thinking about cinema and story had to be invented. "Components, clicks, non-clicks, rabbit-holes and loops" were words that peppered the conversation in the edit suites.

To share and execute the vision, the producers needed to find three writer-directors willing to embark on this new journey. "We were looking for a particular breed of director," said Ana Serrano (CFC producer), "essentially a structuralist, with a high sensitivity of how narrative is structured in space and time, who was unafraid of innovation and taking risks, and who had a distinct enough voice not to mind other voices crowding theirs."

It was a tall order — filled by young writer-directors Daryl Cloran, Anita Doron and Mateo Guez. Along with Serrano and Anita Lee (NFB Producer), the three met and attended a restorative justice process in Montreal that gave them the inspiration and frame for the related stories. Then they went off separately and came back