Arcade Fire released a new interactive video today and a lot people have been talking about it around the web. Since most music fans are not techy, we figured we'd give a brief lay person's explanation of just what's going on with this new video and why we think Arcade Fire chose to do this.
If you haven't seen the video yet you gotta check it out. It's a really powerful, personalized version of Arcade Fire's song called 'We Used To Wait' from their recent, #1 record The Suburbs.
Here's the premise: you type in the address of your childhood home or a place from your childhood, and then a program runs that creates a personalized video for you.
When the video launches, there's a kid running through the streets. Google images of the location that you selected and animations start to be woven in with the video to create the impression of the kid running around your old neighborhood. You start to get nostalgic real fast. It will blow your mind to see your old street featured in the video for one of your favorite rock bands.
The browser takes on a life of its own and choreographed windows start popping up all over your computer. It culminates in asking you to write a postcard to your younger self. When it's over, you can submit your postcard to Arcade Fire to print with seeds that they send out to random people, and to use in concert imagery. The people that receive a postcard can plant it and a tree will grow. The entire concept from the beginning to end is beautiful. It ties in themes from the album and your own childhood memories, and connects the digital world with the natural world in a never-ending narrative arc.
As for the technical side of the video, there's this weird HTML5 thing that music bloggers keep mentioning but don't understand. What is that?
HTML5 is the latest and greatest version of HTML that's only supported by the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome. What has everyone excited about it is the fact that the leading browser makers, via HTML5, have standardized on a lot of what people want to do with the web - video, animation, applications, etc. And they've incorporated standard ways of doing these things so that a web developer (in this case one working with Arcade Fire) can write one web page or application and have it work across all devices. This video should even work on the ipad or iphone.
Techy people are all excited about this, and this video is one of the best overall displays of what browsers that support HTML5 can do. It combines playing music, importing photography from google maps, laying animations on top of these location-specific images, and an interactive way of letting you write a postcard and send it to the band in a wild font. There's a shit ton going on behind the scenes to accomplish all that, and it's amazing that the browser is the only software needed to handle it. In the past you'd have to also have some clunky plugins like flash installed on your computer to accomplish this. You can find out more about the technical side at Google's Chrome Experiments.
Not that we ever doubted the band, but It's surprising to see that Arcade Fire is so in touch with bleeding-edge technology and is pushing the envelope for what people can do with this technology. They truly are in tune with their time, and they're mining the times for new forms of artistic expression. Hats off to Arcade Fire.
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