Filmmakers Discovering Creative Aspects of Interactive TV

Gordon Quinn was a few settings below enthusiastic when he took his latest work-in-progress, “The New Americans,” to an interactive TV workshop run by the American Film Institute.

“I was a skeptic at the beginning,” said Quinn, a producer whose credits include the acclaimed basketball documentary “Hoop Dreams.” “But I’m totally sold on it at the end because I can see what it can accomplish.”

Aided by a group of engineers and design companies, including Santa Monica-based Artifact Inc., Quinn’s Kartemquin Films developed a way to transmit the soundtrack for “The New Americans” through the Internet in multiple languages. Viewers with an Internet connection could watch the broadcast on PBS but listen to it in, for example, Arabic or Vietnamese.

That’s a key enhancement, Quinn said, because many of the viewers targeted by “The New Americans” don’t speak English. The film follows six sets of immigrants from their homelands in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America through their first few years in the United States.

The work on “The New Americans” epitomizes the latest stage in the painfully slow evolution of interactive TV. Engineers were ready to make the leap years ago, but they were about the only ones interested. Now filmmakers are gravitating toward interactive technology because it serves a creative purpose.

Still missing, though, is the business model. PBS might be willing to pay extra for interactivity, but commercial broadcasters, cable operators and satellite companies won’t invest in something unless it generates revenue. Although they’re building digital networks that could support interactivity, they haven’t settled on a common technology to display extra layers of text, graphics and video.

That’s why the interactive features that filmmakers develop through AFI’s Enhanced TV Workshop may never advance beyond prototypes. Nevertheless, Marcia Zellers, AFI’s director of enhanced TV, said, “There’s great momentum in our industry right now.”

AFI recently showed off the results of this year’s workshop, bringing in eight filmmakers to demonstrate what they’d developed with the program’s help. For the first time in its four-year history, Zellers said, “It is highly likely that numerous prototypes ... will be fully developed and aired.”

Paul Mitchell, an executive at Microsoft’s TV division, echoed Zellers’ sentiments. “What we’re seeing now is stuff that could actually see an audience--and in the not-too-distant future,” he said.

Kartemquin has developed a version of the enhanced “New Americans” that would work on an advanced cable set-top box, enabling viewers to choose an alternative language from their TV screen and receive it through the set-top’s Net connection. In another version, viewers would use their computers to go to the program’s Web site, choose an alternate language and have the soundtrack piped through the Net.

“Language should not be something that separates us,” said Quinn, whose film is expected to air in 2003. “We have to be realistic about who’s in America these days.”

Other prototypes demonstrated at AFI included:

* “People Like Us: Social Class in America,” a documentary by the Center for New American Media that explores how people slap labels such as “middle class” and “poor” onto themselves and others. As the broadcast wryly displays a cross-section of Americans talking about class, questions pop up on the TV screen asking viewers about their own attitudes.

For example, as the program shows a high school student in a hallway glibly identifying her passing classmates as “dorks” or “losers,” the on-screen question asks whether a person’s class can by judged by looks alone. Viewers answer questions with their remote control, and the interactive software stores and analyzes their responses. Near the end of the show, the software displays what each viewer’s income level and class designation is likely to be, based on his or her answers.

Andy Kolker of the Center for New American Media said he wasn’t crazy about the idea of enhanced TV because, like most filmmakers, he worried about distracting the audience. What he found, however, was that the enhancements made the program more personal for viewers.

“It’s a different kind of storytelling, but it’s storytelling nonetheless,” Kolker said.

The noninteractive version of “People Like Us” aired on PBS in September, but the filmmakers hope to offer the enhancements in connection with a future broadcast or release. Among the companies assisting the producers in the workshop was Trapeze, a Toronto-based interactive entertainment company.

* “The Eukanuba Tournament of Champions,” a dog show pitting the winners of regional contests against each other for a $50,000 grand prize. Produced by the Animal Planet cable TV network with the help of Mill Valley, Calif.-based PushyBroad, the enhanced show tries to keep viewers glued to the three-hour broadcast with pop-up wisecracks, quiz questions and on-screen chat sessions.

Using a wireless keyboard, viewers compete by guessing the winners in each breed, picking specific types of dogs out of the crowd of canines and answering trivia questions. They also can create electronic bookmarks for dog-related Web sites.

Tom Pope of Animal Planet said the company needs to line up more sponsors before it can deploy the interactive version. It’s trying to lure them with interactive commercials that enable viewers to request coupons or order products--and, in the process, surrender their e-mail addresses to advertisers.

“In this day and age, it’s tough to do something just for the sake of it being cool,” Pope said.

Louis Barbash, project development officer for the Corp. for Public Broadcasting, said there’s something seductive about interactive TV for filmmakers. “What they discover in interactivity is that they can go beyond the 60 minutes that the broadcast structure allows them, to tell things in different ways.” As the TV industry surmounts the technological and economic hurdles, Barbash said, the creative community has to learn how to use the tools effectively. “The thing will not work unless there’s good stuff on,” he said.

*

Jon Healey covers the convergence of entertainment and technology. He can be reached at jon.healey@latimes.com.