This video for Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait” (from their new album The Suburbs), is an extraordinary experience created by writer/director Chris Milk with Google and the band. It’s hard to describe, so avoid even the tiny spoilers in this blog post and check it out.
It uses your childhood home’s address to mash up Google Maps/Street View and HTML5 canvas tricks with its own footage, all the while spawning and killing browser windows in an elaborate choreography.
This is a technical achievement and also further evidence of how Arcade Fire and its Merge, its label, have nailed the web (for example by streaming a live show in Madison Square Garden with an interactive feed directed by Terry Gilliam). More on that at the Google Blog and in Mashable’s article.
Part of the appeal certainly is the novelty of the execution, combined with music which already has a strong emotional core and imagery of a running man, a common trick to energize the viewer.
However, I was surprisingly affected by the pictures of my childhood home (which I only moved away from a year ago, so the wound is still fresh), and even more so writing a letter to my younger self. Making it personal creates the beautiful interpretation of the idea of growing up, of nostalgia and a walk down memory lane. I’d have liked that letter back then.
In improv they teach us to skip the easy laugh and trust the audience’s intelligence: they laugh that much harder if their mind has to work to make the funny connection, and they like it more because they don’t feel that a joke was rammed down their throats. In a similar way, this experience delivers an emotional impact because it trusts that a simple street view image will give you pause for thought, and because it asks you to work a little to get the full reward. The tech just supports this beautifully.
