By Robert Goldrich

For the first time, the AICP Show’s annual road tour included an in-depth look at winners of the Next Awards. The Los Angeles tour stop on July 27, for example, featured a session in which three Next judges shared their insights into this year’s honored work. One Next jury member, Dustin Callif, digital executive producer, Tool of North America, observed that two of the three winners in the Website/Microsite category represented “the next iteration of music videos.” He cited the interactive music clips “The Johnny Cash Project” and Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown” as reflecting what can be realized by teaming a video storyteller with a creative technologist. Both interactive videos were directed by Chris Milk of @radical.media, with Milk and Aaron Koblin of Milk+Koblin serving as creative directors.
    Indeed both clips contribute to a redefining of the music video discipline. The Arcade Fire clip centers on its single “We Used to Wait” from their latest album “The Suburbs.” Deploying Google Maps and Street-view for Google Chrome Experiments, the video takes a personalized approach by enabling users to input (to the film-dedicated website www.thewildernessdowntown.com) an address from their childhood which then places them at the center of the film’s story. Viewers see themselves in the film as they run through the streets of their old neighborhood and finally reach their childhood home. This is tied very closely to the song’s lyrics to make for a moving emotional experience. At the end of the film, the viewer is urged to write a letter to his or her young self. Within days, the site received some 20 million hits and 3 million unique views.

“Johnny Cash”    Earlier this year came the release of “The Johnny Cash Project,” a web-only video that collects portraits of Cash submitted by fans and sets them to the song “Ain’t No Grave.”
    Milk reflected on the transition for videos from broadcast to the web. “The Internet browser, as a canvas, allows for such a broader dialogue with the viewer than TV,” he observed. “There’s an actual two-way communication going on between the piece and the observer, so the work is being reinvented and customized with every viewing. Also, since it lives on the Internet, you have the ability to incorporate any other web-based data set into the narrative, so there’s this whole new box of tools you don’t have in a traditional format. 
    “Film is almost always a linear, one-way medium. The viewer sits on a couch while the product is fed to them.  With web work, the door is opened to ask the viewer to engage further.
    “On the other hand,” continued Milk, “working with the Internet as your broadcast medium presents a whole set of pitfalls you never have in film or TV, because everything you do online is ultimately programmed in raw code. In film if you change one of your shots in post, you might make it a little better or a little worse, but the thing still flows. In code, if you change one thing in one shot, suddenly your whole piece doesn’t play on a Mac anymore, or in certain browsers, and it takes three guys all day to figure out where the code got messed up. That gets very frustrating.”
    As for the aforementioned video storyteller/creative technologist collaboration, Milk cited the main creative technologists on his Next-recognized work as being Aaron Koblin and Mr. Doob. Milk described the latter as being “an artist/coder virtuoso.” Koblin is a data visualization artist who works at Google Creative Lab.
    “With both the Arcade Fire and Johnny Cash projects, Aaron worked closely with me in considering various technologies that could achieve the vision for the piece,” explained Milk. “It’s similar to the working relationship I might have with a cinematographer or editor or another collaborator in filmmaking. We are just working in a new paradigm. Mr Doob likes to get his hands dirty and will often write much of the most difficult code. Stuff that just seems impossible when first conceived, he manages to pull off. It’s really quite extraordinary what he can make a browser do.”
    Asked to shed further light on his working relationship with Koblin at Milk+Koblin, Milk described the shop as “a sort of virtual micro agency of two people with no phone or no website. Aaron and I might consider special projects, but so far it has only been for our own work.”
    On “Wilderness Downtown,” @radical.media was the overall production company. B-Reel handled production of the interactive web elements. On “The Johnny Cash Project,” @radical.media supervised both the overall production, as well as the web production through its interactive department.
    “Wilderness Downtown” wasn’t the only collaboration of note between Milk and Arcade Fire. He created a large, ambitious interactive installation titled “Summer Into Dust” in conjunction with the Arcade Fire performance at this year’s Coachella Music Festival.
    As for what’s next on his agenda, Milk is working on a transmedia endeavor centered on the album “Rome” by Danger Mouse, Danielle Luppi, Jack White and Norah Jones. Milk said of the project, “There are multiple chapters across multiple media, and ultimately it all culminates in a full-length feature film, for which the album is the soundtrack.”
    Milk added that he is separately working on a couple of other feature projects, one of which he hopes will mark his theatrical feature directorial debut.
    Also in the offing is another collaboration with Koblin on a new installation piece for a U.K. modern art museum.
    Milk’s filmography also includes more traditional music videos (including his debut years back for Chemical Brothers, and clips for such artists as U2, Kanye West, Green Day, and Gnarls Barkley), assorted commercials and short-film fare (Last Day Dream which enjoyed a successful run on the festival circuit).
    Milk’s diverse endeavors are reflected in diverse honors his work has earned over the years including Best of Show honors at the Cannes Lions, D&AD Pencils, Clios and SXSW, as well as multiple Grammy nominations, MTV Moon Men and the U.K.’s MVA Innovation Award. Earlier this year he was honored in The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards competition as well as the earlier mentioned AICP Next Awards.

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