We are delighted to announce the Immersive Encounters first release of Ru Howe’s interactive short Life Moves Pretty Fast
Click on image to watch the film
written and directed by Ru Howe Produced by Kate Dimbleby
Starring Ru Howe, Will Adamsdale, Louise Leigh and Keith Warmington
Wolfie’s walking to work, like he always does. But today is his birthday. Surely something should be different?
This experimental interactive short by filmmaker and Stornaway.io’s designer Ru Howe Life Moves Pretty Fast was made hand in hand with the creation of Stornaway.io itself. Originally mapped out on Howe’s kitchen wall with pieces of paper, he and producer Kate Dimbleby used the creative production process to design and prototype an authoring tool which would put the creative process at the heart of stornaway.io‘s revolutionary drag and drop vision.
Part funny vlog, part game, the viewer gets to follow Wolfie all over Bristol, on multiple paths through the city – encountering and re-encountering memorable characters across two timelines.
Behind Howe’s signature jump cut editing and Wolfie’s wide eyed vlogging are layered some wonderfully meditative moments and conversations.
The film was shot in 2 days with a cast and crew of professional friends on a minimal budget.
About Ru Howe
Ru’s film work as director and editor has taken him from shooting and cutting on 16mm to being the first mobile videoblogger in the mid 2000s, long before iPhones and apps. He has spent the last ten years in large media companies translating between top producers and technologists, who rarely speak the same language.
Alongside his day job working for broadcasters, Howe was one of the world’s first vloggers, whose online persona ‘Wolfie’ made Tik-Tok type videos (as far back 2003, even before YouTube) lip-synching to songs and movie scenes from his desk. His 2005-10 projects Fatgirlinohio and Twittervlog pioneered what we now recognise as the classic YouTube daily family vlog, playing with increasingly lo-fi mobile and pocket devices and the intimate connection with his audience – becoming the world’s first mobile vlogger to Twitter in 2007, and always working to enable other film and video makers to embrace affordable technology and workflows. Along the way, he created the first ever interactive film on YouTube (Indecision, 2008).
Since his involvement with the influential video-blogging collective (2004-) he has always been driven to innovate with lo-fi digital tools and explore narrative possibilities in intimate and experimental projects. He has also been a champion of enabling other producers and artists to develop their digital skills and workflows.
In 2018, amazed that the process of producing interactive was still so painful for creatives, he left his consultancy (working for large media companies, including the BBC, Discovery, McCann Erickson on digital transformation projects) to design and create a better writing and production tool for people like himself.
Stornaway.io is the result – and he has happily reunited with his old persona “Wolfie” for Life Moves Pretty Fast – crafted in Stornaway.io’s unique drag and drop storymap and player, to design and test its easy and delightful user experience. This is the first phase of a larger vision to enable creatives to unlock non-linear content for the 2020s.
Stornaway.io have also released “A Little Hungover” at Immersive Encounters which was written and directed by Tyrell Williams (writer of the Youtube hit #HoodDocumentary) and produced by Stornaway.io using a business grant from WECA Creative Scale up in lockdown.
Find out why people are using Stornaway to create interactive stories and games – from FMV games, quizzes, interactive audiobooks, interactive podcasts, interactive films to interactive documentaries. Make your own interactive video for Entertainment.