#HoodDocumentary writer/Director Tyrell Williams releases timely interactive short comedy “A Little Hungover” at Encounters Film Festival with ground-breaking interactive filmmaking platform Stornaway.io
Tyrell Williams
We are incredibly proud to announce the release of Tyrell Williams’ A Little Hungover, the first independent short film to be created and delivered using our creation platform, at our favourite short film festival, Encounters today.
Directed and shot by Williams under lockdown with cast and crew in 4 remote locations, A Little Hungover is a hilariously awkward and timely interactive comedy in which naive employee Sam (Patrick Elue) takes a video work call with his boss Alex (Elizabeth Hammond) after a big night out.
By choosing how he responds, the audience get to navigate the thin line between being honest and being employed – and then to watch and replay as his boss’s mind games become increasingly toxic and unpredictable.
Should Sam fess up or keep telling lies to his boss? In 2020, the rules for young employees are more uncertain than ever.
Patrick Elue (Sam) and Elizabeth Hammond (Alex) in A Little Hungover
Watch A Little Hungover at alittlehungover.com or at Encounters Immersive
Tyrell, famous for his viral Youtube and BBC3 mockumentary series #HoodDocumentary, had a vision of a crossover between film and game. We met during lockdown and the film was funded by a small business grant from West of England Creative Scale Up.
It was fantastic to collaborate on a project with an up and coming writer and see him dive into the possibilities that Stornaway.io offers even for a low budget short filmed under pandemic conditions.
“I learned about Stornaway.io at a moment when the future of storytelling was so uncertain. They’re pioneering a practical and affordable way to create exciting interactive narrative films, and importantly, they are continuing and evolving the relationship between artists and audiences” says Tyrell.
We worked remotely writing and editing the interactive story collaboratively. Our storymap interface was the key to being able to do this and communicate well through the process. You can see an overview and some details of our final storymap for A Little Hungover here, which gives you an idea of its binary looping groundhog-day style structure.
How Stornaway.io made it possible
Normally, an interactive production like this would be a hefty software development project requiring developers, large team and budget and some chunky hardware – and you wouldn’t get to test how it plays, until the very end, when it’s too late to change anything.
The really new thing about Stornaway.io is that you can do it all in a web browser without coding, and instantly edit and playtest your story from the idea stage right the way through to delivery.
Having never worked on an interactive story before, Tyrell says :
“The software was easy to navigate and useful for me as a writer to have at hand. It made it easy to understand how the film would unfold in its interactive form. There’s something very immersive about doing this as a writer – an interesting relationship forms between creatives and audience that shares qualities with immersive theatre.”
To mark this release, today we are releasing discounted licenses, new interactive features and a free 30 day trial. We are also working with film schools to get this ground-breaking technology into the hands of the next generation while the high end market works through it’s long-lead times and post-Covid slowdown.
A Little Hungover will be released on September 18th at the Encounters Immersive festival, and will remain available there for a limited release this autumn.
Our second independent interactive short, Ru Howe’s Life Moves Pretty Fast, will be released at the beginning of October, also at Encounters Immersive. For more information contact kate@stornaway.io
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.