What Is Interactive Direction? Find Out In A New Episode Of ‘This Is My Job’

“It’s never the technology and it’s never even a story,” says Vincent Morisset of his work as an interactive director. “It starts as a feeling that I want people to have. Sometimes it’s a mindset or a state, or recreating an experience that people have in everyday life. That’s the starting point. Then we try to figure out with the available technologies and tools, how we can make this happen.”

Sitting at the intersection of filmmaking, animation, and technology, interactive direction is a fluid and evolving area of digital art. For the second episode of This is My Job, we asked Morisset, a leading practitioner in the field, to explain what interactive direction means to him.

Founder of Montreal’s Studio AATOAA, Morisset’s animation projects like Way to Go mix hand-drawn animation, 360-degree video capture, music, and coding in engaging ways. Other interactive works by Morisset incorporate live-action and real-time performance into the finished product, and have often included collaborations with musicians such as Arcade Fire, Sigur Rós, and Skillrex.

This episode of This is My Job is sponsored by Adobe, whose software Character Animator allows users to apply their own expressions and movements to animate characters in real-time. Starting using Adobe Character Animator today.

The first season of This is My Job was filmed last fall at the VIEW Conference in Turin, Italy.

(Image at top: Morisset’s “Bla Bla” installation. Photo by Maxime Dufour.)