Main interactive program website: theavadventure.com
Main videography project website: avadventurefilms.com
Double Freakquency was a featured presentation in the 2013 Capital Fringe Festival in Washington DC. Four cast members simultaneously lip-synched to two different audio feeds being broadcast to wireless radio headsets. All audience members were free to flip between the channels as the story unfolded… do you listen to the conversation or the inner monologues? The plan from the past or the argument from the future? The left apartment or the right? Every audience member took control of their own viewing experience, switching between the stories, characters, and custom 3D sound design as desired, resulting in no two attendees experiencing the same show.
The Heist AVAdventure was a four-track MP3 AVAdventure that prompted participants to pick their specialty on the night of the big event: players were briefed via an online video by the heist mastermind, then decided which crew to side up with – the tech team, stealth team, rookie crew, or diversion squad – before sneaking past security guards, avoiding lasers, and battling an unexpected villain in an epic action AVAdventure.This live event was the culminating production in a one-week celebration of the arts. In establishing the world and locations for the event, the AVAdventure team opened an ArtVenture gallery, constructing walls within a community space, and curating a gallery of paintings, drawings, metalwork, sculpture, photography, computer art, digital installations, and glasswork. Works from professional artists were displayed alongside art from college students, grade school students, hobbyists, and inmates from a local prison art program; a wide spectrum of the local arts scene was brought under one roof, uniting art demographics in a shared space.
The gallery also featured a series of events, including an opening night reception, and a wide away of spoken word, film, and musical performances throughout the week – romance novels, Celtic dance, stand-up comedy, children’s literature, experimental rock, slam poetry, and much more came to life in the ArtVenture space.
During this very “real” gallery and performance run, fictional characters and story elements from the pending Heist AVAdventure interrupted the proceedings. The fictitious gallery curator welcomed gallery patrons alongside the city’s real mayor and arts speakers, and the inmate heist mastermind (photographed at the real local prison) caused confusion during public events. Online video diaries and ominous PSA announcements leading up to the Heist event also added to the story world, building anticipation for the final event.
Blending elements of live event production with staged performance, the Heist AVAdventure and ArtVenture gallery and programming blurred the lines between reality and fiction in a one-of-kind artistic event.
Taking place in three locations simultaneously – the National Mall in Washington DC, the Governor’s Palace Green in Colonial Williamsburg, and online via an interactive webcast – the Declaration of Codependence was an live theater/interactive movie AVAdventure with three audiences in different locations interacting in real-time with the story and each other.
Audiences in the two field locations followed a cast of characters through a series of challenges, traveling through time to save the day before sunset – timed to the exact minute of the real-world forecast. Some characters were present in person, some were delivered via an movie players carried on their mobile device, and all three narratives were tailored so their respective audiences were at the center of the drama.
All three audiences communicated during the event with text message prompts – users in one location could send messages related to the story to a central system, which would then redirect their message and send it to one user in a different audience. Those watching via the webcast were able to see these text messages received in the field via streaming video, communicate with each other and one of the characters via web chat, and discover special content over Facebook, Twtiter, and additional websites. Some audience members were even able to use these additional components to discover the time travel paradox climax the webcast audiences were inevitably headed toward, and see how this impacted the personal story of the character overseeing the web interface.
This event was a featured case study during an AVAdventure Productions presentation at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in 2011.