The team and I executive produced digital experiences and derivative programming for ABC’s FlashForward.
In the TV pilot, the entire world’s population falls unconscious for two minutes and 17 seconds, at which point they each have a vision of what they’ll be doing on April 29, 2010 — and thus everyone on Earth has a unique experience that, when shared with others, might help decode the mystery behind the Global Black Out. Thus a plucky young FBI agent suggests that they build a web site to compile said “flashes.”
Here’s how we kept viewers engaged online:
A three-part documentary series interviewing show staff as well as experts in the field of fate. Is that a hint at the mysterious reason behind the blackout? There are no answers yet, as you might imagine.
This technically launched earlier in the summer, long before the pilot episode aired, and is essentially the follow-through on Agent Hawk’s initial suggestion: a sleek Flash interface hosts videos and texts describing people’s visions. However, the visions in question weren’t written by the show producers — it’s all UGC. The videos were mostly filmed at Comic-Con 2009, where ABC had a booth set up to collect visions from passersby, and you can submit your own text comments to the site.
This means there are some contributions that work better than others — even that of showrunner Marc Guggenheim is a little too literal. But while The Mosaic Collective doesn’t currently function as a storytelling device, it’s still really fun to play with; changing the view on the visions, for example, allows you to make connections between other people’s visions using keywords and see the flow of updates. And folks really seem to be engaging with it, having fun imagining their own potential futures — which is a huge added bonus.
Both of these experiences won Webby Awards for the team.
