Steven Soderbergh’s free interactive television series “Mosaic” turns viewers into filmmakers

Film director Steven Soderbergh says he faced a lot of challenges in making it mosaic, including what we call. In January, HBO will air mosaic As a series of six episodes over five nights. But starting today, you can Download a standalone app for iOS and tvOS, and takes about 7.5 hours in interactive form, shifting your point of view between the main characters of the story in a branching narrative. mosaic Most of them are similar to the kind of show you might binge-watch on Netflix — all of its episodes will be available at once — yet they allow for a level of interactivity only possible within a dedicated app.

“It’s not a TV show, it’s not a movie,” Soderbergh and two other reporters told me Tuesday afternoon in San Francisco. “It’s something else.”

The creators have kept details about mosaicA mystery plot, it is believed to have been widely described as a murder mystery. The series stars Sharon Stone as Olivia Lake, an author and illustrator; Garrett Hedlund as Joel, a handyman and artist; and Frederick Wheeler as Eric, whom HBO describes as a “suitor whose motives may not be real.”

The initial scenes introduce the characters. Then it’s up to you to decide if you want to watch what follows from Joel’s perspective or Eric’s. Along the way, Moments of Choice will ask you to choose a perspective from which to view the next scenes. The app also includes what Soderbergh calls “discoveries” — supplemental material to the main story, including police reports, voicemails and emails between characters, and news clips. You’re also free to go back and watch the story from a perspective you missed the first time around.

For Soderbergh, who won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2000 for passageoutput mosaic It was an opportunity to play with the conventions of storytelling in a way he had always admired. He is not interested in creating a file Choose your own adventureA story along the lines of the roads Netfix explores. But the interactive possibilities of one of the appealers attracted him.

“I didn’t feel like I was giving up control at all — it’s a static universe,” he says. “I get to decide when and how these moments of choice happen. I get to choose what the discoveries are, and how they emerge.” Viewers will be able to change their point of view between characters at will, “and yet I’m still in control,” says Soderbergh.

Works on mosaic It started three years ago. The technology that supports the app was created by a company named bodoub. Soderbergh developed it for HBO alongside the former CEO of Universal Pictures Casey Silver and writer Ed Solomon.

Solomon, whose writing credits include the original men in blackAs the creators say they hope mosaicTechnology fades into the background. “The first thing we said is, let’s not sacrifice the character or the story,” he says. “Let’s not love technology. Let’s try to tell a story about characters we really care about, with scenes that work no matter how they’re shown.”

The trick was to offer just enough interactivity to enhance the narrative without making it feel like a video game, Soderbergh says. But he was surprised by the complexity of creating a branching narrative. The creators initially planned to include up to 45 decision points, but whittled them down to a relative handful to improve the flow of the story.

“Otherwise lime“This was the most labor-intensive mod I’ve been a part of,” says Soderbergh. “We did a lot of experimentation, refactoring and refactoring during the mod. When we started, we had over 40 years of experience [decision-making] The decade, and that turned out to be too much — the courses weren’t long enough to really engage people and lock them into the characters and the narrative. We ended up simplifying it a lot.”

But Soderbergh came out of the experience as a fan of the branching narrative format, because it invited viewers to share the film editor’s experience. He says that seeing the same event from multiple perspectives can enrich the viewers experience of the narrative.

“In editing—which is my favorite part of the process, always—I’m struck by how easy it is to change or reverse the meaning of a piece majorly by changing the chronology, aligning some scenes with others,” Soderbergh says. “It’s powerful to me how just moving a shot, and holding it four seconds longer, can completely change the meaning of a scene. This seems to be a macro version of that, as nodes are now equivalent to those shots.”

Eventually — and no doubt with some encouragement from HBO — Soderbergh decided to make his own linear adaptation of the narrative. It includes some scenes that are not available in the app. But he wouldn’t call it the final command. “I don’t think either is better—they’re just different,” he says. “The app version is immersive in a different way than the linear version. Because I think there’s really no substitute for watching a full hour, as opposed to a 23-minute clip where you get to have these little discoveries. It’s just a different experience.”

But at a time when unreliable narrators and questions about credibility dominate national news, Soderbergh says he hopes the interactive experience will give viewers a chance to reflect on the holes in their own perspective. It’s called the viewing experience mosaic “A strange kind of empathy trigger.”

“I’m curious to see, when people reach their end, whether their sense of themselves and the world is tilted at all,” he says. “Because that was definitely something I felt, and I’m coming out of the other extreme of it. It really makes you think about what’s going on off screen in your life, with people that you know.”

Soderbergh deadpans then laughs. “We’re trying to unite humanity,” he says.

You can Download Mosaic here for iOS and tvOS. HBO says an Android version is expected to become available in the next few weeks.