May 28, 2020 – Montreal – National Film Board of Canada (NFB)
Vincent Morisset’s Motto, an interactive website for your phone designed by the AATOAA studio and produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), is available as of today, free of charge at motto.io. Part ghost story, part scavenger hunt, part interactive novella, Motto finds a way to be both documentary and fiction—incorporating participants’ lo-fi, unstaged footage into its own emotional narrative. Users can discover its six chapters at their own pace, inside their homes or out in the world, their phone in hand. Combining traditional literary forms with the short-form video vernacular of the Internet, Motto is available in English and French.
The work is an original creation from AATOAA, Morisset’s acclaimed digital production studio, working with programmer Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit and editor Caroline Robert. It was written by Canadian journalist and award-winning novelist Sean Michaels, author of Us Conductors (winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize) and The Wagers.
- About Vincent Morisset
Vincent Morisset first came to prominence through his collaborations with the band Arcade Fire, particularly for the interactive music videos Neon Bible and Just a Reflektor, which won an Emmy. He also directed Inni, a live-experience feature about Icelandic band Sigur Rós, in addition to interactive projects such as BLA BLA and Way to Go, both of which were produced at the NFB and have won many awards. His recent work Vast Body is also an award-winning project. - About the work
Motto by Vincent Morisset, Sean Michaels, Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit and Caroline Robert (created by AATOAA studio and produced by the NFB)
Press kit (synopsis, biographies, trailer, images and credits): mediaspace.nfb.ca/motto
Motto is a playful, one-of-a-kind adventure that uses interactive storytelling and thousands of tiny videos to tell the thousand-year tale of a kindhearted spirit named September. - About the User Experience
When viewers experience Motto, they enter a world of meaning-making and play. As the ghost story unfolds, they are asked to contribute to the experience—it’s a scavenger hunt of miniature video clips, each one an easy, digestible task. Motto uses an ingenious, hidden logic to weave these videos into its narrative, letting the viewers’ own images become stand-ins for the narrator’s daydreams and mementos. Gradually—and, in a crucial design choice, anonymously—everybody who experiences Motto is joining forces with those who have experienced it before, adding intimate fragments of their lives to a pool of collective memory. It up-ends the traditional role of the spectator, transforming the passive viewer into a protagonist and co-creator. You can contribute to the story even as you explore it—shooting clips with your phone that reappear in surprising and even emotional ways.