Arcade Fire and Google say you can go home again
In a strange, and yet undeniably innovative, marketing maneuver, the
people over at Google have teamed up with indie giants Arcade Fire in an
attempt to get the young folks interested in Chrome. And it just might
be working.
Up until now, Chrome has gone largely under-utilized
and mostly ignored by Google's many users, myself included. This is
probably because there doesn't seem to be much of a point to it. Like
the iPad, it seems to be just another, hyped up, trendy version of an
older model that's not yet broken, and therefore really doesn't need any
fixing. But Google's collaboration with Arcade Fire and director Chris
Milk just might have changed the way we're all looking at Chrome (if not
the way we're looking at Arcade Fire...getting into a commercial bed
with Google, guys, really?)
If you haven't seen this yet, you're in for a mid-day treat. The Wilderness Downtown is an interactive experience, created in Chrome, set to "We Used to Wait" off the recently dropped The Suburbs.
To begin, you're asked to enter the address of your childhood home
(which is then entered into Google Earth) and the journey begins. The
experience combines live-feed images of your old 'hood with black and
white animation of a running figure and a flock of dark-winged
birds...all set to Arcade Fire's ode to hometown blues. At certain
points, the viewer is asked to interact, by drawing stencil-like images
on an interactive drawing tool, which are then incorporated into the
movie. If this all sounds a bit confusing...it is. You should just go
ahead and try it out yourself.
There
are a few technical bugs in the whole experience, which was built using HTML5. For one, the film
won't run well in any browser by Chrome (which makes sense, and yet sort
of defeats the purpose if the point of this exercise is to draw new
Chrome users.) For another, if your childhood abode isn't available in Google Street View, the whole experience will sort of be lost on you. (Sorry, swamp-dwellers.) Also, be forewarned that the Wilderness Downtown is
experienced through a series of pop-up windows that flash across your
screen frenetically. At first try, I thought I had inadvertently given
my computer an Arcade Fire-induced virus and started frantically trying
to close the whole shebang. Don't worry, it's part of the film and you
have not introduced an insidious indie music virus into your company's
hardware.
It yet remains to be seen if this clever ploy will
actually convert any new users to Chrome (my own jury's still out) but a journey through the Wilderness Downtown makes for a trippy stroll down
Google's version of your personal memory lane.