投其所好：互动电影根据观众反应定结局

The Angry River is a short interactive film that uses eye-tracking technology and artificial intelligence to gauge who the viewer looks at and where their eyes linger most on screen. The film then edits itself into one of five possible storylines, to suit the viewer’s interest.

互动短片《愤怒的河流》用眼球追踪和人工智能技术观察观众眼睛看的是哪个人物，他们的目光在屏幕的哪块区域停留得最久。然后电影就会从五条故事线中选一条播放，以迎合观众的喜好。

The Angry River is basically a film with the interactivity of a multiple-ending video game, only instead of using a controller or a keyboard to make choices that impact the storyline, you do it with your eyes instead. Armen Perian, the filmmaker behind this groundbreaking project says that he was inspired by something one of the members of his editing team said three years ago. It sounded crazy at the time, but a seed was planted in Perian’s head, and with the advancement in artificial intelligence, that crazy idea became reality.

《愤怒的河流》实际上是一部像多结局电子游戏一样拥有互动功能的电影，不过，观众不是用控制器或键盘来选择故事线，而是用眼睛。这个突破性项目的电影制作人阿尔缅·佩里安说，他的灵感来自他剪辑团队的一个成员三年前说过的话。那时候听起来很疯狂，但是自那以后佩里安脑子里就种下了一颗种子，随着人工智能技术的进步，这个疯狂的想法变成了现实。

“We were sitting in a very long, very difficult edit and someone said, ‘Man, I wish we could just edit this thing with our minds.’ It was totally off-the-cuff but the idea stuck with me,” Armen Perian recalled about how he came up with the idea for The Angry River.

阿尔缅·佩里安回忆自己是如何想出《愤怒的河流》的创意时说：“当时我们正埋头于一个冗长艰巨的剪辑项目中，这时有人说，‘哎，我真希望可以用脑子来剪辑这个东西。’那只是一句随口说的话，但我却突然想到了这个创意。”

To make this interactive film possible, the filmmaker teamed up with Crossbeat New York, a tech company that developed the eye-tracking technology and the machine learning that controls the storyline. The movie itself was shot in Oregon and then edited into five distinct narrative perspectives, which can be assembled into a custom viewing experience that plays like a regular movie, but is actually tailored to suit the viewer’s interest.

为了做出互动电影，佩里安和科技公司Crossbeat New York合作，后者研发出了眼球追踪技术和控制故事线的计算机算法。这部电影在美国俄勒冈州拍摄完后，被剪辑为五个叙事视角的故事线，这些故事线整合在一起，可以像普通电影一样播放，但能够投用户所好，提供定制观影体验。

 
图片来源：Pomegranate Films, LLC

The Angry River plays like a normal movie, but in the background, eye-tracking technology collects data on what the viewer is most interested in and feeds it to an algorithm which then decides how the movie changes based on what is being viewed. So instead of directors and editors deciding the outcome of the story, viewers get to do it themselves.

《愤怒的河流》像普通电影一样播放时，背景的眼球追踪技术将收集观看者最感兴趣的数据，并将数据填入计算公式中，从而决定电影如何在当前情节的基础上发展。也就是说，决定故事结局的不是导演和剪辑师，而是观众自己。

“I loved the idea of bringing game theory to film, but I wanted to preserve a cinematic experience, even though you’re watching it on your computer,” Perian said. “You watch it like any other film. But watching something is still making decisions, and what the viewer decides to pay attention to ultimately drives the action. It changes the movie they see.”

“我喜欢将游戏理论引入电影中，但我想保留观影体验，即使是在电脑上看电影。”佩里安说，“你可以像看其他电影一样看这部片子。不过，就算是观看，观众也在做决定，他们所决定关注的东西最终将驱动情节发展，并会改变自己所看到的电影结局。”

The Angry River follows a family of human traffickers in Portland, Oregon, and will premiere online on May 18. The ingenious technology that powers it has already piqued the interest of both major film studios and tech companies, so we are likely to see interactive motion pictures in the near future.

《愤怒的河流》讲述的是俄勒冈州波特兰一个人贩家庭的故事，将于5月18日在网上首映。支持这一电影的独创技术已经吸引了大型电影工作室和科技公司的兴趣，所以在不久的将来，我们很可能会看到更多互动电影。