ZOS - Last Tango in Jadac
ZOS – Last Tango in Jadac is a new interactive website for the television show ZOS or Zone of Separation which airs Monday nights at 10 PM EST on The Movie Network (TMN), Movie Central.
The eight-part TV series chronicles the difficulties facing international peacekeepers, Canadians among them, in a Balkins city called Jadac as they try to maintain the United Nations-brokered ceasefire.
The interactive component found on the ZOS website is called the Last Tango in Jadac, and this web experience is an incredible paradox.
On one hand Last Tango in Jadac is a remarkable technological accomplishment brought forth by story artists like Peter Miskimmin of Whizbang Films and the award winning design team at LifeCapture Interactive led by Daniel Riley and Brendan Sera-Shriar. Creative Canadians, these guys worked really hard to raise the bar and build a powerful, fully functional interactive experience. It’s beautiful.
And horrible. On a whole nother level this ‘game’ is a sickening nightmare with a haunting soundtrack and stories that will keep people awake at night. The journey reminds me of a C64 software title called Bards Tale, but even though ethnic cleansing was actually occurring in the Balkins back then, no self respecting Commodore game developer would have ever dared depict anything this racy. The Last Tango in Jadac features a dozen characters rooted in the pervasive stench of war. These people are sick bastards and they appear extra revolting to us because they are all too real. The atrocities committed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Montenegro are public knowledge, but this exploration imparts the unhappy experience of meeting the survivors; Jadac is populated with prostitutes and pimps and drug pushers and pornographers and even parents who know their daughter is being held captive somewhere in town. When that woman offers you a picture of her daughter, don’t take it. In Jadac it’s okay to accept free drugs, condoms, cigarettes and video tapes, but that picture will only get you into trouble.
Technology Summary:
Web developers experimenting with open source Flash, and other interactive technologies will certainly be interested to learn some of the specifics regarding the resources created and used to accomplish this online event. Everyone should experience this inactive and social environment to see exactly how real it all feels. With amazing art direction, depth of interactivity, and social qualities.
Most of the interactive components were built using a combination of Papervision3D, Collada files exported from Maya, and AS3, all video elements where edited in After Effects, and streamed as FLV’s using BulkLoader.
The chat tool is quite an accomplishment. It was built using Red5, Eclipse, some Flex and Java . The functionality is unique, and definitely adds to the overall user experience for it allows players to communicate with each other as they explore the PV3 world of Jadac. As there are no player avatars, the chat tool becomes an essential part of the experience and game play. It helps users follow the storyline, discover hidden goodies and complete all three missions across interesting terrain, alleys and flat roof with stunning landscape views.
The chat tool is a multi-layered application that can be minimized or maximized. It can be made to sort users, find friends, and choose from to different display options. It also allows users to log in anonymously, randomly puts users in different rooms, displays current population, handles special characters and html tags, stores and tracks user sessions, disconnects during idle time, and more.
Last Tango Game Play:
The object of this game is to survive, and escape Jadac alive. At the beginning of the event, Participants seem to have unlimited choice as to where they can adventure. Clues are everywhere; some of the characters are featured in the local newspapers that can be read. You can also participate in, or simply listen to, conversations between other characters. Your decisions affect the way things unfold. Although I have yet to master the contest, I’m told the path to success lies on the darkest road.
The designers developers, animators, writers, producers, and actors all did an awesome job putting this together. Most importantly, the technologists behind this project accomplished a phenomenal feat of combining so many different open source technologies. So this is the future of online interactive events, as ugly and horrible as could ever be imagined by Canadians.
Tags: Flash, Interactive, Last Tango in Jadac, LifeCapture Inc, Whizbang Films, ZOS
Smojoe is a online storyteller, web skirmisher and conversation provocateur that teaches folks how to use articles, blogs and discussion forums to engage humans and satisfy search engine robots. You can read more about Story Funnels to Buckstops in every post and esp in the sidebar links where it gets real obvious how I use photos, blogs and bookmarks to make keyword sandwiches for robots.
July 27th, 2011 at 10:57 pm
[...] ZOS Last Tango in Jadac This was one of the first posts I ever wrote on Smojoe, in June 2008 and it was for a LifeCapture Interactive project wherein they were executing a Bell Globe Media fund for a TV Series called Z.O.S. or Zones Of Safety. Not many people saw the TV show and even fewer people visited the website, but my Smojoe blog post about it has been very successful and I’m still getting visits and people ‘borrowing’ the images, which were mostly screen grabs from the game or interactive experience. It was groundbreaking at the time and there were indeed some chapters of this game that i will never forget. Peter Miskimmin was the producer - he was a friend from film business. [...]