Angela Natividad's Live & Uncensored!

28 October 2010

Andy Grammer's 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Music Video

In the last few years, advertising has turned a few tricks on the "choose your own adventure" concept. There was Twix's little hook-up story of 2008. Notably, Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO's "Choose a Different Ending" effort about knife crime for the Metropolitan Police won a Grand Prix for Good at the most recent Cannes Lions.

But this is probably among the more interesting takes on the genre in terms of production quality. In partnership with Vevo, which claims to be precipitating the evolution of music, musician Andy Grammer released the following video for single "Keep Your Head Up."



If you have trouble watching it, that's because Vevo is currently only available for streaming in the United States and Canada. But what it offers is a series of simple choices that enable the user to decide what happens next within a fixed amount of time - two separate ideas that have to be taught to the user in a matter of seconds, well-executed in this case. This enables the outcome to flow in time with the music.

The transitions from one moment to the next, whatever your choice, are seamless. (To maintain this harmony, the options are limited - what colour shirt, dancing waiter or not, etc. - and repercussions play out in seconds, with little deviation from very basic shenanigans.) While the music may not be your thing, the work is intuitive and clean clean and will hopefully stimulate other ideas in this vein.

This is Grammer's debut music video, leaving anticipatory curiosity about how he'll top this next time. But in terms of how tough this two-day feat was (as a first, no less), Grammer says the keys were timing, solid planning and patience.

“Because the choices are so different, I had to keep doing each scene over in different ways," he said. "It was, ‘Put on this shirt. Now put on this shirt. Now we need the big guy to jump out of the cake. And now the stripper.’ It was a mad dash.”

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