Where There's Smoke

"All families have secrets, skeletons hidden in closets, words left unsaid.”
-Lance Weiler

In 2018, I teamed up with writer/director Lance Weiler, who I worked with on Frankenstein AI, for a new piece called Where There’s Smoke. Where Frankenstein had been cerebral and broad—a reimagining of a famous story in zeros and ones—Smoke was its near opposite. It is the true story of Lance and his father, an enigmatic volunteer firefighter, and their relationship as his father is dying from cancer. As time is running out on their time together, Lance is trying to reconcile suspicions he has about whether his father burned down their house 40 years ago.

The story is deeply personal, but the real brilliance comes from the form. Presented as an immersive, non-linear documentary, the arc is open ended, and participants are left—much like Lance—to decide for themselves what they believe about his father. Information is presented, then contradicted; stories are fragmented; time runs out before you have all the answers. The experience was created as Lance was mourning the death of his father, and you can feel the complexity of his grief in both the story and its structure.

Along with my engineer Jeff Gregorio, we created custom technology and code to make this show seamless—participants are left to their own devices in the heart of the experience, urged to find the answers themselves and to be alone with their own thoughts. More on the technology is below.

A work in progress debuted at the Future of Storytelling, and premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. After taking a backstage tour of the show, Filmmaker Magazine praised the way we handled the technical aspects of the experience. “Yes, there’s technology — at the piece’s heart is Internet of Things tech — but the tech is sublimated here in service to Weiler’s very personal chronicling of his father’s life and the nature of their relationship. It’s a lovely piece and another must see.”

Sensor-based Experience

To make Where There’s Smoke truly immersive, we used sensors and Internet of Things technology to advance the story through audience participation.

During the central act of the experience, participants discover a replica of Lance’s childhood family room as it appeared after a mysterious fire ravaged the house. It is dark, everything is charred and burned, it still smells like fire (we built the set, then burned and sealed it). Using flashlights they find four objects that belonged to his father. Upon discovery, sensors in the objects trigger the heart of the experience—a light table and slide projector that will guide them into the story.

Participants are asked to place the objects on the table. Each configuration cues a unique fragment from Lance’s past on the slide projector. Using load cells, LED strips, and Micro-controllers, we created a responsive table that knows what objects are placed on the table. Correct and incorrect moves prompt visual and audio feedback, allowing participants to move through the experience with no human intervention. This forces them to explore and problem solve together, as well as lets them unselfish-consciously be drawn into the story-telling.

Generative Storytelling

To create a non-linear story for Where There’s Smoke, we turned to a simple game mechanic that uses audience behavior to create a generative arc.

In the main room of the experience, participants have a simple task—place the objects on the table in an order of their choosing. What they don’t know is that the order they pick will determine what fragments they see. On the slide projector they are shown a grid of nine fragments, but the experience will end after they’ve only seen four, leaving them with as many questions as answers.

Our table was outfitted with custom sensors (see above), which could track the participants moves and then serve them different fragments based on their choices. There were 24 possible “shows" available.