Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500204
DECISION MAKERS Eighty-seven billion permutations. To be more precise: you would need to watch and play We Lost Our Human 87,178,291,200 times in order to experience every single combination of choices and the resulting outcomes of those combinations. With a target audience of age seven and up, this interactive special stars two ordinary indoor house pets, Pud the Cat and Ham the Dog. When every human on earth disappears, including their owner, they must venture out into the world for the first time. As they travel through the universe to find their human, the choices they make have consequences. Or rather, the choices made by viewers on their behalf have consequences. While interactive TV could be used as just another neat trick to keep audiences entertained, Rikke Asbjoern and Chris Garbutt feel differently. The pair created, wrote, directed, and executive produced We Lost Our Human, and Garbutt says: "We wanted to avoid the format feeling gimmicky. We wanted it to feel like it was intrinsic to the actual narrative." Coming off Pinky Malinky, which they also created, in July 2018, they heard that Netflix was looking to do something interactive. They'd been toying with an idea Asbjoern had done on Instagram—a kind of choose your own adventure comic. They pitched their idea and started work in October. They were excited to try something that could only exist in the interactive format, but at the same time they didn't want to backward engineer a show. For them, story came first. "Animals looking for their owner—it's something everyone can connect to and relate to and easily understand," Garbutt says. The pair started with a traditional linear outline and an emphasis on character development. "You fall in love with the characters because of who they are, not necessarily because you've made decisions for them," Garbutt says. To achieve this goal, they had to make sure every choice option was character-driven. This wasn't as hard as it sounds, Asbjoern says, "because everything that you do in a day, you're going to have choices. Both of those choices can be very true to you, but you're only going to end up doing one of them." With this in mind, Asbjoern and Garbutt made sure every option felt true to the characters. The scope of these choices ranged from the butterfly effect of picking up a specific small item to morally questionable choices, "to let you explore that and go as dark as you want to … within the realms of family TV, of course," Garbutt says. When asked how this all adds up to those 87 billion-plus possibilities, Asbjoern says, "A variation can be just one second, and I guess as soon as you start playing with the math and multiplying, it goes out of control." FOR THEIR INTERACTIVE FEATURE, WE LOST OUR HUMAN, FOCUSING ON CHARACTER WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT CHOICE FOR CREATORS RIKKE ASBJOERN AND CHRIS GARBUTT. RIKKE ASBJOERN CO-CREATOR CHRIS GARBUTT CO-CREATOR S T O R Y & V I S I O N As viewers use interactive technology to make decisions for the characters in We Lost Our Human, the story branches in seemingly countless different directions. 16 KEYFRAME