You may be familiar with the ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’ children's books popularised in the 1990’s. Or more recently, Netflix’s new Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch that lets you decide what happens in the episode by presenting choices as you watch.
But what if you wanted to create your own multi-choice videos? How would you write an interactive script, or record all the branches and link them together to make a cohesive story which you can share?...
Brancher lets you decide the path and outcome of videos by adding multi-choice buttons inside the videos. At certain moments, the videos will freeze and you’ll need to decide what happens next. Each button creates what is known as a branch that splits off into an alternative path in the story. The amount of paths are unlimited and only bound by the creator’s imagination. Until now, creating multi-choice videos has been extremely difficult because there is no easy-to-use tools, video players or platform that supports them. Brancher sets out to change all that with an easy-to-use iPhone app and a web platform.
Story
The founder, Julian Stewart, is a 34-year-old filmmaker and game designer from New Zealand. Through his unique perspective of working professionally in both disciplines he was fixated on combining his two passions to create what is now Brancher.
In his teenage years he experimented with interactive videos using Apple’s Quicktime software and in his early 20’s pushed the limitations of DVD interactivity.
“When DVDs first came out, they promised a new wave of multi-choice stories, but that element never caught on...”
10 years later, there was still no good way to create branched videos so Julian decided to take matters into his own hands and create a product to scratch his own itch.
However, for years he struggled with how to make branched videos simple.
“The biggest problem with branched videos is their inherent complexity involving dizzying flowcharts and complicated desktop software”
He believes this is the main reason multichoice videos have not taken off yet.
But over the years, Julian used this problem to fuel his relentless effort to build an app which lets anyone create and share branched videos easily enough that it could become a mainstream thing. This is why Brancher was designed to facilitate creating and consuming short-form portrait videos that anyone can create, watch and enjoy. Drawing inspiration from popular apps such as Tik Tok, Instagram.
and Youtube - Brancher is a culmination of what the current generation loves while adding an entirely new element which is the branched story-telling.
“I’m just so excited to see what crazy ideas people come up with when they discover the potential of branched videos”.