Adam Bonke’s Interactive Party People

You might well have thought you looked suave downing that ninth shot of vodka at the bar last weekend, but chances are it was all in your head. Adam Bonke’s new interactive film for Danish night bus firm, Movia, challenges the party people of Copenhagen and asks whether it’s time to go home. Here, he tells us about shifting between dream and reality on set.

“The brief was something that caught my attention straight away, and was really quite simple: produce a film with an ‘edge’ that will make people forward it on straight away,” explains the director.

The resulting film invites the viewer into the heart of Copenhagen’s club scene where beautiful people are elegantly drinking cocktails and dancing like superstars to great music. But all is not as it seems for long and when users move their mouse cursors over the film, a horrible glimpse of reality is exposed with the glamour turning to gloom as we witness the unpleasant truth in having had one too many.

According to Bonke, it’s been a success. “It’s so hard, if not impossible, to predict these viral projects,” considers the director, “but when you see the thing being tweeted every other second, I guess you can lean back and enjoy.”

But he was quick to dismiss any assumption that there was an actual party created on set: “No, that was never really an option. There was so much dressing and lighting to do between scenes, and shooting everything with a locked-off camera has some limitations in that direction.”

All the footage was shot over an 18-hour day with around 40 extras. Initially, the director had hoped for more but the budget constraints wouldn’t allow, and actually, it worked out for the best:

“In the end, I realised that this whole thing with the circle wouldn't actually work with too big a picture. It would become confusing and we would lose our main characters.”

He says that the budget wouldn’t have even allowed for the film to be made if it wasn’t for his producers at Nobody pushing the project through. But now it’s out there in the Twittersphere and beyond and he’s relishing the reactions.

“Many seem to think it's an anti-alcohol campaign. When the Movia logo then pops up in the end, the film suddenly becomes less educating,” says Bonke. “The overall notion amongst young people, that the bus is something for old retired people who can't walk, will most definitely be affected by a thing like this.”

He says the project involved buckets of improvisation – more than he’s ever had to use, and proves it by telling us that there’s an exposed nipple in one of the scenes to look out for. Happy viewing!