Who says life has no regret medicine？ Interactive movie’s ＂If Yo Had＂ set you free.

Interactive movie, as its name implies, is no longer simply a passive acceptance mode that you show me, but gives the audience the right to choose, helping the protagonists in the film to choose from various unexpected events and fork roads in life, so as to achieve the purpose of controlling the plot and gain an "exclusive" ending.

"If there were a Original" has been launched, and it was also listed in the list of the theme unit of "First Perspective" in the online film exhibition "Beijing International Film Festival on the Cloud" created by the 11th Beijing International Film Festival and iQiyi. As an interactive drama, this work contains 76 content segments, 55 interactive nodes and 23 life endings, which is much richer than another interactive drama "Your Smile" launched in iQiyi in 2019. That work has 21 selection nodes and 17 endings. Therefore, "If there is a Original" can be regarded as a real interactive movie.

However, if we talk about the origin and development of interactive movie, we have to mention a work, Night Shift, which was shown at the Beijing Film Festival in 2020. In many cases, this work, which was released globally in 2016, is regarded as the world’s first interactive movie. In the process of watching the movie on the battlefield, the audience needs to choose from more than 180 critical moments that determine the fate of the characters according to the development of the plot, which leads to different stories and finally ushered in seven different endings. In the whole process, the audience won’t encounter any pauses or loops, which is equivalent to personally performing a movie. It is said that if the movie is completely unlocked, it will take four hours.

Let’s go back to today’s "If Only", with Bai Yiqi as the chief producer and starring William, Wang Meiren and Zhao Ziqi, which tells the story of Huang Yaozu, a teenager born in the 1980s, growing up all the way. For the audience, this film is much different from the traditional film and television works in the past. It has the "interactive" and "immersion" of all the films of the same type, and the process of watching movies is really immersive, so as to participate in a unique life experience that is exclusively customized.

The relevant content can also be seen from the concept poster of "If there were a Original": the composition is simple and bright, and a bright moon in the night sky shines on the colorful theater door. On the blackboard in the lower left corner, several films are previewed, including Love in Time and Space, God of Gambling, Sweet Honey and so on, which are all well-known classics in the 1980s, and also make the whole poster full of nostalgia. However, if we carefully observe this poster, we will find that the gate of the theater is composed of doorframes of different colors, and the patterns of doorframes of each color are decorated with life scenes of different ages and regional styles. The silhouette of the young man standing against the wall next to the motorcycle at the door with greetings may be the hero of this film, or perhaps we ourselves as the audience. What will happen when we walk into this gate? It is indeed full of suspense.

Although the whole composition tends to the traditional style, there are four buttons on the right side of the poster that are full of sense of science and technology, which are quietly "spoilers". The four buttons are "like love line", "business sea ups and downs line", "horse-catching fantasy line" and "Hong Kong-style love line" in turn. These four story lines are really hidden in the whole film "If Only", and different choices are made.

When I opened "If There Were Original", the first thing that caught my eye was the southern town in the 1980s, and Huang Yaozu was playing in the street as a child. Perhaps everyone’s childhood is so carefree, but Huang Yaozu’s life is not always calm, and in a twinkling, he will face various challenges from life. His fate, with the choice at different intersections of life, has undergone earth-shaking changes, whether it is love, friendship, career or health.

At this time, the substitution interaction of the film began to "take effect". After all, the latest novelty of "If there was a Original" is that the future of the protagonist in the film is tightly grasped by the audience. You can choose the next step, what to say and what to do through the remote control in your hand, and then wait for a brand-new unknown result to feel the most real "impermanence of fate". Such a work is the result of the joint efforts of the playwright and the platform:

For the creative team, from script to shooting to editing, it needs a lot of material reserves. After all, every step of selection may bring the audience into a brand-new story line. There are also many versions waiting to meet the audience. At the plot level, this will be a huge tree structure.

For broadcasting, this is another rare interactive content test. After all, there are still many functions to be developed and utilized in the technical level of the webcast platform, so that the audience can deeply cooperate with the broadcast content through the remote control in their hands, bringing a brand-new sense of "my destiny is my master", which is bound to raise the viewing experience to a brand-new level.

As a interactive movie, "If there were a Original" firmly grasped the two concepts of "If" and "Original", and brought countless ifs, which also made it easy for the audience to go back to the original and start over. Such an opportunity does not exist in real life. However, "If I Had the Original" is so bold, it gives the audience the opportunity of "trial and error" again and again. To put it more vividly, there are a lot of regret medicines here. If you have experienced a failed life or want to start all over again in the middle, it doesn’t matter. Just click the mouse and move the remote control, and a brand-new life will be opened in front of you. Such an enjoyable experience of "my life is up to me" is not immediately played!