Hybrid of mobile phone / PDA messaging chat and black comedy series for television and broadband media

Accidental Lovers, a participatory black comedy about love, introduces a new interactive format and genre for television. Viewer can effect the unfolding drama, its turns and outcomes of the plot, by sending mobile messages to a system that triggers on-screen events based on the keyword recognition. The system responds immediately by audio dialogue of the characters and indirectly through consequential thematic changes on the video images and scenes. Events will be collected from a large database of video and audio clips of improvised scenes that are associated with keywords that will be sensitive to the incoming mobile messages. Flexible content units of video, audio and text combined with algorithmically directed databases, associative and metaphorical script writing and the chance guarantee the sustainability in the story line.

Each time the program is broadcasted, it will unfold in a substantially different manner thus provoking different kinds of messages from the viewers. Additionally, the ongoing text message conversations that are also viewed on the screen, as an essential part of the narrative body may raise a wide range of associated meanings out of the audiovisual material. Hence, the number of possible works created seems infinite. The impression of infinite storyworld is further enhanced by providing variations of characters’ actions in multiple locations and various times, through the seasons.

Accidental Lovers is a part of the EU's New Media for New Millennium (NM2) IST practice-based R&D project running September 2004 - 2007. The broadband IPTV prototype version of the research production will be released April 2006. The Finnish National Broadcasting company YLE will broadcast Accidental Lovers in the end of 2006.

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June 13, 2003, Accidental Lovers won the Banff Centre New Media CyberPitch, presented by Telefilm Canada as the courtesy of the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, at the Banff2003 television festival.

Please find below the presentation materials during the thrilling festival.

Slide Show
3.98 MB PowerPoint show. Expanded since the CyberPitch presentation with Accidental Lovers Explanatory Bullets.

Authors' Design Sheets
763 KB Adobe Acrobat PDF file. This was provided to the CyberPitch jury in addition to the slides and the Producer's Fact Sheets document.

Teaser Animation
7.06 MB QuickTime movie, res. 1024x768. Please review on full screen.

Demo Animation
11.9 MB Quicktime movie, res. 640x480. This is a poor quality web version of the silent video on how Accidental Lovers may look on television screen. It demonstrates the first phase of Juulia's and Roope's life, the self-satisfied Longing before their destined, absurd improvisations in falling in Love and Relationship, dropping Dead and coming back to Life.

Press Release in Finnish 19 June 2003