Sample Track by TZU: Open Craw

Interactive Video: Educating and Empowering Audiences

Martin Percy, a BAFTA, Emmy, and 11-time Webby Award-winning creator, has spent his career championing the power of interactive video to educate, empower, and emotionally engage audiences. While many filmmakers struggle to blend narrative with user choices, Percy approaches his work not as traditional storytelling, but as a model of real life. As he notes, stories are historically linear, but real life is inherently interactive.

By harnessing the natural stop-and-interact behavior seen daily on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, Percy crafts films that demand participation. His interactive CPR training films are a prime example, backed by three peer-reviewed medical research papers proving their effectiveness. Percy achieves this by modeling high-stakes emergencies and forcing viewers to choose between the right action and a wrong action that feels counterintuitively correct. For Percy, CPR is just one of the “Deadly Dozen”—twelve critical emergencies where laypeople can save lives with accessible, interactive training.

Designing Emotionally Satisfying Interactions

Percy’s philosophy of mirroring real life extends beyond medical emergencies to entertainment. For Viri, an interactive project created with Fountain Digital Labs for PlayStation VR, Percy set out to give users the fairy-tale sensation of feeding wild animals.

Filming on location in Kenya and the UAE, the team dropped physical meat in front of a camera and left it running for hours to capture the natural reactions of lions. In the final VR experience, users shake their controller to drop the meat, triggering the real-world footage of a lion investigating—and occasionally biting—the camera. It proves that emotionally satisfying interactivity stems from choices that feel authentic to real-world logic, a lesson Percy believes could increase digital marketing response rates by 50% compared to the standard, static “More Info” buttons currently dominating social media.

AI in Film: Making the Impossible Possible

For over two decades, Percy dreamed of adding fire safety to his “Deadly Dozen” roster, but the danger and extreme cost of filming people near real fires made it completely unfeasible. Today, the rapid evolution of AI-generated video has dissolved those barriers.

Partnering with Google DeepMind, Percy is developing Flashover, an interactive fire survival film. AI-generated video allows him to safely place viewers right next to visceral, photorealistic flames. The footage is so effective that even before its official release, test viewers have rushed to check their smoke alarms, and one viewer even swapped a planned nylon carpet for fire-resistant wool after watching.

The Speed of AI and the Hollywood Backlash

Percy echoes the sentiment of deep-tech leaders like Demis Hassabis: AI is a milestone on par with the Industrial Revolution, but moving ten times faster. When skeptics claim “AI can’t do X,” they are often relying on information that is months out of date against tools like Seed Dance 2.0 that are advancing exponentially.

However, this rapid integration is sparking intense friction within the entertainment industry. While the Oscars have shown surprising openness to AI influence recently, Percy predicts an imminent and massive pushback. Citing controversies like the AI-enhanced Hungarian accents in The Brutalist, he anticipates the Academy will ultimately walk back its concessions. Driven by the existential fears of physical performers and creators whose livelihoods are on the line, Percy believes the industry will draw a hard boundary, ensuring that concepts like a “Best AI Actor” award face fierce resistance.