"HTML5 and the future of the web: Edgar Wright on BrandonGenerator.com"

Matt Warman talks to BrandonGenerator.com director Edgar Wright about how HTML5 allows for a new kind of web experience

Brandon Generator is written in HTML5 and mixes video with animation 

Which technology is evolving fastest? The mobile phone? The television? Tablets may constantly tout their latest specifications, but it’s easy to forget that the internet itself is evolving at unprecedented pace.

In part, that’s because of the shift to a new way of writing for the web, called HTML5, but it’s also because that shift is backed by every major software company in the world, from Google and Microsoft to Apple and Mozilla, the makers of the popular Firefox browser.

Thankfully, however, these firms are not taking the view that web users should have the faintest idea what HTML5 actually is. Although it stands for hypertext markup language, even that is far more than you need to know.

Instead, the companies are simply trying to show off the web. For Google that means doing clever things, such as producing personalised music videos at TheWildernessDowntown.com with the band Arcade Fire. It also means making sites the sheer utility of which is obvious, and building an entire operating system, Chrome OS, that makes the web central to everything people do on their computer, from saving files to editing video.

Their aim is ultimately to take on Windows but Microsoft itself is taking the fight back to Google on the web. Through a series of websites, they’re seeking simply to emphasise the slogan they’re using for their web browser, IE9: “The beauty of the web”.

The latest project is called Brandon Generator, and it’s got the starriest cast yet. Written by Edgar Wright, the director behind the award-winning Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, it’s narrated by Julian Barratt, of The Mighty Boosh, animated by Marvel and Lucasfilm illustrator Tommy Lee Edwards and has music from David Holmes.

Wright says that what excited him most was Microsoft’s open brief simply to “do something that was highly interactive”.

“I liked the idea of working with an unknown co-writer – the web users – and I very quickly came up with Brandon Generator,” he says. Brandon is a writer suffering from writer’s block who passes out after drinking too much coffee: when he wakes up he finds himself surrounded by the fruits of creativity he doesn’t remember. Viewers are invited to submit their thoughts on what those writings might look like, and using a mixture of comic-book style animation, video and sound, the site displays some of their suggestions.

Wright says that Brandon’s problems with inspiration are somewhat like his own. “Brandon has this amnesia blackout – he wakes up and he’s written something he doesn’t remember, he’s drawn something he doesn’t remember, his phone’s got voicemails on it when it hasn’t rung for months previously, and we asked visitors to the site to submit what they thought he might have written or drawn or heard on his phone. Within 48 hours we had hundreds, and often from people who hadn’t done ‘creative writing’ since they were at school”.

Wright points out that while the story is enabled by technology, users shouldn’t be thinking about how clever the gadgets are. Over the next three episodes, the site will directly use some of the entries submitted. In fact, the main technological input has been that which has allowed all the collaborators, who live in different cities around the world, to design the site in the first place.

Key to the story, however, is Wright’s idea that users watch a film on their computers, “but end up looking at someone else’s desktop”. It’s a conceit that he describes as “slightly” self-referential. It should fit in perfectly online.