Independent Television Service (ITVS) announced FUTURESTATES, the series of online digital shorts, is back for its fifth and final season with a new approach, envisioning a singular futuristic world with interconnected stories from a diverse group of indie filmmakers and digital storytellers on an immersive new website.
This season of the interactive show will feature a radical new design, video artifacts, shareable media, news clips, and more, with each film giving viewers a bigger sense of this visionary world. The narrative begins on Twitter at @FuturestatesTV, where Dr. Evelyn Malik has reached back through time with a message asking viewers to help her change the future.
“This isn’t just a reboot of FUTURESTATES, but a reboot of the entire web series genre,” said series producer Karim Ahmad, also the senior digital content strategist at ITVS. “I’ve long felt that the new opportunity with web series is to really unleash the user experience potential of the web to tell a nonlinear story in serialized form that is guided by the user. Our upcoming and final season of the FUTURESTATES series does exactly that.”
“The short films are independent, yet interconnected,” Ahmad continued. “And the storyworld design is immersive and mysterious – a puzzle for you to explore, filled with supplementary videos to help flesh out the nature of this futuristic world and offer clues as to how it came about. And even though the series is in its final season, this is just the beginning for ITVS. Hot on the heels of FUTURESTATES, we’re launching the ITVS Storylab, a one-of-a-kind cross-media web series incubator for independent content creators to develop similar series concepts along a myriad of different themes and genres.”
The series concept for FUTURESTATES was conceived by ITVS, with the new interactive site designed and developed by New York based digital studio, Murmur, featuring films by Tanuj Chopra, Nisha Ganatra, Tina Mabry, Trevin Matcek, Greg Pak, Alex Rivera and Aldo Velasco.
