Interactive videos powered by Facebook Connect experiences have been making their rounds on the Internet over the past few years and now rock band, Linkin Park, adds their new video to the list. “Lost in the Echo” is a ‘personalized film experience’ by Jason Zada and Jason Nickel, the creators of the Emmy Award-winning interactive video, Take This Lollipop. Zada speaks to rationale behind creating an interactive music video:

Linkin Park came to us with the idea of creating an interactive music video. Since [interactive director] Jason Nickel and I had recently done a Facebook Connect experience, we pitched the idea of doing a personalized music video. The band has almost 45 million Facebook fans, so doing something within that world seemed to make a lot of sense.

In the emotive song, the interactive music video pulls-in photos from the viewer’s Facebook social graph to the post-apocalyptic wasteland setting. The video opens on a man in a hoodie walking through the wasteland carrying a suitcase. When a suspicious crowd appears, the hooded man opens the suitcase; viewers see that the suitcase contains pictures from their Facebook profile and of the crowd.

Each person within the crowd takes a picture from the suitcase, emotionally and physically breaking down as they look at the Facebook snapshots. The experience stays true to the nature of the catastrophic song’s lyrics, which depicts a love lost. In an interview with Fast Company, Nickel speaks to the extremely personal nature of the video:

Working with the Facebook API, we scraped users’ data to try to integrate the most appropriate content that fit with the story in the video. So depending on what Facebook users had listed, we display the photos that fit best with each scene to create an experience that makes the user feel like this video is about them. It’s an evolving art, and one that has incredible potential as it is still in the early stages of conceptualizing. It’s a very new technique to integrate users’ information so seamlessly in this medium and has only become possible recently because of technology and social media.

‘Lost In The Echo’ is the second single from Linkin Park’s latest album ‘Living Things,’ which is in stores now. Visit Lost In The Echo to experience the custom music video.

Lost In The Echo