The Boston Film Festival may have ushered in a strange new world for transmedia and mobile devices: “Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill,” an iPhone application designed for a walking tour of Boston, has been accepted as an official entrant into the festival.
“When we got the letter saying we’d been accepted, we called them back and said, ‘Do you really know what this is?’” says Michael Epstein, the director of the app and the founder of Untravel Media, which released it.
“And they said, ‘Yeah, but we thought it worked as a movie, too.’”
The app, which is made up of 43 minutes of video designed to be viewed at eight different locations around Boston, uses still photos, narration, original video footage and scenes from a 2003 PBS documentary to tell the story of the mysterious disappearance of wealthy Bostonian George Parkman in 1849, and the subsequent investigation of physician and Harvard instructor John Webster.