What Is Sankari?

Sankari Show is a participatory interactive video show about Elias. Elias is quite a nice guy, but he is not able to speak. So he is a little bit helpless on his own. Actually, Elias is speaking, but we have taken away his voice. That is the genius of the show. People from the audience have to give Elias their own voice. What they say defines his future.  

Sankari is an impro show offering people a fun way to perform in front of an audience. It is a combination of karaoke, drama and video game.  

“Sankari” is the Finnish word for a hero. It also means the main character in a story. The format is based on interactive scenes where the participant improvises with virtual characters. The scenes consist of small video fragments. We listen to the improvisation and choose how other characters react by showing different video clips. The story can develop in many directions depending on the performance.

Participatory Fiction

Sankari experiments with interactive storytelling. We wanted to make our interaction work for our story situation and add dramatic tension. The interaction in Sankari puts participant to a very similar spot as the main character in our story. He or she has to make a good impression by saying the right things in a right way. The mechanics behind the game are controlled by a person with a sense of drama. This makes interaction easy to understand, fast - and funny.

We have developed the game as a social happening. We think that watching the game can be interesting if the game brings out the personalities of the players. This happens when players are speaking for the main character and making the character their own. This kind of speech interface also gives different possibilities for future applications. The game could be played also by phone.

The format for this game has been developed through many script versions, working prototypes and user tests. Sankari requires that the story react quickly to the player. This is done with smooth interactive video editing. We have developed video technology and interface that give the clip-editor possibility to choose easily between the video clips and guide the story to different directions.