Honorable Mentions:
Emerge would also like to acknowledge these two interactive projects:

The Showing
By Keira Wingert, Drew West, Spencer Coulton & Ben Collins
Genres of Media Production: Cross-Platform Story – Summer 2016, Prof. Laura Zaylea

As The Curtain Closes
By Amanda Kijak, Amanda Arnold, Emma Malefakis & Dornella Johnson
Genres of Media Production: Cross-Platform Story – Spring 2016, Prof. Laura Zaylea

Technical note: The interactive platform has updated, and these interactive narrative projects are no longer playable online. You can still read about them here and visit their project websites. 

The Showing

By Keira Wingert, Drew West, Spencer Coulton & Ben Collins

Paul the Realtor just wants to sell this house. The catch: it’s haunted. Will Paul be able to distract the couple from the supernatural forces inside The Showing? You Decide.

Project website: http://yikesproductions.wixsite.com/theshowing

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As The Curtain Closes

By Amanda Kijak, Amanda Arnold, Emma Malefakis & Dornella Johnson

Obsession. Lust. Lies. It’s hard to find the killer of someone who is hated by just about everyone… In this interactive murder mystery, piece together the death of your leading lady.

Project website: www.AsTheCurtainCloses.wordpress.com

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Curatorial Statement by Laura Zaylea:

The Showing is a horror-comedy that takes a classic Choose-Your-Own-Adventure approach. This may seem like a default strategy for an interactive video, but it isn’t. Branching narratives are hard to make. Consider this: Each choice on screen has to lead to at least two options, which means that the amount of work grows exponentially with each choice that’s added. Also, no thread can be a dud; if it is, Murphy’s Law says the audience will pick it. Considering this, it is especially impressive that the makers of The Showing created a successful Choose-Your-Own-Adventure video in just four weeks during a summer intensive course. The narrative is successful and entertaining; it is a crowd-pleaser and it feels complete at the end – that is, it feels complete at the end no matter which of the 4 possible endings you choose.

As the Curtain Closes is a “whodunit” murder mystery that bridges the worlds of narrative media production and game-making. It obscures the line between these forms, playfully drawing upon narrative strategies (character desires, plot, dialog, flashbacks) and game-like interaction (clickable choices on screen, a clear goal, obstacles and a countdown timer). The video is seen through the director’s eyes (that’s you! The viewer!) and this first person point of view filmmaking effectively supports both the narrative and the game-like qualities.

The three videos highlighted here – Here & Now, The Showing and As the Curtain Closes – take different yet complementary approaches to interactive video design. The first works with parallel threads (all videos playing simultaneously, and you can choose any one at any time), the second is a multi-linear choose-your-own-adventure narrative, and the third is a game-like mystery that you have to “solve” to complete (otherwise you loop back to the same core video, and you may see it up to 7 times if you don’t choose the correct murder weapon and suspect. Good luck, detectives!).

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More about the interactive videos created for MSP 3701: Genres of Media Production – Cross-Platform Story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqkMeKOCmhk