I decided to look at the participatory and technical elements of the interactive short. My biggest challenge was how to put it into a video format. I was not fluent in html and coding and I want to have similar experience through video format. I took some reference from other interactive commercials or web series to help me reconstruct this video. There was a part where Martha received the call from someone but I had accidentally clicked ignore. When I clicked ‘Ignore’, I was still stuck at the same spot, the story did not progress so I had more time to venture around to see other information pop-ups under the ‘Listing’ chapter.
I used an example from a commercial with alternate endings – Tipp Ex about the Hunter shoots the bear or not. Using YouTube annotations, the participants are linked to the narration of their choice. This was an easy concept as it was just putting text on a freeze frame.
From this sketch, I realised that even though you are given an interactive short where you get to choose the sequence of the video, filmmakers still have the ultimate control. The ending will always be the same as set by the filmmakers. Seeing that I could not progress with the story when I clicked ‘Don’t Answer’, it gave me a clear view that the filmmakers still have the sequence set but they just want participants to interact with it.