interactive film

Her Story is the award winning video game from Sam Barlow, creator of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Aisle. A crime fiction game with non-linear storytelling, Her Story revolves around a police database full of live action video footage. It stars Viva Seifert, actress and one half of the band Joe Gideon and the Shark.

Her Story sits you in front of a mothballed desktop computer that’s logged into a police database of video footage. The footage covers seven interviews from 1994 in which a British woman is interviewed about her missing husband. Explore the database by typing search terms, watch the clips where she speaks those words and piece together her story.

(Source: Steam's description)

Crossed Lines is a multiform (or multiplot) film telling the stories of nine characters in a way that the viewer can constantly explore and switch between all nine forms, and can simultaneously witness all sides of the characters’ exchanges which are taking place between the nine remote locations. The starting point of the piece was to conceive a series of narratives that could be viewed as individual stories, but would also reference and link to the other stories, as is the case of the multiplot film genre. As McKee has noted ‘multiplot films never develop a central plot; rather they weave together a number of stories of subplot size’. (1998:227) The difference with Crossed Lines is that it is delivered through an interactive interface paradigm, meaning that the viewer has the power to navigate and order the stories themselves, and to create a story of varying complexity depending on the number of different characters which are selected through the interface.