Interactive films and coconstruction

Interactive Filmmaking is both an aesthetic and technological challenge. Steerable plots, where audiences are not passive viewers but active participants of the narrative experience, require an engaging narrative model as well as a technologically feasible structure. This article discusses the connection between aesthetics, cinema, and interactivity and presents a model for interactive narration that is based on the audience's ability to read and interpret footage differently according to its context. Through a detour narrative model it is possible to engage audiences in a coconstructive hypermedia experience while at the same time minimizing the amount of footage required. An interface model that allows seamless hypervideo navigation through graphic interaction is also discussed, and the interactive short film The Crime or Revenge of Fernando Moreno is presented, along with user experience and usability studies that experimentally prove our hypothesis.