Meanwhile: A Virtual Experience

A few days ago, I stumbled upon a very interesting intermedia experience that I figured I'd share with all of you. Filmmakers David Clark, Jeff Howard, Chris Mendis and Shelley Simmons are playing with the new media and combining them in a very smart way. Their production, Meanwhile – A Non-Linear Film, attempts to show how a story can be told in a way that doesn't accurately follow a chronological order. Video footage is combined with Flash in order to create a semi-interactive interface that allows the users to pick what comes next. The story is divided into nine scenes. Each scene reveals at least one important piece of information that, in the end, helps to piece the story together.
Watching nine parts of a story in a random order sounds messy. I know. This is how they worked around this issue. After watching a randomly selected scene, the user is asked to choose to continue with a scene that chronologically precedes, succeeds or happens at the same time as the one previously watched. The user does get a sense of time, and in the end the story comes together.
So, starting with the good, overall, the acting is great. The boyfriend and his lover are brilliant characters and the performers are fantastic. The story is well structured. It works well as a film.
The bad: It is a great way to start exploring the Video-Flash combination, but loading time is over 5-minutes on my computer. Due to the production's nature, the scenes are a little too long, I find. They need to give information, but in a linear/video-only production, many of the scenes would be cross-cut with their "meanwhile" pairs or, at least trimmed down... or perhaps, not.
That is my humble opinion. You can check out Meanwhile yourself. Click here.