two-minutes.com was an interactive murder mystery set in Cornwall during the eclipse of 1999.It told the story of a group of documentary makers who went to make a film about the effect of the eclipse on Cornwall and the tourist industry. All close friends (and some closer enemies) what the team didn’t know was that one of their number was a murderer and that during the two minutes of darkness during the total eclipse, all hell would break loose.

The audience could follow the drama through the website, with regular diary entries from the group and uploads of video extracts. Due to a ‘mistake’ the audience could also access the team’s webmail and personal folders, giving them a real insight into the relationships between the characters.

When four members of the team were murdered during the festivities surrounding the eclipse the ‘police’ appealed to the online audience for their help in tracking down the murderer. The audience had to sift through the clues hidden around the site in order to find out who the murderer was. With one correct answer winning a prize sponsored by lastminute.com.

I developed the characters and storylines and the basic shape of the thing and then Fin and I got it together for launch - and well after, in fact, since this was a ‘live’ event, which meant all of us but particlularly Fin and I were having to keep the whole drama running as live for five days. It also meant that the whole company got to go to Cornwall for the eclipse, which was nice.

In the end the audience was a lot cleverer than we expected and a lot of them came up with much better solutions to the mystery than certainly I had thought of and they certainly ‘got’ the concept, making it very popular.

two-minutes.com was, from start to finish, one of the most enjoyable and satisfying things I have ever done.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 17th, 2006 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Web, Client-side, Writing, Content, Entertainment, Interactive, Development, Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.