onyx project

After reading the homepage of The Onyx Project and watching the two clips, I'm still a little unsure as to how this "movie" is navigated. From reading the description on the site, I felt confused by the viewing descriptions and from reading tophat1's entry and her link to a NY Times article on the Onyx Project, I'm overwhelmed by the fact that there are over 400 scenes!

From these snippets of the actual DVD, I can't say that I'm well-informed enough to make a judgement on the content of the Onyx Project. However, from the little information that I read about, I have formed a few first impressions of the project:

1) The website advertised the price $23.95 and plastered the ORDER NOW! button no less than EIGHT TIMES on just the one page, on top of a "how to buy" link. I can understand the need to promote and sell considering that this project was independently financed by the movie-makers, but it did seem a little desperate advertising it so much.

2) From watching the two clips on the site, I was reminded of those interview segments that they have on Dateline NBC, 20/20, 60 minutes, and any other primetime news magazine shows. This seemed like a fictionalized version of those shows, and a gimmicky project to me--although I could very well be wrong on this since I haven't watched the whole thing. But the format and content of the two clips was very much like those TV shows.

3) I didn't find any reviews for "The Onyx Project" on the amazon site, and I wonder how receptive people have been to it. I usually see movies as very immersive projects, in which the audience lets go and allows themselves to be carried away by the drama unfolding onscreen. The two clips I saw seemed like pretty straighforward, immersive media, but I wonder what kind of experience it would be if I experienced the whole "project"? Would I want immersion? How would this not be immersive? Would I enjoy this new form of story-telling?

It was mentioned that someone in the class owns a copy of this DVD? If so, would it be possible to bring a copy to class on Monday just so those of us who haven't seen it yet gets an idea of how to navigate around the DVD? Perhaps that would answer a lot of my and probably other people's questions.