I seem to have reacted more favorably to the Onyx Project than many others did. I agree that the work could have been better executed than it was. However, I found it a fascinating, if flawed experiment. I think that hypertext and similar formats are very well suited to piecing together a story that can be told from many different angles. The Onyx Project took on a huge amount of material. While other people viewed much of this material as backstory, I thought that the discussions of politics and family were interesting stories in their own right.

To be fair, I am assuming that there wasn't a big secret or surprise ending that we simply failed to find.

I found The Onyx Project fascinating. A few ideas --

I doubt it's vaguely like a matter of replacing film. As story, they don't function anything alike. A normal (itchy word, but I'll leave it) film is based on external story and operates mostly temporally, Memento and some others notably aside. Even the nontemporal stories progress in a very linear manner -- we see scene after scene. Even the time we spend on any given scene is dicatated, as it is not in a book. We've seen something of how tremendously difficult plot has been to accomplish in linked text. I can't imagine that a medium that relies on inevitably temporal sound and action footage would be easier. Imagine what they had to do -- and what they had to NOT do! -- to get the music to work.

Somewhere between listening to the class' reactions to "The Onyx Project" and realizing I was spending the bulk of the time we watched it trying to decide if he was reading a teleprompter (verdict: at least half the time, but he did a really good job of not making it painfully obvious. Not surprising, though, cuts down on the time they have to pay him for). I actually spent most of the time watching it trying to figure out exactly what sort of equipment and time frame they were working with.

And I started thinking, huh, this is a visual presentation in which nothing really happens. Just a big long interview/confession. Why is it that this can't hold my interest while other works about nothing can.

To me, the question raised in tophat1's post and in class discussion of whether or not The Onyx Project could and should be in a more linear, movie format seems contradictory to the project itself. As much as the it previously annoyed me that The Onyx Project is so opposed to being called a movie (as tophat1 points out, there is clearly a camera, and they show it; as we discussed in class, there is background music, which is a part of the editing process; and in one of the in-between scenes where you wait to click on something, it shows David Strathairn bent over and staring at papers, which I took to be a script), I think I'm beginning to see why the creators were so adamant about its naming. The point of the project, as I see it, is to redefine the way we look at media. In other words, asking why it isn't a linear movie is like asking why Michael Joyce's "Afternoon" isn't a linear, print book. On some level, I think this is a valid question, because the format of "Afternoon" confused me, and I wanted to see it in "book" form; similarly, The Onyx Project isn't my favorite, and I was often bored or anxious from seeing and hearing such scripted, dry speeches from David Strathairn (sorry, KF : )). But I think the point of both of these projects is that they want to use new media opportunities to move away from traditions of the past and create a new way of storytelling.

In class today, there were two threads of conversation about a viewer's interactions with "The Onyx Project." The first thread seemed to see the process as an experience of the main character's neural processes. In other words, we could see what the speaker was thinking (in the form of the color pictures at the bottom of the screen) while he was talking about something else.

On the other hand, it seemed that others saw the process as something akin to an interview or a real-life conversation in which, while the speaker was talking, the viewer could "interrupt" and choose to "ask" him to speak about something else. By clicking on the pictures, the viewer can prompt another line of conversation.

I was reading this random review of The Onyx Project that I came across online, and in it the reviewer mentions that Colonel Henderson talks about and quotes from several bloggers, which I thought was an interesting choice for the writer/director (Larry Atlas) to make. This would definitely help the film to seem more realistic, but I wonder if it also reflects something about the intended audience. Does Atlas think that film needs a new format or a level of viewer interactivity the same way text has been given new formats and interactive qualities? Hmm where am I going with this...I guess I'm wondering how a comparison would work. Reading something in print versus reading something online that now gives you the options of choosing the order you view the text in, and watching a movie from start to finish versus choosing scenes of film pretty much randomly until you've watched them all or get bored... how do the two compare and should I even be thinking about all of this in terms of this comparison?

In the quest to find more information on "The Onyx Project," I checked in with the ever-reliable IMDb, which sadly failed me (though yielded an *ahem* interesting list of suggested titles) (And rotten tomatoes' list of titles has even less to do with anything). I find the lack of its presense on traditional movie-reviewing sites interesting. On the project's website, they're forever harping on the fact that it's not a movie and you can't make it one!

My two cents is the reason they kept getting turned down by all the people in Hollywood is that such people forsaw that it would probably not be a successful project. The format of the software is far more condusive to pure documentaries, or "educational programming" than the sort of pseudo-docu-drama they have created that, from the two clips I've seen, has the visual interest of a radio broadcast. I realize they were on a tight budget but...

A few people have mentioned frustration with the “for sale only” nature of “The Onyx Project,” or in this post, a desire to see the site’s claims about their product in action. When I first suggested this reading a while back, I mentioned that I had a copy of the full, working product (and no, I did not pay $23.95 for it).

It’s a DVD that runs out of Windows. I haven’t seen the thing myself, but I’m also pretty intrigued to see how this interactive not-movie plays out. If there's interest, maybe I should bring it to class Monday or Wednesday and we could all play around with it then? What does the rest of the class/the professor think?

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!

I took a look at "The Onyx Project" and, after reading about it and watching the two clips, I was a little mystified. Apparently this new, non-linear form is a new innovation. On the site, they claim: "NAVworlds™ are nonlinear in form. Their form does not have a beginning, a middle or an end. Nor are NAVworlds™ "choose your own adventure" movies. Nor are they "choose our own ending" movies. They are not "interactive movies." Not browseable movies. Not movies." I'm wondering if anyone has seen the project in its entirety. It says on the site that there is a secret not revealed until the end, yet, in other places, it says that the user can decide which links to press and no two users will have the same experience. Thus, it seems both that there is an end and that there should not be an end (since there is supposedly not a beginning, middle and an end). Can anyone clarify?