Lego Man
(2010)
makers: Alana Ward, David Ludlow, Kathleen Bain and Oliver Wicks.
From the blue background, the soundtrack and through to the Lego characters used for navigation this is a work that is both quioxitic and awkward. It is an experiment in using a K-film to frame, and narrate, a story, with a framing narrative about how the three characters of the film need to find each other and return to Lego Land. The navigation thumbnails are using keywords in the usual way, and consist of three - presumably because there are three characters, however since they load randomnly there is no guarantee that you get each character, so you are invited to explore as a consequence.
A story though, often (not always) relies on cause and effect and this particular story does, so for example relatively early in one particular reading I find "But not all animals were helpful...time was running out for Seth..." Now, when the text begins with "But" this is always in response to something that came previously, usually the thing that immediately preceeded it, but in this case (see) it doesn't really make good narrative sense because the previous sequence did not refer to animals. There is an effort to make the story consist of small self contained sequences, but this does not really work for a quest. So the story either needed to be much more causal (and so used a lot of keywords so it was relatively linear), or to be made up of more fragmented parts and not be a quest, or more causal but also more interconnected so that it is less three distinct character based lines and is one distinct set of narrative actions (it is a quest after all) which the characters intersect with and around.
Finally, the three close up images across the top are not thumbnails. A minor point which the user easily establishes, but as the images across the bottom are clickable the only way to learn that the top ones aren't is to try clicking on them. Having to test something is often not a good idea as generally in projects like this if an image is clickable, then it should always afford this. It also clutters up the project, and visually dominates and crowds in ways that may not have been intended.
It is an interesting experiment, one that produces a lot of lessons.