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_Moss Landing

One of the first projects to be called an interactive documentary, this piece sought to create an explorable slice of life in the Moss Landing community through a collection of hyperlinked video clips.

1989 Fabrice Florin
EN Visit the project

In 1987, the Apple Multimedia Lab was founded as a research branch of Apple Computer aimed at generating the future of electronic media. One of the projects the group created was Moss Landing, a nonlinear examination of life in the small town of Moss Landing, California.

The footage for the project was all captured in a single day, giving a multiform view of everyday life in the coastal town. Using a structure that was leading-edge at the time, Moss Landing producers uploaded video clips to a database and strung them together using a hyperlinked system driven by ‘hotspots’ on the video images – clicking a hotspot would take the user to another clip in the database.

A precursor to the next generation of interactive web documentaries, Moss Landing stands out as the project that introduced many people to a new kind of visual storytelling untethered from a single linear format—one that beckoned the user to take part in creating what would come next.

While the original site is not online, a history of the Apple Multimedia Lab and it’s “Golden Age” of multimedia creation is still maintained at the following site:

The Golden Age of Multimedia

Project at a Glance :

Language : EN
Country : United States
Year : 1989
Author : Fabrice Florin
Producer : Apple Multimedia Lab
Team : Michael Naimark,Rachel Strickland
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  1. Laura Alinne Rivero Fragoso

    Hello, my name is Laura Rivero. I’m from Mexico and i want to make a study about interactive documentary. How relevant is the interactive documentary currently?

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