Cells & actions

As your project plays, it will traverse through cells that contain one or more actions. There are three kinds of actions in Choicelab:

• Timeline actions take place over a period of time, adding duration to your project. A cell only plays a single timeline action at a time. The two available timeline actions are Play Video and Play Audio.
• Interact actions give the player something they have to interact with before the project will keep progressing.
• Event actions are points that occur on the timeline. They don't add time themselves to a cell, but can be set up to fire at specific points in your media.

If you're working with audio and video extensively—as Choicelab is designed for—you'll likely build much of your experience around timeline actions, and slotting video and audio into them.

Working with media

The Play Audio and Play Video actions let you insert your own media into your project. Play Audio accepts MP3 files, while Play Video accepts MP4 (H.264) files.

[image: play audio and play video actions]

Once you've added video and audio to your timeline, you can add Interact and Event actions and time them out to appear at specific points in the audio and video:

[image: timed actions]

Once your project plays that specific point in the media, it will show those actions on screen.

Now that you've been introduced to cells, you may be wondering: how do you string together cells into paths and create a truly interactive story? That's where branches come into the picture.