The Living Moment
Shortland Street was going off air for five weeks. For most shows, that’s a problem. I saw it as a storytelling and engagement opportunity.
Shortland Street - TVNZ 2
Interactive Storytelling / Broadcast Innovation / Creative Direction
Shortland Street was going off air for five weeks. The season finale ended on a brutal cliffhanger: Who would live? Who would die?
The show stopped. Time stopped for the characters too.
That became The Living Moment - a story suspended between the final scene and the moment Shortland Street returned, picking up immediately where it had left off. Five weeks off air. Five weeks still in the story.
TIME HAS RUN OUT FOR SOME OF THEM.
ThE SEASON ENDED.
TIME STOPPED.
THE STORY DIDN’T.
The hero 60-second film made that suspended moment physical. Shot on Phantom cameras at extreme slow motion, actors moved through smoke, dust and falling tinsel while camera and subject moved at different speeds - creating a strange, heightened sense of time standing still.
The story kept moving.
Using WIREWAX, we turned a promo into an interactive portal. Viewers could explore hotspots and unlock new story fragments, clues and character content throughout the five-week hiatus.
The five original films each revealed another piece of the mystery in a different way - from intimate home-video messages and dreamlike fragments to scenes that felt lifted directly from the show.
One recreated the second shooting from the finale, flashing between multiple possible suspects with a hidden clue pointing towards the truth.
Another compressed a character’s entire life into flashes - from birth and childhood, through their dream of becoming a doctor, to the moment their fate was left hanging.
Nothing explicitly revealed who would survive. YET Everything contained clues.
The result was a parallel narrative that kept audiences inside the world of Shortland Street for five weeks - investigating, speculating and sharing clues until the show returned.
410,026 interactions
62.7% of Shortland Street viewers engaged
3.25+ interactions per engaged view
2+ min average engagement time
When Shortland Street returned, 526,900 people tuned in, with a 45.8% share among 18–49s.
The technology was only the mechanism.
The real idea was to change what a television story could do while television was off.
The story continued beyond the films through fictional evidence: character emails, emergency calls to police, photographs of supposed police evidence and social updates that gave audiences more fragments to investigate. The audience wasn't just watching for answers. They were investigating.
We even brought back a fan-favourite character who’d died earlier in the season. I negotiated with Thomasin McKenzie’s agent to create a new scene between her character and her on-screen father, whose fate remained unresolved. It became part clue, part goodbye - and one of the most emotional moments in the entire experience.
McKenzie later asked to use the footage as a showreel for Hollywood auditions.
The campaign became a Top 10 WIREWAX experience globally and won multiple PromaxBDA ANZ Golds, including Best Drama Campaign and Best Drama Promo, before reaching the global PromaxBDA finals.
PromaxBDA Australia / ANZ
Multiple Gold Awards
PromaxBDA Global
Global Finalist
Best Design Awards NZ
Interactive - Finalist
Role: Creative Director / Director / Editor - conceived The Living Moment and the interactive narrative system, defining the creative idea, audience journey and visual language. Directed and edited the original films, using performance, production and post to make the idea of suspended time tangible.