I was looking for a GNU/Linux alternative for Adobe's Flash authoring tool on Sourceforge and stumbled upon Pachyderm. I see that it's target are museums and such but I was wondering can it be used to make interactive movies?

I understand that it is template based and I wonder if these templates could be changed relatively easy by a non-programmer?

I'm not sure if Pachyderm is precisely what you are looking for. I'm not a programmer either. We edit movies in Adobe Premiere or iMovie or something like that, and drop it into Pachyderm, which then creates the final Flash product. But I may not be understanding exactly what you are looking for so I would refer you to:

1. the Pachyderm Showcase - many completed Pachyderms that will let you see the final product: http://www.pachyderm.org/showcase/index.html
2. the Template workbook - which shows diagrams of the templates, although there are a few new templates that aren't included there: http://www.pachyderm.org/docs/PachyTemplateWorkbook.pdf

Please ask if you have any additional questions, and I hoped I pointed you to some useful info!

Catherine

The are some links to interactive movies on this page. Basically it's a film with alternative plots/ending with or without some animation. The video or animation could be made in a program dedicated for video editing or animation and then imported to Pachyderm.
Basically I would need a tool to make a flash (swf) file with buttons which change to another shot of video or trigger an animation. I've seen the showcase but I'm not sure if the templates are changeable. Is it possible to add your own templates to pachyderm?

Ok, I've looked at the interactive movies and done some thinking. Here are my ideas, but there may be other ones.

1. Quick option - not perfect, but workable. You could use Pachyderm, as is, by using the Commentary Template a lot. The Commentary template has a main image on the left third of the screen, that can be a movie. It has text in the middle third, and three small images which can be links to other screens on the right third. It also has a title and subtitle at the top. You could put your movie segments in the left part, and your links (limited to three) on the right side. The links would just go to another Commentary screen where you would have another video segment. The negative points of this are: 1. you may not want to have that much text available. and 2. you may not want to be limited to only 3 options after each segment.

2. You could edit a screen such as the commentary screen to make a bigger window for the main movie and decrease or eliminate the size of the text box. This isn't something I know how to do, but it is possible. I think the easiest way to do this is to do some flash editing on the commentary swf file and then drop that file in post-publication. Again, though, I haven't personally done it, but I know other people have.

It is not easy to make new screens if you don't have programming/development experience. It's certainly possible, and there are materials here and/or on SourceForge that can help you in that direction if you want to pursue that.

Good luck!
Catherine