As kids growing up in the 1980s, Jeff Norton and Michelle Crames loved navigating the world of tigers, exotic valleys and fantasy realms that came alive in the pages of the popular "Choose Your Own Adventure" children's books.
Now, as young adult entrepreneurs, Norton and Crames have chosen their own business adventure. The two are turning their Harvard Business School project into an interactive DVD version of the book series, mixing elements of video games, paperback narrative and Saturday morning cartoons.
With a distribution deal set to become final today with a distributor of family DVDs, Norton, 31, and Crames, 30, are hoping to persuade a new generation to test the adventuresome waters, using a remote control in place of a bookmark. First up is "The Abominable Snowman," a film aimed at children ages 6 to 11 that allows users to guide what happens by registering their choices on their DVD player.
Like the books, the "Choose Your Own Adventure" DVDs start with a set introduction. In "The Abominable Snowman" three siblings set out to find their uncle trekking in the Himalayas. But when their plane sputters out of gas, the screen prompts a choice, asking the viewer to choose whether to crash land in the plane or parachute into the unknown. Each choice begins a different adventure. Can't decide? The DVD will do it for you.
"Kids have no sense of choice and control, and with 'Choose Your Own Adventure,' we are trying to give a 5- or 6-year-old a choice in their life," said Norton, who added that test marketing showed that children responded to the technology. "They wanted to exhaust the content, to watch every branch and permutation to see what happens to their characters."
Norton and Crames founded their business, Lean Forward Media, in spring 2003 while taking a management class at Harvard. The two friends aspired to work in entertainment, holding down jobs as Hollywood interns during school breaks.
Working on a class project, Norton and Crames cooked up the idea of making the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series into a line of family-friendly DVDs. Both crazy about the books in their youth, the two researched and wrote a business plan.
They found that younger children who had yet to embrace video games repeatedly watched movies they liked. There was a perfect opportunity, thought the two entrepreneurs, to offer a movie with a different story each time it was viewed.
