Clouds Over Cuba is an interactive multimedia documentary commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The feature begins with Castro’s overthrow of Batista in 1959, and continues on until the missiles were removed in October 1962. Features include 15 expert interviews on related topics, a dossier of 200 related documents and images linked to the timeline of the film, mobile sync, tablet optimization, and calendar integration so you can attend JFK’s secret meetings “live,” 50 years later. Finally, a “What If?” short film depicts an alternate 2012 in which the crisis had escalated into nuclear war.

Within one week we had visitors from 129 countries spend an average of 12 minutes on the site per visit. Comments on Twitter came from a surprisingly wide variety of quarters—military historians, cold war historians, alternate history buffs, documentary film schools and filmmakers, interactive media specialists, digital storytellers—the story and execution were powerful in different ways for different audiences. And the discussions continue today. Since launch, we've received visits from 182 countries, and the interactive film will take up a permanent place within the JFK Presidential Library in Boston.

On October 16, 2012, exactly 50 years after Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba, Clouds Over Cuba went live. In addition to the documentary proper, a variety of networked and synced media were used to enrich the experience. Smartphone users could sync their phones to the documentary playback so all our archival documents, photos and videos would be added to their mobile dossiers as the film played, for review later at any time. JFK secretly recorded the meetings of the ExComm as they debated what to do over 13 tense days, and users could add these meetings to their iCal or Google calendars so they could “attend” these meetings live, 50 years later, hearing all 43 hours of meeting audio and experiencing the tension from an utterly unique insider perspective. And all the events of the Crisis were live tweeted, linking to documents, audio and video, accessible through the site.