Clouds over Cuba is an interactive documentary commemorating the 50th anniversary of The Cuban Missile Crisis, beginning with the 1959 Cuban revolution and continuing on until the missiles were removed in October, 1962.

Along the way, the user is invited to explore 15 related topics in greater depth via expert interviews including Sheldon M. Stern, former historian at the JFK Presidential Library, and Sergei Khrushchev, son of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

As the documentary unfolds, nearly 200 archival photos, videos, documents and audio recordings are automatically added to a digital dossier for further review at any time. Smartphone users can link their devices with the film so their mobile dossiers sync with the documentary playback.

Visitors who wanted to follow the crisis "live" exactly 50 years later could import all the secret ExComm meetings recorded by Kennedy into their Google calendars, enabling them to "attend" the meetings live over the 13 days.

But what if diplomacy had not won out? The film ultimately builds to an alternate 2012 in which the Crisis escalated into nuclear war. This short film tells the intertwining story of four fictional characters who each remember the horrors of nuclear war in their own way.

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.