I spent nearly two years working on customer-profiling and product preference multimedia kiosk booths for use in an experimental GNC store in Florida. Completion saw some 2,000 pages of interactive decision-tree scripting for a cast of eight actors and six university health experts. I'm sure my very skillful co-writer, Tita Beal, produced another 2,000 pages. My only regret is that we weren't paid by the pound. Being paid by the number of revisions required by the GNC legal department would have been good, too.

Llifestyle profiling – on areas such as weight management, exercise, nutrition, energy, and stress reduction – is done by Q&A "movies", i.e. digitized video clips. The movies a customer sees depend on the health goals selected. About two hundred 8 to 12 second customer interrogation clips were written and videotaped against original, green screen, Ultimatte plates.

The end result of all this produced a set of customized wellness recommendations (hard copy printouts) for every visitor. How successfully customers followed their health plans was to be revealed during the next visit; when additional movies of the "Glad to see you back, let's find out how well you're doing" variety are called up. (As the system is activated by swiping a mag stripe card, the computer greets customers by name and tracks and updates return visit results.

One of our challenges was to keep visitors interested during some rather extended Q&A sessions: "extended" because computer algorithms (and ethics) required a minimum response-load in order to generate accurate recommendations. (Pretty accurate, anyway.) So Tita and I used a system where many customer answers were "rewarded" by a quickie talent vignette. About 110 response "movies" were recorded. The following sample, from a three-monitor presentation, is typical: