Paul Raschid’s interactive films

Paul Raschid writes and directs interactive films with live actors — the branch-and-timer format that Late Shift took into cinemas. His own site lists seven titles between 2020 and 2025, most as writer-director, one as director for hire. The producer on The Gallery is Neville Raschid, the publisher PRM Games. I read him as the case study the UK FMV scene was missing: one director, one method, seven shipped productions — enough material to see the craft, not just the novelty.

The Complex (2020)

A real-time thriller inside a London laboratory under lockdown; per the director’s site, Raschid’s role was director — the producers John Giwa-Amu and Jade Alexander hired him. Live-action, real-time clock, eight endings per the store era. It established the production pattern the later titles reuse: one location, a compressed timeframe, choices under a timer.

Five Dates (2020)

Writer-director. A first-person romance shot in lockdown: five evenings, five possible partners, and the film was BAFTA Cymru nominated. This is the title that proved the dating branch of the format could be made small and still feel authored — the genre my live-action FMV dating sims page reads from the Asian side.

Deathtrap Dungeon: The Golden Room (2021)

Writer-director. An adaptation of Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy world — a gamebook brought to film, which is exactly what it sounds like: numbered passages, death endings, and a narrator’s voice. The one title in the list that wears its paper ancestry openly.

The Gallery (2022)

Writer-director. A hostage thriller across two timelines — 1981 with a female protagonist, 2021 with a male one; the cast includes George Blagden, Anna Popplewell, Rebecca Root, Kara Tointon and Richard Fleeshman. Released September 2022, published by PRM Games on Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and mobile. His site’s filmography adds the claim that matters for film history: in 2023 it became “the UK’s first interactive film to receive a limited cinema release.”

Ten Dates (2023)

Writer-director, the sequel to Five Dates: a speed-dating night, ten encounters, both protagonists playable. The romance line doubled its cast instead of its budget — the same coverage economy I describe in the dating sims page.

Hello Stranger (2025)

Writer-director. A romance where the protagonist’s face is never shown — the first-person camera pushed to its logical limit, and the clearest sign that the Asian POV wave and the British one have converged on the same grammar.

The Run (2025)

Writer-director. A real-time thriller, again with the clock as the antagonist; per the director’s listing it is his most recent produced feature. It closes the 2020–2025 run of seven titles — one every year but one, which is, by FMV standards, an industrial pace.

The claim on the director’s site is careful, and the care is the story: not “the first interactive film in UK cinemas” — Late Shift screened at Vue in March 2017 — but “the UK’s first interactive film to receive a limited cinema release”: a British interactive film given a booked, ticketed run, even a limited one. The difference between a touring one-off and a release is distribution, and distribution is what a format needs to survive.

Set beside Late Shift, the line is clean. Late Shift was built for the hall: server, apps, a vote. The Gallery went the other way — a home-first title that then took a cinema run, the way concert films do. For a director without a studio, that ordering (digital first, theatrical as an event) is the realistic path: my Netflix page explains why the streamer’s branch of the format closed just as this one opened.

Per Stornaway’s own case study, Raschid writes interactive scripts as playable gamebooks and maps them as flowcharts — the method he developed across the projects. On set, the Story Map let cast and crew see how each scene related to earlier choices; in post, the engine sat inside the normal mastering workflow, with music, VFX, grade and sound dropped into “Story Islands” as versions arrived. Stornaway’s claim is the significant one: the platform “removed an entire department of coders from the end of the production process.”

I write this as a neutral reader of that case, not a Stornaway user; my own pipeline is FMV Builder — the conflict is stated where the tools are compared. The transferable idea is not the tool but the order of work: author the system before the shoot, keep it visible on set, and let post-production update a living graph instead of re-editing a tree.

Three things, from one filmography. First, constraints travel: one location and a compressed clock carried The Complex, Five Dates and The Run alike — the branching needs coverage, and coverage needs a small world. Second, the romance line is a training ground, not a ghetto: Five Dates and Ten Dates paid for the grammar that The Gallery and Hello Stranger spend. Third, a cinema claim can be earned backwards: ship the digital work first, let the theatrical release be the event. That ordering is the honest version of what Kinoautomat started — a screening where the audience’s part is the point, whatever the screen size.