For this week's Hotshot Toronto-based collaborative studio Jam3 craft an immersive online experience to showcase gritty TV drama Crash & Burn.

The online experience at autotopsy.ca puts the viewer in the driving seat as the show's main character and a young insurance claims adjuster Jimmy Burns is hot on the tail of a multi-vehicle pile-up. The viewer is taken through his journey step-by-step to piece together the complex jigsaw, and invited into a hellish crash scene that allows them to delve deeper and witness the moments leading up to the crash.

Part-game, part-narrative experiment, the sophisticated site serves up an array of interactive video content alongside character case studies that provide hints and distractions alike.

"We knew this had to be more than just an online video, and we wanted users to be able to experience in whatever order to their liking," explains Jam3 creative director Adrian Belina. "It begins with the end or 'aftermath' and essentially sets up the 'WTF?' premise of the site. From there viewers fly through our frozen moment in time and can stop at any person involved in the accident and view three things: the approach, Jimmy's two cents, and the case study."

These are essentially the before, during and after elements of the site, which evolve the more the viewer explores. Users are given different options to interact with the site, such as a stylized 3D overview of the accident built in Papervision that allows people to jump to any point within the accident. Users can also drag the scene frame-by-frame with their cursor, jump to a point on the timeline or fast-forward with the mini-navigator.

The site took five months to complete from conception to the finished product, and Jam3 had the challenge of fitting the construction of the site in with the show's timeline schedule. "We spent about a month conceiving the story, working out how to make it interactive and how the accident would unfold. We essentially sat in a boardroom with dinky cars running over different scenarios of who hit who first," recalls Belina. "Interactive fiction is a fairly new concept and I think what attracts people to it is the notion of piecing together a puzzle. They are controlling what they see and how they see it."

You can check out the intro film from the site below, and if you'd like to play detective and experience the interactive elements in full, visit the site at autotopsy.ca.