My final aim for assignment two has been to create an interactive, multifaceted piece of online screen media that offers instructions to RMIT students about getting around the city campus. I feel as though, on a very basic level myself and my partner have been able to achieve this.
Our final piece for assignment two is called Explore RMIT a ‘create your own adventure’ style piece that helps returning and new students find their way around the confusion of the city campus. We drew on our own experiences to pinpoint the things that can be confusing for students including using the library, finding places to eat and reading the timetable. We filmed various short videos around RMIT answering these questions, before using a WordPress blog to put them all together. Our WordPress blog has a ‘Start your Adventure’ tab at the top that, when clicked leads you to your first question, ‘did you catch the train or the tram to get to university today?’ Clicking on the words train or tram redirects you to a new blog post with a video. Below the video is another question that can be answered after watching the video. The next question takes you through to a similar situation and so on. The piece allows for the audience to make their own path and directly interact with the content they see on their screens. For some of our pages, for example the rocking chair room and the silent area, we simply took a picture of the room as it was heavily populated with studying students at the time of our filming. We also added some links to information about the study areas, further information on printing and book borrowing, and images of Google Maps to create a piece that was multi faceted and interesting for all members of the audience.
This project has certainly been a new challenge for me, as I have never put together something that is interactive in the online world before. One large challenge we faced came with deciding how we would put the piece together in a way that showed off the desired effect. We decided that the best way to do this was to make individual posts on one of our blogs for each possible branch, then hyperlink each one together through the questions. We felt this was the most appropriate way to display the interactiveness that also allowed us to include links to external sites, photos and extra information. This was not necessarily easy. Doing it this way meant that the blogs had to generate close to fifteen different posts. As we felt this would not be ideal to have on our own blogs, we moved onto a WordPress blog specific to Explore RMIT. This, however, did come with its own challenges, as the free WordPress version forced us to upload each video to Youtube as opposed to imbedding them in the blog itself. While we were faced with many last minute challenges, I believe that this piece helps make clear exactly what our aim was and works as a fully functioning interactive, multifaceted piece. The interactivity came through in the ‘create your own adventure’ form of the piece, while the multifaceted aspect came through in the multimedia we used, including traditional video, screen recordings, photos, text based website links and map screen shots. While interactive and multifaceted were the two forms we decided to display, it is clear to see that our piece did involve other characteristics as well. The videos could be seen as episodic, with each video looking at a different aspect of RMIT life, and could also be seen as cross-platformed, as we published the videos on Youtube and our WordPress blog.
The piece we created would have been a much different piece had we of had certain technological knowledge. The way that our project currently stands, the audience has to click on the answer to the questions we pose through a hyperlink and watch the video separately on Youtube and access the external links through this. If we had of been able to, we would have created this transition in a more seamless way. I envision that we would of created one overall piece of media as opposed to multiple. The audience would have started their story, and the first question “did you catch the train or the tram?” would have actually overlaid a piece of media during the video. The audience would have been able to simply keep watching the videos with the questions popping up at the end of each of the clips, allowing them to choose their options while still immersed in the piece, which would of made the process much smoother. For the pages where we added extra written information and articles, such as on the study areas pages, we would have had a corresponding word pop up on the screen that the audience could click that could open the link over the video, making the whole thing one.
I was happy with majority of the actual video execution, though there were things I would do differently next time. For some reason, maybe as a result of the format, Youtube did not convert the time-lapse videos with the same high quality that the iPhone did, and most of those shots looked grainy and not well done. We also didn’t think much about the sound we attached to our videos, and some of the videos ended up with no sound at all, which is a factor when making something non-fiction. In the future I will work on giving all components of my project a consistent sound.
This piece, and the development of it, has helped further develop my knowledge of online screen media that I gained through my first assignment. The most important thing I have learnt during my progress is the definition of interaction in online screen media. I always presumed that interactive online media spoke of the interaction between people over platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. What i’ve come to realise is that interaction can take many forms, and can be defined as any thing that the audience can actively engage in and make their own decisions on. While there are degrees to interaction, some pieces of online screen media may ask you to vote on something or answer questions, interaction is such a broad term that needs to be treated that way. I’ve also begun to answer one of the questions I posed early on in this course about the parameters of online screen media. Having interacted with non-fiction online screen media and looked at some interactive fiction, I have been able to see more broadly what online screen media is and all it can encompass. I’ve also learnt a lot more about the wide range of platforms with the ability to handle interactive media. Social media platforms are important for this, however there are so many other platforms with the possibility of taking on interactive online screen media.
In saying this, there is still so much more I want to know about online screen media, and as much as this test has answered so many questions, I feel that it has also created so many more. My partner and I created this piece on an iPhone with a lot of help from automation after a relatively short planning session. What interests me is the difference between creating something like this and something more professional, perhaps for marketing purposes. What process do professional makers of online screen media need to go through to create it and how does this process differ to ours?
This experiment has opened up two other main questions I hope to be able to answer by the conclusion of the course. The first is ‘how can I make a proper online interactive piece?’ While i’m so proud of what we created, as I said above, I would have loved to have had the technological expertise to join it all together and make the whole product smoother. I would be interested in learning whether there are specific technologies to do this and how this can be done.
I am also interested in exploring the idea of non-fiction in more detail. I’ve always been someone that turns to fiction for almost everything, having strayed away from what I considered to be the harder genre. I am interested in creating non-fiction, what is involved and most importantly what makes something truly non-fiction. As I spoke about often during my development posts, non-fiction always involves elements of construction. I would like to understand why this is and if there is ever a way of making online screen media that is completely non-fictional. These questions are sure to give me a lot to think about when completing my next task!