Tag: assignment4

While it is such a cliche, it really does feel like just yesterday that I walked into my first Thinking in Fragments class with almost no knowledge of online screen production and no projects under my belt. I am so proud of all I have been able to achieve over the course of this semester, especially when thinking about our finished product for assignment 4 ‘The Complete Judging by the Cover’.

With assignment four, we decided to test the possibilities offered by online spaces by moving away from creating one final large video project and instead creating a multi-layered project with elements of social media, web pages and video content. Differently to our previous assignment, rather than starting with an idea and building on it, we started off with a question that we hoped our project would help us to answer: ‘to what degree are people likely to interact with online content?’ It’s easy for us to say that we can and should create online screen media, but it is a whole different thing to understand whether our audiences are actually willing to view and interact with it.

We decided to tackle our question by offering our audiences two different ways to interact with our project, one that would suit a more creative audience member, and one that would suit a more competitive audience member. One of the strengths of our last project was that it captured our authentic first impressions of album covers. One thing it didn’t do, however, was allow us to compare how our first impressions of the same thing can differ so much from person to person. We all have different thoughts, different first impressions of things, and understanding how people differ in this way is an interesting thing to think about. Therefore, for the creative side of our project, we decided to ask our audience to provide us with their own written first impressions of a new artwork that we chose, in the hopes that we could use these comments to create some sort of video project. Another strength of our last project surrounded the ‘game-like nature’ of our project, where the audience was forced throughout to guess which album cover we had recreated in each video. For our competitive angle, we decided to use this, as well as the influence of Buzzfeed and other online quizzes, to create a quiz of our own relating to each album cover we recreated. At the end of the quiz, we offered a Youtube link to our original outro video for people to see which album covers we recreated. To communicate this information to our audience, we created a Facebook page, and created our own audience by asking our friends and classmates to engage with it. We made regular posts reminding our audience to take our quiz and/or comment their first impressions of our chosen album cover in one sentence. We ended up using six of the comments we received to create our ‘Your First Impressions’ project, and compiled our original ‘Judging by the Cover’ project, our quiz, Facebook page and Your First Impressions project on a Wix website to come away with ‘The Complete Judging by the Cover’, our final Thinking in Fragments project.

While I am proud of the project we created, there were things I wish we could have fixed or done better to improve it. Ideally, I would of loved to have used a more progressive quiz software that allowed us to incorporate video footage into the project, particularly in the answers section so users could see the videos we made and the answers to which album covers we recreated as they went along. I also know that the quiz software itself was not without fault, as some users found themselves unable to get through the entire thing due to technical difficulties. Using a more advanced software for this purpose may have also been a good idea. Finally, the actual set up of our final ‘Your First Impressions’ piece was much clunkier than I would have hoped. While we were planning on using Korsakow to present our final project, issues with our interface redirected us to post all of our videos on our website with external links to YouTube. Ideally, it would of been great to have received more that ten responses that we could have then recreated and grouped into three or four main categories, as we found some of the responses were relatively similar. While we were unable to achieve this in the end, featuring our final project on our website in the form we used did still have the desired effect.

The final results of our project suggest that people are more likely to engage with a competitive quiz as opposed to actually coming up with something to write and contribute. Our quiz ended up having around fifteen different responses, with each of our audience members completing it through our posts on Facebook. Our ‘comment your first impressions’ pieces were less successful. While we did receive a number of comments on our album cover, we were forced to directly ask our friends to comment after days of no comments whatsoever. In the final question of our quiz, we asked our audiences to comment their first impressions of our chosen album cover, and found that many people actually kept this space blank or wrote a very short answer, instead preferring the multiple choice style format. In our ‘Media Presents’ presentation, we first asked our audience to interact with at least parts of our original Korsakow project, before giving people the option to complete the quiz or view ‘Your First Impressions’. Every response we gained sounded something like ‘oh where is this quiz?’ or ‘let me do the quiz’. This suggests that, when looking at the question ‘to what degree are people likely to interact with online content?’, that audiences are more likely to interact with something ‘fun’ or unique as opposed to having to actually think of their own contribution.

One of the questions we asked at the beginning of the semester was ‘how can we operate social media to attract people?’ This question is similar to the one we posed at the beginning of assignment four, where we hoped to understand how people are willing to interact in the online space. What I have found through this semester, and in particular through this final assignment, is that understanding the audience you are targeting is the key to successfully operating social media. When I think about the friends I asked to engage with our page, I realise that they are all relatively passive users who would much prefer to like a page or like a post rather than engage on any kind of deeper level. Generally, our audience, and the audience we spoke to during ‘Media Presents’ were of a young demographic. For one thing, this demographic suggests to me that the content on social media needs to be bite sized, so that it is able to capture the attention of this audience, otherwise, it needs to have some sort of hooking element to draw the audience in. This is the major reason why I think our quiz was much more popular, as the ‘fun element’ was enough of a hook to capture our audience. Being able to understand what makes a specific audience tick, whether this be with regards to their age or interests, and being able to create content from this is of high importance, which is the major piece of knowledge I have gained from creating this online screen media project.

To respond to the possibilities of online screen media, we incorporated the characteristics of interactive, cross-platform, non-linear and user-generated into our project. In terms of interactivity, our audience had a number of different ways in which they were able to interact with our project. Our two major pieces of interaction came through our Facebook page, with our quiz and ‘Your First Impressions’ posts. Our audience was given the opportunity to complete and interact with a quiz, while also having the opportunity to comment their own personal first impressions to help create a major part of our final piece.

Of each of the four characteristics, I would say that cross-platform was the most predominant in our project, and helped us to truly push the boundaries of online screen media. While our previous project focussed on Korsakow as our platform, this project incorporated uQuiz, Facebook, YouTube and a Wix site to join all of our platforms together. In terms of our platforms, we ensured that each of them were actually achieving something and adding to the project as opposed to simply using them for the sake of using them. Our Facebook page was our major communication medium, while uQuiz supported both the competitive element of our project and offered our audience the answers to which album covers we were recreating in Judging by the Cover. YouTube ended up being the platform we used to publish our ‘Your First Impressions’ project, while Wix gave our project one home, a place where all of these platforms could be joined as one project.

As with the other projects I have worked on throughout the semester, we also incorporated the ‘non-linear’ characteristic into our project. A major part of online screen media is allowing the audience to choose how they wish to interact, in which order and with what elements. Making our project non-linear allowed us to achieve this. While we did suggest that our audience members first viewed our original Judging by the Cover project, we presented our website in a way that allowed our audience to choose which elements of the project they wanted to explore, whether this be the Facebook page, the Your First Impressions project, the quiz or all three elements.

Finally, we decided to look at the characteristic of user-generated content. This was not something we have so far explored, and I was interested in seeing how this could shape our project. We felt that asking our audience members to create the entirety of our projects, by creating their own videos, was not only risky but also unlikely to get us the result we wanted, so we decided instead to ask our audience to contribute their ideas to our project, with the ideas we ended up filming coming directly from our audience, not from us.

Each of the characteristics we used were important to making our project web-specific. What we were able to achieve through this project is certainly not something that we could have pulled off if it were not web specific. While we would have been able to use a more traditional form of media to create our original ‘Judging by the Cover’ project and the final result of our ‘Your First Impressions’ project, very little of our project would have functioned effectively without the online space. For one thing, our project relied heavily on multiple platforms to bring each element to life, something we would not of had without the capabilities of the internet. The initial question we asked simply could not of been answered or even thought about had the project not been web specific. Audience engagement is of a different form when thinking about traditional media, with online screen media projects such as ours allowing for a much deeper audience interaction.

Another question we asked at the start of the semester was ‘How is the production for a smaller scale project different from traditional media?’ Throughout the semester, this is something that I have kept in the forefront of my mind, as I am looking towards doing digital marketing and know that understanding exactly how to produce online screen media, and how it differs from traditional media, will be very important. The biggest thing I have learnt about online screen media production is that, compared to traditional production, one must allow the actual filming to be much more flexible. With traditional media, due to its large scale, it is imperative that a very strict pre-production and production phase is planned out, with little room available for deviation. With online screen media, there is both an ability and a need to allow for anything to happen. With regards to our own project, our pre-production phase started with the creation of our Facebook page and our posts reaching out to our audience. We understood that we may not gain the amount of responses that we needed to create the ‘Your First Impressions’ piece, and therefore ensured our project was wide-spread enough to function without this section. Even the day before our project was due, we had issues with the Korsakow system, and had to turn to a new way of publishing our project through our website. In my opinion, the ability to be flexible enough to work around technological issues and audience input is the most important part of the online screen media production process. 

When thinking about all I have learnt in Thinking in Fragments, some key things stand out for me. For one thing, now being able to understand the true meanings of both non-linear media and fiction vs non-fiction with regards to online screen media has completely changed the way I think about production. In terms of non-linear media, I now understand that this does not refer to whether our project is non-linear in terms of its actual timeline, but by whether or not the audience is able to interact and choose the pathway of the project. Non-Linear media is a much more engaging and interactive form, and having this knowledge will certainly be of great importance heading away from university. In terms of fiction vs non-fiction, I have spent much of the semester attempting to understand what makes something fictional or non-fictional, and how we can truly make something non-fictional, due to the fact everything we recreate is merely a representation of a thought. What I have come to realise is that the lines of fiction and non-fiction are much more blurred than imagined, and a piece does not specifically need to fall into either category to be successful. In terms of truly making something non-fictional, while i’m not sure that it can ever be truly possible, I have come to realise that online screen media would be the best medium to achieve it. Online screen media has less parameters compared to most other forms of media, and therefore allows for more truthful, unique pieces to be explored and created.

The biggest thing I have learnt, thanks specifically to this project, is about what makes something an online screen media work. An online screen media piece does not literally need to involve film or photographs, it can encompass social media, websites, written content, user-generated content, and many more endless possibilities. I am so proud of all that myself and my group members have been able to achieve throughout this class, and feel that this studio was a great way to end my stint in the media side of my degree!

 

Please follow the below image to our website to view our Facebook page, Quiz and Your First Impressions video, as known as The Complete Judging by the Cover

 

Please follow the below image to see all of our documented research (also imbedded in development blog posts):

While the idea for our project has been relatively set in stone since our early planning stages, one thing that we left to be decided on was our ‘Your First Impressions’ final project. The idea of ‘Your First Impressions’ was to take all of the comments we received on Facebook about our chosen album cover, and recreate the audiences first impressions in video form. While we have known this from the beginning, up until now, we have not had to think about exactly what we hope to create through doing this.

One thing we liked the idea of was combining everyones first impressions into one long video. Through doing this, the audience would be able to see their first impressions weaved in with everyone else’s, therefore seeing how other people interpreted the cover and what similarities and differences came through. The issue with this idea, however, is that we do have a large number of different opinions that we have to include that don’t necessarily fit together. This means that we will potentially be creating something that flows poorly or simply doesn’t make sense. Another issue is in relation to time. It is no secret that people are not overly willing to watch long videos, whether they helped with the idea or not, so creating a longer-form video may restrict our audience.

Our other idea was to create shorter videos, with each video capturing a different comment. The videos would be much shorter and easier to watch, and the audience would be able to compare their own ideas with other people’s by watching as many as they choose. While we could have an issue with people simply deciding to watch their own film, we could eliminate this by not letting the audience know which video was based off of which specific comment.

In their journal article ‘The problem of peer review in screen production: exploring issues and proposing solutions’, Smiljana Glisovic, Leo Berkeley & Craig Batty (2016, abstract) highlight that the process of peer review with traditional academic work is quite simple, as ‘work is refereed as a way of gatekeeping ideas and research contributions, to ensure it is not publicly available until it has passed a test of rigour, originality, clarity and significance to the field’, with the work assessed by those with a large knowledge in the field. However, this process becomes much more complicated when it comes to screen production, as unlike with traditional academic work, ‘a key value in this kind of work is the ability to communicate implicitly and differently from what can be articulated within the parameters of written, academic language’, (abstract, 2015) therefore making it harder to assess. 

While this article was difficult, and spoke more about screen production pieces made for research purposes, the notion of peer review and the difference of it with regards to online screen production has been interesting to think about with regards to our production process. Throughout the entire semester, we have owed a lot to the feedback we have received along the way from our peers. With online screen production, media is relatively unregulated, and is not something that I ever typically thought about asking for professional advice on before publishing it. This course has shown me the importance of treating online screen production as no different to other traditional forms with regards to gaining feedback, as it can have a big impact on the project.

With pros and cons of both shorter and longer videos in mind, we decided to ask the class during our final feedback session what their opinion was, and which piece they as audience members would be more likely to engage with. This session gave us a lot of clarity, with almost every group saying immediately that they like the idea of shorter videos, as they are much easier to engage with. The group also offered some clarity with regards to how we should organise our videos, with one group in particular suggesting we use Korsakow to make a project similar to our last.

Upon gaining this insight, we were initially concerned that we were biting off more than we can chew. However, while a new Korsakow project would be a lot of work in a short amount of time, I do think that Korsakow will be the best way to organise our thoughts. While our Korsakow project may not be as large as our last one, due to the fact that this project has involved a Facebook page and a quiz, I do believe that it can be effective.

The next thing for us to think about is how we wish to organise our Korsakow project. For our first assignment, our interface was simple, and while it worked well for the project we were creating, it would be interesting to explore different things we can do using Korsakow.

During our feedback session, it was suggested we group our videos into categories, depending on themes. This definitely does have the potential to work, as we have noticed common themes of power, gold and being rich throughout the comments, and this idea would allow us to test out the different ways Korsakow can work. The Whole Picture by Tony Telson begins with an interface with four squares that, when clicked on, takes the audience through a number of different linked videos. While the project takes on a different idea to ours, it does show off the effectiveness of grouping ideas and allowing videos to roll on from one-another.

However, I do also have some concerns with using this idea. For one thing, we have only received seven comments, with a couple of these seeming difficult to create in a short period of time. This will mean that, if we do only have six or seven videos, organising them into a few categories will mean only one or two videos will be in each category and the effect will not be clear. One of the characteristics of our project is to create something that is non-linear, that allows our audience to choose their own path and interact with the project the way they want to. If we create categories and structure our piece, we are guiding our audience, and leaving them with less decisions and more linearity.

At this very final stage of our project, it is important that we spend some time filming the first impressions our audience has given us in short video form, and playing around further with Korsakow so we can place this last element of our piece on our website and publish our final Thinking in Fragments piece.

Research (as listed above)

Academic: Glisovic, S, Berkeley, L & Batty, C 2016,  The problem of peer review in screen production: exploring issues and proposing solutions’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, 10:1, 5-19, DOI: 10.1080/17503175.2015.1133262

 

Over the last few days we have spent some time working on our Facebook page and making some posts that ask our audience to comment their first impressions and/or complete the quiz. Early indications suggest that our audience has been drawn to the quiz element of the project as opposed to commenting on our chosen album cover. While we have had a few responses to our chosen album cover, many of these have been through asking specific people to comment, rather than people choosing to do so on their own accord. While these comments have not come about quite as naturally as I would have hoped, the reactions that people have had to our chosen album artwork have been interesting and relatively unique to each other, meaning we should have some good ideas to work with for our final product.

The way that I used the word react, and the overall use of the word react when speaking about people responding to something in an online form is interesting to think about. In the article Globalisation of the Privatised Self-Image: The reaction video and its attention economy on Youtube from the  Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia (2015), author Yeran Kim discusses the new phenomenon of reaction videos. Reaction videos involve audience members watching or engaging with something, and filming themselves throughout this engagement to capture their emotions and ‘reactions’ to what they see. The authors of the piece make an interesting point surrounding the use of the word ‘reaction’ or ‘reactive’, pointing out the issues with calling these videos reactive, as the audience is actually actively creating content: 

“The role of reactors in reaction videos, in fact, is doubled: in terms of interpretative position, a reactor takes the reactive position of appreciating the ready-made visual product, but, in terms of productive action, the reactor is a “produser” (Bird 2011; Bruns 2008) that not only consumes ready-made media products but also makes and distributes self-reactive images.” (Kim 2015, p. 440) While our audiences are not specifically creating videos, they are viewing media material that we are posting and writing out their reactions to it, so our audience is therefore creating reactions by looking at content we posted, similarly to what is suggested in the article.

Media studies throughout the years have looked at audiences in two ways, as being either active or passive, or proactive and reactive. Some of the earliest theories of media have suggested that audiences are passive, and suggests that media is ‘closed’. In 1938, Orson Welles directed the dramatisation of HG Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds’, which was set up as a news bulletin and broadcast on the radio to a high volume of listeners. Brett Lamb of Lesson Bucket notes that, due to the way the broadcast was set up, ‘viewers who tuned in late became convinced that Earth was actually being invaded by martians.’  Thinking in Fragments has shown me how far we have come with media since then, and how allowing audiences to interact and contribute to media has allowed for this change and for audiences to be so active. While our audience could be labelled as reactive due to their reactions to our Facebook posts, they truly are active and involved in interacting openly with our work.

While I wasn’t totally sure that people would respond to the quiz, due to the fact that it did involve 12 questions that may seem like a big commitment for some people, I wasn’t exactly surprised either. Buzzfeed quizzes have risen in popularity over time, while a number of other game-style projects have also been well-received by audiences. ‘Project Architeuthis’ is the first alternate reality game (ARG) ever launched by a branch of U.S. Armed Forces’ (pp. 1). Marketed through Facebook, the game involves a number of different puzzles for the viewer to move through, with the aim that the US Armed forces would be able ‘to locate the ideal candidates for Cryptology’ (pp. 2). The game was the multi-platform campaign Shorty Award winner, and not only worked as an important piece of advertising, but also as an engaging piece of online screen media.

The piece is also interesting in the way that, while it is a fictional piece, it looks for real skills within the users, and simulates situations that will test real skills. While I am starting to feel like a broken record with my talks about fictional vs non-fictional pieces, it is something that constantly seems to keep coming up throughout my work in this subject. Through my discoveries in this course, I felt as though I would learn more about the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction pieces. Instead, each project has tangled up the definitions more and more. The piece we are in the midst of creating uses the real-life platforms of Facebook and Wix to speak to a real audience about their real thoughts, with a supplementary quiz that asks questions about real things. Despite this, the pieces we are recreating aren’t actually real, they are representations of our audiences thoughts.

As we near the end of the semester, my thoughts about online screen media and the characteristics of it are becoming more refined. In terms of fiction vs non-fiction, I have discovered that when it comes to online screen media, pieces do not necessarily need to be either fictional or non-fictional. Online screen media is much more experimental when compared to other forms, with less regulation around it. Because of this, works can fall into a number of categories, rather than having clear distinctions. The next thing we must turn to in order to finish our piece is the final element of our project, the ‘your first impressions video’, with many decisions still needing to be made on the way this will be completed.

Research

Academic:  Kim, Y 2015, ‘Globalisation of the Privatised Self-Image: The reaction video and its attention economy on Youtube’, Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia, edited by: Hjorth, L and Khoo, O, Taylor and Francis, pp. 439-440

Project: Campbell Ewald, L n.d, Project Architeuthis, Client: US Navy, Shorty Awards website, viewed 20 May 2018, < http://shortyawards.com/7th/project-architeuthis >

 

As mentioned in my last blog post, while assignment 4 has few parameters, we have been asked to incorporate four online screen media characteristics into our work.

The first that we will be incorporating is interactivity. Our audience will be offered a number of ways that they can interact with our piece through our website and Facebook page. The audience will have the ability to work through our original Korsakow project as they wish, before having the chance to interact through our Facebook posts and complete our quiz. The project involves a different layer of interactivity also, as it asks our audience to react to our posts and comment something that will end up being the basis of a new project.

Cross-platform is another characteristic that is imperative to our project. Our project is spread across many different platforms including Korsakow, Facebook, Wix, uQuiz and Youtube, with each of these platforms contributing to the project. Korsakow is important as it provides our main project, and Facebook is the major way we are communicating with our audience. uQuiz and YouTube work hand in hand to give our audience the answers to what album covers we recreated in Judging by the Cover, and Wix is what ties each of these platforms together, creating a hub for our project. Through this, we will also be hitting the requirement of including a number of media types. Our Facebook page will feature a range of written content and photographs, while video will be featuring on our website through our ‘your first impressions’ section.

Our project will also be non-linear. While we do suggest that the audience first views our Korsakow project before interacting with the Facebook page, quiz and other elements of the project, the audience is free to make their own decisions of which elements of the project they wish to invest themselves in and in which order they do this.

Finally, our project will also display the characteristic user-generated. A large part of our final project revolves around our users commenting on our Facebook posts with their first impressions of an album cover that we can use to create a video, as well as users actively taking our quiz. Without the users interacting with our project, we will have no content to generate and quite simply no project at all, as this is all about the users.

While my first blog post may make our thinking process for coming up with this project simple, it was anything but. It did take us a long time to come to the conclusion that we wanted to create something social media based, and even when we did, we weren’t exactly sold on the idea. Speaking to the class through our first feedback session helped us to cement our idea. We were doubting the use of a quiz in our project, however majority of the groups thought that the quiz was an idea that suited our project well, with some groups suggesting ways to actually execute this. Another group suggested that we use Instagram story polls to promote our ideas, and while this is not something we plan to do at this point in time, this suggestion helped us to think more about ways that we can quickly and easily ask people to contribute. Asking people to comment long pieces may not be practical, where as polls or quick and easy ‘comment one sentence’ posts may give us more responses.

A concern of mine at the current moment is that, while we now have quite a solid idea that i’m glad to say will definitely teach me something about the way people contribute online, our idea did take a very long time to formulate. While we liked the idea of looking at first impressions and seeing people contribute to the project, we were unsure for a very long time as to how to achieve this. Because of this setback, it now means that our Facebook campaign, especially the section that asks people to contribute their ideas, will not be able to be opened for as long as we hoped, as we will need to allow ourselves a week to actually produce the video and ensure it is of high quality. This makes our window of opportunity smaller, as we will now be relying on people to interact with our Facebook posts quickly.

While this has the potential to effect our projects outcome, it does not mean that it is impossible to gain enough responses. In the text ‘The Impact of Social TV and Audience Participation on National Cultural Policy: Cocreating television comedy with #7DaysLater’, author Jonathon Hutchinson (2015) discusses the ABCs collaborative project with online up and coming YouTubers called #7DaysLater. #7DaysLater was created to engage a younger demographic, and asked audiences to contribute their ideas and plots for the producers to use to create the comedy episodes. The interesting thing about this project was the time frame associated with creating it. On Monday, a Google Hangout would be opened for participants to comment in, the actual filming would take place from Wednesday, with the final product broadcast on Monday. While the ABC team is much more experienced than we are, and has a larger scope than we do, #7DaysLater proves that a short production time is possible to create something well.

Something that will be important for us to do is ensure our posts ask our audience to contribute in a way that is quick and easy, and does not require much work of them. Published in 2016, Decreasing Attention Spans and Your Website, Social Media Strategy suggests that the average human attention span is just 8 seconds, something worsened by ever-growing social media. This means we need to create something that is able to be absorbed by our audience in a short amount of time, otherwise something that attracts our audiences attention and hooks them in for longer than this period. The author of the piece does make many suggestions to people who use social media for marketing and advertising, one of these relating to frequency. He suggests that posting the same piece of content a number of times to ensure it is viewed by as many people as possible is both okay and very important. This is a strategy that we will be implementing, as we do not have a lot of time to waste making hundreds of different posts, yet we also need to ensure we are reaching as many people as possible.

Another important thing we need to ensure is that our posts are asking our audiences to do something that is interesting and enjoyable. While The Hunger Games series is not an online screen media piece, the franchise used online channels, particularly Facebook, to involve the audience. At the time of the Mockingjay Part 2 film release, The Hunger Games Facebook page asked its fans to post images of their fan art through the hashtag #mockingjayfanart, with a Fan of the Week chosen each week. While this campaign did not target the ‘quick and easy’ element, the franchise understood their audience and created posts that would engage them in a way that was interesting. The page has also followed along with the suggestion surrounding frequency of post, with the page being updated regularly, even years after the final films release.

While something as involved as a fan art would never work for our piece, we have been able to identify that our audience would be more likely to respond to something quick and easy. Therefore, asking our audience to comment their first impressions of our chosen album artwork in one sentence is likely to be the best way to target our audience moving forward.

Research (as listed above)

Academic: Hutchinson, J 2015, ‘The Impact of Social TV and Audience Participation on National Cultural Policy: Cocreating television comedy with #7DaysLater’, Communications, Politics and Culture, vol. 47, is. 3.

Project: The Hunger Games movie 2016, Fan of the Week, Facebook, 6 February, viewed 16 May 2018, < https://www.facebook.com/TheHungerGamesMovie/photos/a.288998967783428.89832.159746560708670/1324782467538401/?type=3&theater >

 

With assignment 3 completed, it’s time to head back to the beginning one final time and create one final project in Thinking in Fragments. This assignment asks that we build further on assignment three and incorporate four characteristics into our final online screen media piece. In opposition to our last task, this time the parameters are much broader, with no set guidelines being made with regards to how much we have to produce. This honestly does make me nervous, as I am someone that prefers to work with strong constraints.

One of the strong points of our initial project was the way that it truly captured our first impressions, and looked at the idea of first impressions in a visual way. We still feel that the idea of first impressions is something interesting to explore, and something we would like to look at in further detail. To do this, we have discussed taking it a step further, and looking at how people’s first impressions differ from one another, how we all have a unique look on things.

In her journal article ‘Storyworld: the Bigger Picture, investigating the world of multi-platform/ transmedia production and its affect on storytelling processes‘, Anna Zaluczkowska discusses the new phenomenon of multi-platform production, how storytelling is changing, and how writers need to become content creators.

While Zaluczkowska highlights many of the positives of this kind of production, she also mentions the problems associated with this form. She notes that ‘many drama experiments have failed due to small numbers of audience or participants’ (98). This perfectly encapsulates our worries with looking at other people’s first impressions. While it’s one thing to create a project of our own, it’s a whole other thing relying on an external audience to create our piece. In this day and age, content viewers are ‘skimming the surface’ of content, and relying on audiences to write long passages or create first impressions themselves would be unlikely to work. Knowing this, it has been important for us to think about creating something that explores the idea of everyone’s different first impressions that we know will actually be feasible. 

This has left us with the question: to what degree are people likely to interact with online content?

While we initially found this question to be a challenge, we have decided to embrace it and use our project to test how far people are willing to contribute online, whether people are more likely to comment their thoughts or complete a more extensive competitive quiz. A piece of feedback we received from our last assignment was that the audience enjoyed the ‘guessing game’ style of the piece, and feel as though a quiz could take this idea one step further.

In her piece, Zaluczkowska discusses Jeff Gomez’ principles of transmedia narrative and how they lead to the success of multi-platform production. One thing she notes is the importance of using more than three platforms, and ensuring that each of these platforms ‘introduce the audience to new story elements that expand the world’ (93). We feel as though publishing our video on Korsakow, creating a quiz and using both a Facebook and Wix site allows us to expand our story. Our quiz will offer the answers to which exact album covers we recreated in Judging by the Cover, while the Facebook page will act as a communication platform that will allow our audience to share their own first impressions.

We hope to incorporate two elements to our project. Using a Wix website as our main point of contact, we will be using an external website to create a basic quiz for our audience to complete. The questions will reveal the album covers we recreated in our Korsakow project, giving the more competitive audience members incentive to take the quiz. Not only will the link live alongside the Korsakow project on our website, however it will also be promoted on a Facebook page. On our Facebook page, we will be splitting the posts so that half cover the quiz, and the other half covers our second element. Our second element will involve us choosing a new album cover and writing posts on our Facebook page that will ask our followers to comment their first impressions of the album cover, which we will put together and make into one cohesive video. There are always risks with something like this, as we are placing a lot of our success on our audience and potentially setting ourselves up for failure as spoken about in Zaluczkowska’s text, however, failure in gaining responses will help to show us how deep the audiences engagement is. 

The piece surrounding our audiences first impressions will not only work to show how peoples first impressions can either be so similar or so different, but it will also create an interesting piece of interactive online screen media. While we will be filming and directing the final product, the entire video will be based off other people’s ideas, it will be the audiences story, not ours.

Thirst is an online collaborative documentary created in Western Sydney by members of the community. Thirst was an experiment that explored the idea of giving regular people in the community with no particular experience with documentary or film making ‘the tools to create what they want to see in a documentary and determine how they want it portrayed, with the support of a professional production team’. (WSROC, para.3) The project uses the website CrowdTV to help instil the collaborative nature, and looks at the uses and meanings of water across Western Sydney in different cultures. The 17 minute documentary that resulted from the experiment not only brings awareness to issues surrounding water and the environment, but it also allowed people to use CrowdTV to submit their ideas and create something based off what the audience was thinking. This project has shown us that allowing the audience to create the story can be done quite successfully. The project was also completely run through Facebook and Twitter, as well as CrowdTV, showing us that it is possible to reach enough people through social media to create a far-reaching project.

Choosing the social media platform to use has been a very important part of the early stage of our project, as it could completely impact the amount of interaction we receive and, as we are relying heavily on our audience for our assignments completion, we need to ensure the audience is willing to interact with that platform. While we have decided on Facebook, we initially thought of using Instagram, as there have been many examples of strong and successful Instagram campaigns. An example of this is the lingerie and intimates brand Aerie, who started a movement called #aerieREAL, where the company asked users to post images of themselves that showed their body confidence, no matter their size, with the hashtag #aerieREAL. The organisation pledged to donate $1 to the National Eating Disorders Association for each post, offering both incentive to the audience to contribute, and spreading a strong message.

Comparing this project to ours, while there are some clear things we could have taken from this campaign to create our own Instagram account, there were also some aims that we had that didn’t fit the Instagram mould so well. This campaign relied heavily on people creating their own posts and using hashtags to connect all of the pieces together. While this was effective for this specific campaign, I’m not sure that we would get enough people willing to go out of their way to make a post and hashtag it. I also feel that, with our project, people’s written comments surrounding their first impressions will be of more importance than the images that Instagram is built for.

Our next steps will be to set up our website, quiz and Facebook page to ensure we are beginning to reach a large enough audience and gain the appropriate information that we need to produce the last piece of our final product.

Research (as featured in the above post):

Academic: Zaluczkowska, A 2011, ‘Storyworld: the Bigger Picture, investigating the world of multi-platform/transmedia production and its affect on storytelling processes’, Journal of Screenwriting, Volume 3, Number 1, pp. 83-101

Project: WSCOR 2011, Premier of Thirst, a film made by Western Sydney about Western Sydney, WSCOR, viewed 15 May 2018, <https://wsroc.com.au/media-a-resources/releases/media-release-november-2011 >

Project: Rella, E 2017, ‘Aerie launches new campaign to donate $1 to the NEDA for every unretouched Instagram posted’, AOL.COM, March 21st, viewed 17 May 2018, < https://www.aol.com/article/finance/2017/03/21/aerie-campaign-NEDA-donation-instagram/21904540/ >