This project has been a huge learning experience for both myself and my group mates Gigi and Matt, and the ideas and concepts we’ve explored have given us valuable skills and a deeper understanding of online screen content. During this project we wanted to expand on the ideas of boredom, attentiveness and engagement through the concept of the ‘attractiveness’ of social media by developing a series of videos that test user’s attention span and level of engagement.

This project displayed formal qualities of online content such as variability since it was enclosed within itself, where no context or prior knowledge is needed to experience the project. However, the video and the subsequent quiz that followed wasn’t exactly modular since it was set up as one video, but it also created a very linear experience, which helped serve the purpose of our experiment and in drawing accurate results. The idea at the start of formulating the concept was to set up the series of videos in a social media like format where users could scroll through their feed and select content to view, however along the development process that concept was lost due to impracticality and the lack of our ability to make it happen. However we believe that the current format where the singular video is followed by a quiz is able to better explore the ideas that we want to share with our audience, while retaining a similar level of audience interaction and engagement.

During this project i have learnt many things relating to the aspects of online screen production and how it differs from traditional screen production. speaking from my experience making this project, in the case of online screen-making the focus is more on the ideas raised behind the footage, rather than the footage itself. Where traditional film making revolves around what the final product is going to look like, I’ve learnt that when making content that is fixated on an online platform, filming what you see and what happens around you without necessarily directly relating to the finished video has its merits. Throughout the semester we have been encouraged to just film; to gather random bits of footage, collate them in post-production, find correlations and patterns within them and then develop ideas and concepts from there, which thus far has proven to be an interesting but effective way of gathering footage and content and has been a tactic that we employed in the making of this project.

In completing this project it has allowed me to reflect on myself at the start of the course, where I knew little about online screen making, and the concepts raised in class. Looking back at some of the questions that were raised of us and by us, I think I have a better idea of the nature of the online space that we can contribute to, and take ideas away from. Comparing our project to the ideas raised of us, I am able to draw conclusions of some of them.

“How can we make engaging online content?”

This is a question that has bugged me, my group and many others in my position as well as we want our work to be interesting, but trends and quality content seemingly pop up at random at different times. It’s difficult to know what people will engage with and how, and I’ve played with the idea that if the content is interactive, and encourages the user to contribute to what they are experiencing, it will be engaging. However now I think that while this aspect helps in creating engaging content, it is not limited to this. Interactive content can improve the level of engagement in a video or project, but at the end of the day a creator should create something they can engage with and find interesting, and in turn someone will want to engage with that in the future as well.

“What are the limits of what we can do online?”

Everyone is different, and ideas can come from a near infinite number of sources, but I feel like there are some limits for what is possible online. The internet is a culmination of billions of ideas developed by millions of people, and the themes and concepts developed globally is immense, and will continue to grow exponentially in the future however there are always constraints. When developing our project, we had an idea to make something, but it was a very sophisticated idea and none of us had the skills to pull it off, so we had to compromise and create something smaller. Constraints can come in many various forms, like lack of software, skills, ideas or opportunities, but the things that people can accomplish while working with, against or around these obstacles will often turn out for the better. The challenges presented to us when creating are there to prove to us that if we can overcome them, we are capable of making something truly magnificent.

Although I said that i can draw these conclusions from what I’ve learnt, I highly doubt that these definitions are final. The internet is a constantly growing and changing organism made up of the ideas of millions of users, and with these traits of this online sandbox, I can only assume that my interpretation and perspective of such a space will grow and change with it as I experience more and more content that is created here.

https://mattkennedy1324.wixsite.com/tifassignment4

For our final week of working on this project, we dedicated ourselves to getting the website working and all of our content into a cohesive, condensed format. Afterpresenting our work to the people in our class, we took the following notes and creative decisions we took away and adapted our project to:

For how attentive and engaged our audiences will be with our project and what we wanted them to get out of it, we decided to make it a bit more challenging in how we presented it. Originally we wanted to quiz our audience after each clip on what they engaged with the most, but instead we decided to show all the clips together and then quiz them on everything afterwards despite concerns that people would forget what they just watched and wouldn’t be able to respond to everything. However, we saw this as a desirable effect; it would be too easy to watch a video and answer some questions about what they just saw, but if the clips were shown in a clump, it would encourage our users to forget details, thus we would get results that better establish what parts of the project as a whole that they interacted with the best.

Another student also mentioned a potential problem during the presentation feedback that users could just pause or go back and re-watch the project to ingrain it into their mind before attempting the quiz. This aspect could definitely skew our results and cause us detriment, so we made an effort to put a disclaimer at the start of the video, however I am still undecided on how effective that will be.

Despite the interactive aspects of our project we were worried that maybe we weren’t doing enough to interact with our audience and there was no incentive to participate or see the results. Therefore from this, we concluded that we will have another laptop open where we will log in as admins of the site and from there, we will display the collective results that we hope to gather on the day so our users, after experiencing our project, can see how their results compared with others who also took part.

The third week of our project was dedicated to filming and producing our project and starting on our Wix website. Going into filming was a bit difficult as we were still a bit unclear on some of our ideas and concepts regarding our content. Before we started, we only had ideas that we wanted to portray and styles of videos that we wanted to film, but we had no specifics on what we wanted to film, which was worrying but we wanted to see what we could film and how we could turn it into a clear project that addresses the ideas that we wanted to put across. After testing some shots, we felt fairly confident that we could adapt what we were about to film into our final piece, but we resolved to go away on our own after the shoot and film our own things to contribute to the project as we wouldn’t have enough. The shooting process itself however, was seamless and passed by without any major issues.

Since we hadn’t filmed enough and were a bit stuck on inspiration, we started brainstorming what new twist we could add to our project. So far we had a lot of visually engaging content, most relying on the idea of remembering what is seen on screen, so Gigi suggested we experiment with colours and/or sounds. This got us thinking of how we could use these new aspects of engagement and how colours and sounds affect the way people pay attention or take in information, as opposed to absorbing it visually. From there we explored visual effects achieved through Adobe After Effects, how colour affects memory and how we could use music in our project. This posed a new problem however as we had to either find copyright free music or compose music of our own (which none of us had any experience in). These new problems we looked at continued into the following week when we tried to tackle applying our content into our website and ironing out the final details.

During the second week of the development of our project, my group members and I set a course of action to explore the practicality of our project in order to make it work, and did research to find more in-depth ideas relating to our topic and further explore the concept we already have.

Following up on some feedback that we got from the previous week, we started by looking for a suitable online software that could pull off what we wanted to achieve. Someone mentioned us some sites that might serve our purposes, such as Racontr, but for various reasons, including needing to pay for most of them, we decided to develop our project on Wix after exploring its easy and simpler interface.

A journal article that I found called ‘The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography For Marketing Research in Online Communities’ explored ideas that I thought may be useful in developing our content, and in looking at the results of our project, in terms of Netnography. It talks about using internet history and online consumption patterns by studying internet communities, and while it doesn’t directly relate to our project, the idea of obtaining information based off what users engage with is what we are trying to do to learn about the interactive and appealing nature of online media content.

In researching what type of content we wanted to produce, I took inspiration from Childish Gambino’s music video for his song ‘This is America.’ What we are trying to create are a series of media content that while engaging, test the user’s attention and attempt to distract them from the true meaning of our work. This will hopefully fleshed out in our final project which we’ll be filming next week

Research articles

Andrade, J 2013, ‘Sensory Imagery In Craving’, Principles of Addiction: Comprehensive Addictive Behaviors and Disorders, Volume 1, p. 445 – 452.

Kozinets, R 2002, ‘The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography For Marketing Research in Online Communities’, Journal of Marketing Research, 39 (February), p. 61-72.

Rosen, L 2017, The distracted student mind — enhancing its focus and attention, Kappan, viewed 15 May 2018, <http://www.kappanonline.org/rosen-distracted-student-mind-attention/>.

Audio/visual material

Childish Gambino – This Is America (2018), Hiro Murai

Her (2013), Spike Jonze

MAX – Lights Down Low feat. gnash (2016), Scranton and No. 2 Pencil

In making a start from our final assignment, Matt, Gigi and I had ideas that we got from the feedback from our last assignment, but we had no idea what form they would take.

We want to focus on specific aspects of boredom in modern society; narrowing down on the ideas of how people nowadays have shorter attention spans and go to extraordinary lengths to escape our boredom. From that idea, the prominent aspects that we decided that we want to explore are attention, memory and engagement, and we started to ask questions like why do we feel the need to be constantly engaged and where does this fear of stagnancy come from?

After brainstorming our ideas with our instructor, we developed the concept of addressing our ideas in the form of social media. This seemed like an ideal concept as most of the time to escape boredom, people turn to their phones and social media to escape their boredom, however we didn’t want to make our project on a social media platform as we recognized many potential problems  such as followers/friends, video players and organizing content to name a few. We eventually decided to put our project into a social media format, where our content will be set up to look like a social ‘feed’, where users can scroll through and watch videos etc. and like/up-vote the content that they enjoy the most. However, despite the concept solidifying, we didn’t know how we were going to present it all in terms of what software we would use and how people would interact with it.

After developing the concept, we pitched our idea to other groups, where received a lot of feedback, like timing the users on how fast/slow they took everything in and how long their attention spans lasted, adding in sound effects in the background to emphasize boring/suspenseful atmospheres and some sources we can research for social media content ideas like SBS Satire, Reductress and The Betoota Advocate. We were also suggested a software that we could implement, called Racontr, so we decided to look into it and plan our content from there.