Our concept is more concrete now, so we have been able to begin incorporating our research into the way we want to approach production. We’re going to begin filming tomorrow, and we’ve already begun playing around with our Wix site a bit, so this is the perfect time to break down a couple of the articles and AV materials we will draw from.
An article I found (Rosen, 2017) contained some staggering statistics regarding the distracted mind of today’s youth. Most notably, college students unlock their phones around 50 times a day and use their phones for 4 and a half hours per 24 hour cycle. This heavy use of technology backs up what we have suggested – that people feel the need to be constantly engaged with some form of media and their attention spans are suffering in the real world. The data found here has given us some inspiration as to what we want to find from our quiz and what kind of questions we want to ask. We know we want user generated/contributed content to be an integral part of our project through the quiz.
Liam also found an interesting article (Kozinets, 2002) regarding ‘netnography’, a new form of ethnography growing to become a more effective way of studying people. Since this article was written in 2002, online searches, history and application usage has surely become the most widely used way to study someone – spending over 4 hours on a mobile device alone can tell a lot. Marketers now advertise to people online based off this data and it is part of the world they are engaged in. In a similar way, we want to know as much as we can about our users based off how they engage with our project. Many of the ideas here can be applied to the way we approach our production. We want our findings through online data to be used as nonfiction content – it will in theory be a part of the whole experience for the viewer.
An audiovisual material I thought might be appropriate to discuss was Her (2013). The film directed by Spike Jonze follows the story of a man who enters a relationship with a siri-type android. Here’s the trailer if you haven’t seen it. The movie’s world is set in the future yet scarily close to our own. Everybody seems isolated yet so caught up interacting with their OS that they don’t seem to care. It gives some direct insight into the ideas and themes that we’re trying to explore and gives a different perspective what our lives may look like today, albeit to a lesser extent.
Gigi’s audiovisual material will give us more of an idea of what we can shoot tomorrow. The music video is somewhat similar to a something we looked at earlier in the week for inspiration, in that a single shot has constantly changing elements. We think something similar to these two AV materials could work quite well for our project. The interactive parts of our project will use similar ideas, with changing elements within shots to evaluate engagement.
Group 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/>.
Group AV materials
Childish Gambino – This Is America (2018), Hiro Murai
Her (2013), Spike Jonze
MAX – Lights Down Low feat. gnash (2016), Scranton and No. 2 Pencil