As my group and I decided that our production would run under the theme of isolation, we were concerned about the content of our production. Indeed, we have decided that our project would be fragmented experimental videos, where it would not contain any interview.
However, looking back to the examples, most of them are interview-based projects. They use vox pops in a way to explore the notion of happiness, as they answer the question about that particular emotion. Thus, it seems that the projects have a purpose to expand the notion of happiness by portraying different perspectives, as it was mentioned by Jon Dovey and Many Rose (2012), using vox pops does not only make the viewers aware of ‘what is happiness’ for the interviewee, but also the answer of ‘why’, by seeing different backgrounds of the vox pops and what happened within the area where they live in (p.168).
So, as different perspectives from the examples come from the vox pops, I realised that our own production concept would challenge us in a way that we had to create our own perspectives of how it feels to be isolated, because our project was did not contain an interview. Thus, my group and I decided to portray different aspects that represent the notion of isolation.
Indeed, we decided to use a human subject in order to create even more emotion to the audience, which was similar to the interactive documentary examples. So, they feel the isolation through the expression of the subject because self-expression allows the audience to reflect reality or actuality (Dovey & Rose 2012, p.162).
From our plan to use a human subject, this enclosed my worry that the production would not look like an interactive documentary production. Though our production did not reflect an interactive documentary in a way that our production was not an interview-based production, where the perspectives come from the vox pops, I realised that we still used the concept of interactive documentary in a way we applied self-expression element (p.162).
Moreover, not only the visual content, but we also concerned about the sound. In fact, Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (2017) mentioned that, when a person plays a video game, soundtrack plays a role to influence the players’ world. From what I understand, in audio-visual production, soundtrack or sound plays an important role to make the viewers see the world differently, which gives a different perspectives of what they see in reality.
So, as we were planning for the visual content, we were also considering some sounds that correlate the feeling of isolation to build more of the emotional impact for the audience, which our plan was to use the sound of wind, the mind, and even mute sound to create loneliness, sadness, and emptiness and thus would create the feeling of isolation.
