Although I wasn’t able to attend the panel presentation and get direct feedback and critique, I was able to get the feedback relayed from Nik and Aravinda.

Ultimately what the main issue we’re currently facing is the fact that the structure of our Korsakow and Interview questions and subjects weren’t polished enough and felt boring. I agree in that sense that it does seem stale and repetitive so what I’ve learned from that particular feedback is that in order to actively engage with the audience much more we need to consider perhaps lowering the amount of interviewees to 3 rather than 5.

This’ll give us more time to get to know less people in more detail – quality over quantity. We’re also looking into further developing and altering the structure based on this new premise. Although we’re limiting ourselves to 3 interviewees, we’re sticking with the main question still – What does cycling mean to you? The only difference is the amount of detail we’ll go into each interviewee mixed alongside the new structure we have planned for the granules.

In terms of granule structure, we’re looking to use the drone footage to capture establishing shots to use as a hook for the audience, although we may be limiting the usage of machinima in the process and use it more of a transitional thing, however we still plan on using machinima as a means to recreate scenarios that would otherwise take too much time to recreate. This is to also avoid using as many talking head shots as possible as it’ll drag on – so we need action shots to keep the audience captivated.

As for the korsakow structure, we’re looking into changing certain aspects of it, I believe it’ll be much easier when it comes to the workload in Korsakow as we’re only working with 3 subjects, however the overall structure won’t be altered too much. We may link a lot more granules together however as a way to increase the amount of freedom we’re giving to the audience.

Overall our main concern is being able to keep the audience’s attention and to make our work ‘less boring’. It should be achievable given the changes we have planned and so forth.

So it’s been a month since my last blog post but nevertheless, I’ve decided to reflect on the project Niklas and I have been working on.

To put it short, what me and Niklas aim to explore in terms of using this theme of cycling is how we can utilize the Korsakow program to create a map of interviews with various people under the question ‘what is cycling to you?’

Although it may seem broad, what we aim to do is ask a couple of people what cycling means to them and what their experience with cycling is like and hopefully be able to put their different opinions in Korsakow, linking them together through keywords. In short, we’re hoping to get a variety of responses depending on our subject’s experience with cycling and then linking them together in Korsakow, using the similarities they may share.

E.g. We may ask one person what their experience with cycling is – they may say that they fundamentally use cycling as a means of commuting to work, school, places, etc. However, they may also say that it plays a small part socially where he/she get together to have a simple bike ride together – hence we may utilize that small factor of sociability and relate it to someone’s experience with cycling in which they claim that cycling for them heavily reflects their social nature and network.

What we’re hoping to expand on for project 3 is the variety of responses we can work with as well as going deeper into using Korsakow to showcase this – this also means we’ll be using a ton of keywords so organization is one of the key things we’ll need to address when moving onto our final product. Even though in project 2 we asked a couple of questions addressing this theme of cycling.

5. What makes cycling enjoyable for you?
6. What do you think cycling brings out when we’re riding as opposed to driving a car?
7. How has cycling affected your life?
8. What is cycling to you?
9. How does this idea of cycling fit into certain aspects of your daily life?
10. Are there any interesting stories involving cycling that have stood out to you?

Above are a couple of the questions we asked, as you can see they’re quite specific. The conclusion we came to at the end of the 2nd project however is that we should really focus on asking the one main question being ‘What does cycling mean to you?’ / ‘What is your experience with cycling?’

Following that question depending on how they answer, we would compile a list of sub questions to ask them based on their responses. This would allow us to delve deeper into their perception of cycling that would hopefully link to other’s perspective, even despite these subject’s not even being related to each other.

A key factor that came into play that influenced us to take this route was the structure of Korsakow, how the program allowed us to expand our horizon as opposed to traditional linear documentary. What we’re looking at is a multi-linear documentary in which Korsakow provides effectively despite it’s seemingly simple and more or less ‘outdated’ design.

We also feel in order to create an effective multi-linear documentary, given the time and resource constraints as well, it’d be better off if rather than spend massive amounts of time with each subject, we’d create a decent length interactive documentary that outlines the various perspectives on cycling and what they mean to people as opposed to going deeper into their lives to find out more about what their specific schedules and thought about cycling are. As said, we’re aiming to give viewers an interactive experience that gives them a broad insight as to how cycling affects different people.

To make this more interesting we’ve decided to work with both machinima as a video form and live action footage using drones and cameras. The audio will mostly be recorded and placed together separately in the post production process, speaking of which is another issue we’re faced with since machinima does take a considerable amount of time to edit and place into korsakow, we’re constrained even more in terms of time – hence the shorter interviews.

TL:DR – What we’re aiming to explore further into project 3 is how cycling affects the lives of various people depending on their experience with it – this will be achieved under a single main question; ‘what does cycling mean to you?’. How we’re structuring this is by linking the responses together with an aspect/perspective/idea that they may share together. This aims to provide the audience with a broad insight of how cycling is perceived by many people and how cycling can apply to people’s lives in my situations. We’ll also be merging machinima footage and live action footage to hopefully try to create something interesting all whilst using Korsakow to link them – creating a multi-linear online interactive documentary.

So after I was finished with the clips I simply added them into Korsakow and turned them into SNUs – linking them together with inbound and outbound keywords.

It’s pretty rough but you get the idea more or less, bicycles>motorbikes>law enforcement. All of these subtopics fall within this concept of cycling. I’ve still got a lot to learn but for now it’s all very simple stuff, there are still a wide range of options and features I’ve yet to experiment with but I’m getting the hang of it…kinda.

At this stage it’s all pretty simple.

For the first clip I decided to focus on this notion of motorcycles in comparison to the traditional form of cycling. I added in an array of audio effects and merged them to create a better atmosphere to suit the image – nothing too special.

The second clip I did the same thing only without motorbikes and just regular bikes, mixed together with a couple of ambient tracks along with bell sounds and some cross cutting between images, it’s a pretty simple means of creating a scene with no real meaning…nonetheless…

Finally for the last video, I focused on the idea of trying to portray cycling in a lawful sense with signs and symbols associated with cycling. Again, cross-cutting mixed together with simple sound effects makes for a pretty bland and easy clip but hey, we’re still in the experimental stage so I’m not going to focus making anything too elaborate.

Of course these clips are nothing compared to a whole lot of other korsakow works, these were all made on Sony Vegas 13 and rendered in .mp4 at 1080p. At this stage I’m not too worried about utilizing the editing software as best I could because I’m already experienced with it, so I’m more focused on learning how to use the Korsakow software more effectively.

My understanding of the Korsakow program at the moment is quite basic.

It’s essentially a program for compiling a number of videos/images/sounds into a online interactive documentary.

The program does this by linking the videos one by one dependent on the keyword linked to them. The main video/image you are given first off is known as a SNU and within each SNU you are given the options of an inbound and outbound keyword.

These keywords are used to linked each SNU to each other, e.g. a SNU with an outbound keyword ‘bike’ will link to a SNU with an inbound keyword ‘bike’. To me the easiest way of understanding this concept is to think of a video mind map. A barrage of ideas that branch out whilst still revolving around one main concept.

All in all, the program isn’t difficult to use once you get the hang of it, of course I’m still in the experimenting stage of it all and hopefully I’ll expand and get a better understanding of how to utilize the program to it’s fullest potential.

Knowing the limitations of Kosakow and the specific nature of it, I had to work around formatting and rendering mp4 files in order for it to work properly.

mp4 seems to the best format in my opinion because it retains quality whilst the file size isn’t as large as other formats such as .avi. Unfortunately I don’t think .wav would work well on Korsakow for whatever reason, although I wouldn’t use .wav as a means of creating a video to add into Korsakow because unless you’re making a ridiculously long clip (unlikely), then you won’t need to compress the file size that much.

I’m using Sony Vegas as a means of creating video clips for Korsakow mainly because I find it much easier to use than softwares such as premiere and obviously using something like windows movie maker or imovie is limiting in terms of what you can actually do – although at this stage you’re not really expected to do much in these softwares.

For the most part when taking pictures of random bicycles I began to think that the pictures were getting repetitive, especially if I were to convey images relating to ‘cycling’. 

For the longest most of my images were as simple as finding a bike on the street and just snapping a picture of it, however, moving outside the box I began to think of things that may relate to the idea of cycling.

Although given the limitations of photography especially within a small time frame, I was only able to take a couple pictures of other things, not in the best setting obviously due to limitations on equipment (using my phone).

Eventually I ended up expanding this notion of ‘cycling’ into something broader, taking pictures of motorbikes and signs that relate which could branch off into several other topics of interest.

E.g. Staying within the theme of ‘cycling’, I initially took photos of bicycles and thereby moved on to motorbikes, an more or less advanced stage of cycling and then thought of ethical/law issues hence the shots of prohibition signs and lights.

Our final end product titled ‘Gamer Feed’ encompasses most of the positives effects and features we have experimented with over the course of the project. The main features include including gifs and placing a hashtag on them to create a trend, an idea which we have shared to other individuals in an attempt to create a collaborative community.

How we utilized caption has also changed in the fact that rather than using mentions and replies to gain suggestions from the community, instead we allowed people themselves to create and publish their own content based on the idea we expressed.

The end result was a massive gaming feed we managed to create under the hashtag ‘JustGTAThings’ that included a wide range of images and gifs made from us, reposted by us and content created by other people (mostly friends willing to help out).

Note: You actually need to be logged in as me in order to really get an idea of what we were trying to achieve, simply going on my twitter page will only display my content, fortunately though I have created a video showcasing our final work.

Overall I think we managed to explore gaming in a way that hasn’t really been achieved, although I don’t think it’s anything ground breaking, I do believe we’ve stumbled across a unique way to explore gaming as a genre – using highlights to collaborate with the community in an instantaneous social network.

Prior to presentation I had expanded on this notion of community, although at this point as Seth suggested, it’s more of a collaboration involving different mediums to express the same concept made by different people including us.

What we did was expand further into using hashtags in order to better collaborate with other gamers. Although we have explored this previously, we expanded on this idea by essentially creating an example of what we’re trying to achieve – by having other friends help us by replying and using the same hashtag to create a collaboration within that specific idea (being #JustGTAThings). The replies and mentions also make it much easier to connect with each other and forming a stronger community with one another – this process isn’t restricted by gif files, as long the work produced relates to the idea we’re trying to enforce it’ll all go towards this notion of collaboration.

As for feedback, there are a couple of things we need to work on, first of all our prototype is nearing completion, the only thing we’re deciding to improve on is the diversity of mediums involved when creating a collaboration within the twitter community. E.g. instead of gifs, we’ll look more into also adding screenshots labeled with replies, mentions and hashtags as well as simply tweets that may contain options for suggestions and anything else related to the tag.

What we need to work on specifically however is the report, we need to clarify our process and go into detail about what we’re trying to achieve and how it’s done as well as the purpose of what we’re trying to create. Also giving our prototype a title which we haven’t really though about just yet. Essentially what really needs to be worked on for us is our presentation and explanation.