I’ve been told many times by different people that the best way of learning is through teaching, or in the simplest of terms, speaking. You solidify an idea, a concept, or theory that’s been floating in your head by reiterating it to people, slowly concreting the points and piling bricks one on top of the other. That’s how I felt when I was delivering our group’s idea and concept for our final assignment to the other groups in class. By the end of the consultation session, I’ve managed to string up a bunch of words (that I can’t even recall now) that could sum up all our pointers into a couple of sentences.

Before all that was happening, the group struggled to define if our project work was fiction or non-fiction. We are dealing with a non-fiction topic, but with a fictional character. However, we had a hard time deciding whether we should call our project a fictional story or not. But by the end of class, we managed to come up with a definition that encompasses both words ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’, which unfortunately has escaped me at this point. Bottomline, we are progressing with our project work on exploring ways we can portray the mood and feeling of isolation without having explicit telling the user.

We gathered some much useful feedback from our classmates from the other groups. Olivia from the CrashCourse group gave us a really good tip on having a little narrative structure, but not so much that is curated, just a certain flow and a general direction for the user to keep them engaged and motivate them to move on to the next scenes. Coincidentally, the 3 scenarios could be linked together as if our subject starts off from class, and then makes her way back home in the alley, and ends up in the lounge room of her house. Previously, we didn’t really consider having such a structure to follow, but it would amount to having something a little disorganised or random. We’ve moved from being something non-linear (ie. our last project work) to something multi-linear, where we have the same Start and End, but the journey taken by the user is entirely up to the person’s decision.

Another feedback we got was the choice of using VR or a 360 camera for our first perspective (the POV shot). Although it did come up during our group discussion, we thought given the amount of time for this assignment, we can’t dwell on the technicalities and how-to-dos right now since non of us have any background on operating and producing a VR/360 video media object. Having said that, it would give the user that extra bit of interactivity and immersive experience. I don’t think I need to expressed my interest in the use of VR as a tool to capture and exhibit documentary as I have already made it very clear in my previous blog posts.