Framing Childhood

‘Framing Childhood’, by Skye Chen, Ella Watt and Maddi Emery, is an interactive Korsakow project about childhood where users choose what videos they want to watch next and they can hear multiple voiceovers at once by hovering the mouse over a different thumbnail. It’s created by a personal list that gathers childhood memories from three different people. Users can thus explore their own narrative order and contemplate on connections between the fragments of memories, reflecting on their own childhood too.

Link to ‘Framing Childhood’:

http://projects.hannahbrasier.com/student-work/framing-childhood/

Its process and what we got out of it:

Skye:

We collected home videos, filmed mostly close-up shots and used voice over to tell our personal stories; exploding different keywords related to childhood to have stronger relationships between some and to show what they meant to us or memories we thought of relating to them. I learnt new ways of telling stories in a multi-linear way with fragments that suited Korsakow’s fragmentary nature. It was great at enhancing user engagement and agency, where pause and pace was important in the design, teaching me different ideas like physical space on the interface to not hear any thumbnails. Our work inspired relationship with users too – personal lists can make users reflect, compare, and childhood memories can spark memories (in our process, we watched each others’, which recalled memories to create more). From this poetic list project, I explored the infinite qualities new media could offer in personal, gathering, exploding lists and many more aspects of lists and media’s flexible affordances.

Ella:

The perfect balance was found when including all of tangents, as well as one of our big 5 keywords as out-keywords, so there was a nice random mix of tangents mixed with the other videos. The most important poetic element of our project is the space for audience interpretation and reflection. Through new media and Korsakow, I have realised and appreciated the significance of this space and the many impacts it has. Our group changed our interface so that more people would be able to have the opportunity of creating a comfortable space to reflect, both in a physical and mental sense. This challenged my initial ideas of new media lacking this space, due to the assumed cold, and impersonal nature of the internet. I now believe that new media has a greater potential for pause due it’s infinite qualities and non-linear ways of storytelling.

Maddi:

Throughout this semester we have discussed numerous topics regarding documentary film, experimental film and new media, collecting numerous key concerns to the course. My final work is a new media project using the program Korsakow called Framing Childhood, and we aim to engage our audience through shared experiences/memories and exploring relevant or familiar themes and ideas throughout. ‘Framing Childhood’ conveys fleeting imagery through the program of Korsakow, allowing the audience to click on the clips they want to watch and hear. We started with sharing memories of childhood, then gathered home videos and filmed memories, whether it was associated with bath time or family. As a group we decided it would be best to use Korsakow and because it is not designed for group projects, only Ella could use it! We worked on Facetime to see how the program worked with our footage and made changes where necessary. The piece came together really quickly as we all individually filmed footage and then it was all put together at the end. I think I gained great teamwork skills from working on this project, and it was so lovely to work with Skye and Ella! I also understand the importance of contemplation and how the interpretation of a piece of work can be different to how it was originally intended.