SEX AND DRUGS EXCERPT
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x3WRbddnkqp7g6QuloP1NAr2GXiGcnmH/view?usp=sharing
Entangling Media Reflection
In our group, we decided to form our project around the idea of anonymous confessions, which lead us to our project ‘The Art of Confession’. We decided to start our project by coming up with a few questions we would like to ask people and using survey monkey to anonymously receive the responses. We came into our first issue here because after 5 surveys you have to pay to see the rest of the answers, so we then moved the survey to google forms. Now that we had the main base (survey answers) to form our project we discussed several ways that we could format the piece and make it multimodal, from the very start we knew that we wanted to include videos of the answers being read aloud out. This idea sprouted when Jack referenced a video posted on youtube ‘People Read Strangers Darkest Secrets’ by Jubilee which we then showed a short snippet in our pitch. What worked well for us is that the three of us had a strong idea about the direction of the project and how it would look at the end. Jack has really strong graphic design skills, so our posters, website design and theme was driven by his talent. Another positive was the way Brandon and I were able to flesh out ideas, about how we would film and edit the videos to suit each theme and further break down the answers into different categories. An issue that we faced, was how to incorporate our research into our project. Our research behind the psychology of why people want to make confessions and the psychological relief one experiences after a confession didn’t fit very well with our final direction of the piece. As the main research that we looked at was based on catholic confessions, such as this article by Beata Zarzycka and Dariusz Krok “Disclosure to God as a Mediator Between Private Prayer and Psychological Well-Being in a Christian Sample.” which was a study that showed that ‘confession’ style prays to god do not have a positive impact on peoples mental health. This research we were not able to include in our final work as we moved away from the catholic confession side. We did however find a way to incorporate the research about scientific psychological effects into our website, if we had more time to evolve the piece I would have focused on using the research as a way of introducing the project.
References
“People Read Strangers Darkest Secrets .” YouTube, YouTube, 18 July 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRIg2mgHkew.
- Zarzycka, Beata, and Dariusz Krok. “Disclosure to God as a Mediator Between Private Prayer and Psychological Well-Being in a Christian Sample.” Journal of Religion and Health, vol. 60, no. 2, 2021, pp. 1083–95, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-020-01107-3.
How have your ideas about multimodal storytelling and different media modes changed over the semester? How might you like to explore these ideas in the future? In what ways do you hope your final work engages its audience and communicates and/or explores a key concern of the studio?
- At first, when I thought of multimodal story-telling I thought about people using immersive sound and video. But after the semester I’ve learnt about so many different forms of media that I didn’t even realise were multimodal. Such as scrolly-telling, which transformed the use of websites and blogs into a hybrid form of displaying media. Out of all the media forms, this stood out to me the most, I enjoyed using story maps to create pieces throughout the semester. We did consider using the platform for our project but instead, we decided to use a website. As it enables us to format and embed our videos with hyperlinks to create a more cohesive result. I hope that our final work engages the audience because it’s relatable, all the confessions came from real people and their experiences, it is true non-fiction that relates straight back to people and emotions. With the main focus on storytelling in the studio to be focusing on non-fiction media, it was a fresh way to collect stories, that aren’t just based on historical facts.
How did you consider the way someone might engage with your collection in an exhibition space after seeing the exhibition in class (or another of your choosing)?
- We considered that most people would want to just watch the videos rather than wanted to sit and scroll through the website at the time of the exhibition. Because of that, we decided to write down pull quotes on pieces of paper, with the full confession on the back so that, the piece was more interactive in the exhibition. We considered how people might also want to view the videos, we have then decided on using a screen to play the videos off a laptop because a larger screen is more immersive in an exhibition space. A limitation that we face is how to deliver the audio, to make the experience more private for each viewer we have headphones, but If a group wants to watch at the same time it may be difficult and we would then have to play the audio aloud.
How did you consider how someone might engage with your work ‘in the real world’ (outside of uni)? Where might your work be broadcast/published?
- Outside of uni, I think that most people would engage with our piece on social media, which then allows people to follow a link from a bio onto the website. I would be posting small clips of the confessions being read onto Tiktok and Instagram because of the large volume of people that use the platforms. I believe that many people would find the videos about sex and drugs to be quite entertaining and then may also want to send in their confessions which they would be able to do via the website. So it would lead to the project being able to continuously grow and develop with new confessions coming in. Which would also help to keep an audience that follows the account, so they are always seeing new content.
Imagine you are going to keep working on the media collection (eg. to screen it somewhere else like a festival, or develop it into a different kind of work, and so on). What would be the core things you would want to improve and extend and why?
- If I was to keep developing the piece, like I said in the reflection before I would develop the work to be formatted on social media rather than the website. This is because most people aren’t going to go onto a website often to see if there are new confessions. The other way I would keep working on the project would be to turn it into a podcast, there are a few people that do a similar thing. Audience members send in their bad dating stories or funny experience they have had in. Which then read and discuss on the podcast. This would work for our piece because most of the confessions are funny, so people can listen to the podcast via Apple Music or Spotify, or they can see clips of the podcast posted on Tiktok or Instagram. This improvement would keep The Art of Confessions relevant and almost give it new legs, the idea we had is really good, it would just receive higher interaction and views if we changed it into a podcast format.
Collaboration
- Overall for the semester collaborating with everyone in the class was a really enjoyable experience. When it came to collaborating in our group it was also a very positive and enjoyable experience and I found it helped to develop my skills. Three out of five of us worked well together and were able to help drive and expand our ideas, to create an amazing piece of media. The difficult situation which I often communicated was my inability to let go of the fact a certain group member did next to nothing in terms of work. This is a situation that I will be faced with, even after I complete my degree so even though I found it angering and difficult to accept. It also taught me that sometimes you just have to get on with everything and prepare for the fact that you may need to make alternative plans to make sure work is completed and you can meet deadlines. So going on in the future, I will face this issue and accept that at times people aren’t going to be as passionate and put in the work and yes it is annoying, but then you also work with amazing other members in your group.