I really enjoyed getting to watch the other students in my class present their assignments as it allowed us to not only see what they’re doing but also to be inspired by their work in order to better our own pieces.
This is especially true as we presented our ongoing production processes through assignments 2-4.

One presentation I found particularly inspiring was the “Queerly” app by Zachary. From assignment 3, Zachary had really professional looking app user interface drafts which clearly showed how the app was meant to look as well as the function it was going to complete.
At the time, my idea was mostly a blandly drafted website as well as an idea of the creative direction I would like to go, so this really inspired me to put more emphasis on the app functionality and appearance for assignment 4.

Without the presentation element of this course, this likely would have been something I would have overlooked and definitely helped to make my presentation look like it had more thought put into it’s functionality.

This absolutely meets the idea of the studio regarding making media both digital and mobile, as the app functionality is one of the most crucial elements of a mobile phone-based media item.

Another presentation I found really inspiring was the “#activatemelbourne” idea by Isabella. Being able to watch the development of this idea was really interesting to see how the feedback received by Larissa was implemented as this progressed. The element of this idea I feel really helped with my piece was the way that the hashtag (something that is typically utilised by social media platforms) was used to create almost a link between the physical world and the digital by taking something that we already understand it’s use altering it in a way that becomes a game for the audience.
This inspired me to create a website that functions the way a regular tour based website would work, and then having it be a link to the audiences mobile device in the form of a connected augmented reality app.

This also very much meets the idea of the studio of urban storytelling and gamifying the exploration experience.

The studio I chose to look into is the studio “To Be At Sea”, a studio based around telling time based stories of a site, whether the site be historical or mundane.
The two pieces I chose to watch were “Shopping Centered” by Fifi and “A Site of Mysterious Werribee Mansion” by Zirui.
Shopping Centred was a retelling of real cherished memories of shoppers at Bell Street Mall, about their experiences with the mall from times passed along with real footage of some of the shops at the mall. These ranged from Kim Kardashian meetings to buying cigarettes.
A Site of Mysterious Werribee Mansion was a tour of Werribee Mansion along with some snippets of information about what makes the location a historical site.

To me, both of these videos successfully completed the studio idea of “attuning to the site” in their choice of historical retelling.
Shopping Centred had more of a casual “those were the days” feel, as it consisted of purely voice recordings and handicam footage. It felt like almost my own memories (I’ve never been to Bell St Mall) were being presented to me just by how raw the retellings of this location were. To me, this vibe perfectly fit the site of the mall as it is intended to show how something as ordinary as a mall can be a historic site.

A Site of Mysterious Werribee Mansion immediately sets the tone with ambient audio played from the site, with birds and the crunching of gravel underfoot. However, for me the audio really gave a spooky vibe to this historical site. This is complemented by stories of how the owner committed suicide, hunting and familial incest to really give the site this eery feel.
As someone who has visited the site this definitely offers a retelling that I didn’t expect but really enjoyed.

Melbourne DigiTours example tour – Ned Kelly

I hope that my final piece accurately displays the possibilities of mobile media in increasing accessibility to the city of Melbourne after a rough couple of years of being locked down due to covid-19, by gamifying something as simple as a historical tour, I hope that it allows people to see their phones as more than just a social media / communication tool and something that can be used to increase engagement due to the mass amounts of technological advancements we’ve had in mobile processing tools and the opportunities this presents.

If this was being presented at a festival, I would really like to showcase the interactivity that this app can have. In its current form, due to my limited design capabilities I’ve only been able to create a mock display of how this app would operate. By adding in either the desired augmented reality features or even show the app functioning as a touch based resource instead of a video utilising Google Map tools I think this could really appear visually appealing and represent the final image I was envisioning.

Over the semester, while this course had the opportunity to collaborate in the form of multiple people joining together to handle the assignments if their ideas aligned, I largely found that my idea was not similar enough to join with any other students. In saying this, as the final 3 assignments had us presenting our ongoing piece to the other students, I found this really useful to see what other classmates had done and use their ideas to further develop my own piece. For example, looking at other mock app ideas helped me to visualise how I could represent my idea in a photoshopped app form whereas I had previously just intended to display a video of how this could look. I was instead able to create an app overlay that I could place on top of my video to create a mock tutorial of how this app may look.

Melbourne DigiTours Presentation Slides

Melbourne DigiTours Script Guide

Melbourne Digi-Tours

History can be recorded and retold in a variety of ways, however, with the Covid-19 pandemic putting a strain on our ability to explore popular historical sites and tours we need to find new ways of ensuring this gets safely passed on.

Upon looking into digital media projects, I stumbled across an app that allowed for a self guided murder mystery tour that can be completed either on site within the streets of Melbourne or in the comfort of your own home using augmented reality software to generate objects, people and stories within the desired location and found this to be a really interesting, fun and even a physically safe experience due to being able to complete the tour from my own chosen location.

I think the normalisation of this type of digital tour is an exciting opportunity, especially within a world that has been affected by Covid-19, but also in a variety of alternate circumstances such as schools, offering the ability to complete a tour without having to haul entire class groups across towns to get them on-site or for anyone who can experience crowd anxiety or stimulus overload that can be avoided by not having to complete the tour with a group of strangers or even simply people who are not in the vicinity of the tour in question.

This medium of telling stories works by allowing users to scan their surroundings using their phone camera and then to essentially insert the elements of the game into the room they’re in. When added to specific locations, such as the streets of Melbourne where the storied events occur, this allows the user to immerse themselves in the story by feeling like they’re actually in the same location as the game is set. As mentioned in Victoria Szabo’s article, “Critical and Creative Approaches to Digital Cultural Heritage with Augmented Reality,” the core experience of augmented reality is based around the idea of “narration” as the user is merely selecting which objects to interact with while a predetermined story will begin to unfold around them based on their choices.

However, also noted in Victoria Szabo’s article, this concept of retelling history through augmented reality isn’t brand new, merely implemented on a short term basis due to development issues. In this article, it is noted that the London Street museum had created an app utilising augmented reality software, but had to shut it down due to operating system updates requiring them to commission further app development in order to restore full functionality. As this can be an arduous and expensive task that may need to happen countless times throughout the duration of the apps life, understandably, the app has yet to be restored.

This brings me to my idea.

To overcome this issue, my overarching idea is to create a platform to host a collection of these tours, where they can be filtered based on topic, location or even time. Additionally, a team of game developers, story tellers and voice actors can collaborate with clients (typically expected to be historians looking to digitise their tours) to find the relevant information, create a story and have the historians confirm that the story would be suitable, record voice actors doing the lines written by the story tellers (or if the historians have their own recorded audio, these can be included) and then developed into a playable game.
By creating these experiences within the one base platform, as operating systems change, the onus of updating the platform will not be left with the client but on us, the developers of the platform.
This will also produce a format that can become familiar to frequent users to allow for a lower learning curve on how to use the app and get the most enjoyment from the game, as they will have played something similar before.

However, the issue with this idea is that with relatively few up and running examples of this type of game, people would likely not be willing to just jump onboard once the idea is presented, therefore the best approach is to investigate possible game options that can be created first, and possibly explore the platform options once a catalogue has been created.

As such, I began looking into possible examples and how they could be completed and decided to focus on RMIT’s creepy neighbour, the Old Melbourne Gaol.

So firstly,

Why might someone prefer a virtual tour of the Old Melbourne Gaol?

As mentioned, some people still may not feel comfortable taking leisurely tours that may risk putting them in close proximity to strangers.
The gaol is incredibly scary, much of the appeal of this location is how terrifying it is, which is why many of the popular tours are ghost or murderer tours which are taken after hours to increase the scary effect, for those that scare easy, this option of being safe behind a screen could feel like a literal life saver.
Accessibility – The Gaol is also a comprised of 3 different levels and quite a large amount of stairs. Due to the sites heritage listing status renovations to add lifts or ramps are not able to be completed and as such, while most of the tours are all on the one level, anyone who is wheelchair bound or for medical reasons may have difficulty climbing stairs are not able to see all it has to offer.

And finally, Australia is a huge country, why limit access to the Old Melbourne Gaol exclusively to those in the proximity of the Melbourne CBD?

The tech

The Old Melbourne Gaol has already proven that they have both the means and the desire to digitise parts of their site. Currently, you can take a 3D Virtual Tour of the gaol via google maps, allowing you to physically explore the primary sites similar to the google maps street view, jumping between each key location and being able to then rotate 360 degrees to look at your surroundings.
While the initial app I viewed offered a home based augmented reality option, I think due to much of the appeal of this tour being the gaol site itself, the offsite option would benefit from being able to move from room to room while then still adding the interactive 3D characters to give it that authentic feel.
While the app would benefit from also having an on-site AR function, this would likely result in almost creating two completely separate versions of the story, one in 3D map view and one in AR, while this would be a fantastic option, for simplicity’s sake my idea involves letting the user view the 3D map version while physically standing in the room when on-site.

Possible Stories

So what kind of stories could be focused upon for this particular piece? Well, the Old Melbourne Gaol already has some key stories at hand to emphasise their importance not only in Victorian, but Australian history.
Most notably are the stories of Ned Kelly, the infamous bushranger who was finally held and then executed at the gaol and Frederick Bailey Deeming, a notorious serial killer who is believed by some to be Jack the Ripper due to his tendency for murder along with his being in Whitechapel at the time that the killings took place.

As Ned Kelly was hung at the gaol, a recreation of this final moments can be added by scanning the Ned Kelly death mask. This would allow for a retelling of the bushranger’s actions which would ultimately lead to the moment he mutters his much debated final words “such is life”.

Frederick Bailey Deeming’s hanging is less iconic, however, scanning his death mask can also reveal a quick recap on Jack the Ripper ending with a retelling of his hanging detailing his crimes before ending with his hanging.

References

Hjorth, L, de, SESA, & Lanson, K (eds) 2020, The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art, Taylor & Francis Group, Milton. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [30 April 2022].

Old Melbourne Gaol | National Trust Victoria. 2022. Old Melbourne Gaol | National Trust Victoria. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.oldmelbournegaol.com.au/. [Accessed 30 April 2022].

The combination of digital artwork displayed in real life locations is no longer a sci-fi dream due to the continuing advancements made to both portable computing and image capturing devices such as smartphones.
With smartphones comes an exciting digital opportunity in augmented reality, where digitally created content can be seamlessly merged into your surroundings before your very eyes.

Game Developers “True Crime Games” have used this AR technology to bring the historically accurate murder mystery “Misadventure in Little Lon” to life, sending the user through the streets of 1910 Melbourne to explore its heritage sites where these real events occurred.

In a post Covid-19 world, this app can be enjoyed both without a human guide or tour groups and can be enjoyed from the comfort of your own home, with even the streets of Melbourne being able to be digitally recreated. As discussed in the reading “Playful Urban Spaces, A Historical Approach to Mobile Games” this type of game is known as a Location-Based Mobile Game due to the linking of information provided from the smartphone to the static physical location of Melbourne.

The game uses digital models voiced by real people to retell the story, but is made in a way that forces you to interact with the characters as well as actually investigate the clues you have received in order to make decisions on what to do next. As discussed in “The Art of Tacit Learning in Serious Location-Based Games” the combination of wayfaring and placemaking brings the opportunity for tacit learning due to the requirement to not only be in the correct location, but also by providing the correct items to the relevant models in order to gain more clues

The developers have also added a comedic element to the game to keep you entertained and immersed in the content, which I discovered by trialling the game, as I was instructed to “keep my grubby mits to myself” upon trying to click on the newspaper this boy was trying to give me.

Along with a non-abrasive backing music, the game is complete with sound effects of bells, swishing newspapers and even the sound of horse shoes on gravel as you travel around the streets, which while I admit, I am no expert on the sounds of 1910 Melbourne, as far as I’m aware make me feel like I’m authentically experiencing 1910 Melbourne.

Games such as this take ideas such as city crime tours which are often popular with tourists and puts the exciting spin of being able to explore at your own pace as well as actually including you in the activities with their digital retelling of the story.

To play on site, you can line up the characters to the appropriate Melbourne landmarks to get the most out of the immersive AR experience, however, if playing at home, you can scan your surroundings and select a flat surface for the models to appear for you to interact with.

However, it may be worth noting that the game is best experienced standing up, as there were some scenarios that didn’t play out ideally due to being on an odd angle to the flat surfaces by sitting down.

The game is accessible on both the Apple App store and the Google Play store for between $3.49 and $4.99 AUD depending on your platform.
Those using Apple devices can receive a free trial of the first two scenes with the option of paying to receive the full game.

Along with the popularity of their other similarly designed game “Eastern Market Murder” this shows that this is an exciting production opportunity for those interested in Art, Gaming, History and even Tourism to get involved not just locally but even internationally, with a plethora of possible historic tales and locations just waiting to be retold in an easily accessible and attention grabbing way.

References

de Souza e Silva, Adriana, and Larissa Hjorth. 2009. “Playful Urban Spaces”. Simulation & Gaming 40 (5): 602-625. doi:10.1177/1046878109333723.

Sheahan, Jacob, Hugh Davies, and Larissa Hjorth. 2021. “The Art Of Tacit Learning In Serious Location-Based Games”. Frontiers In Education 6. doi:10.3389/feduc.2021.686633.

My role in the production of this piece was the structuring of the piece and the editing of the audio together.
Due to Caitlin having a personal connection to the family, we felt this was best to keep the recorded audio to feel natural and like a regular conversation instead of a formal interview piece.

From suggestions taken from Macadam’s “The journey from print to radio storytelling: A guide for navigating a new landscape” I attempted to “Narrow your story’s focus” and edit out anything that wasn’t relevant to the story we wanted to tell. I then grouped pieces of the audio together if they had a similar discussion theme.

The narrative is structured to take us through the business’ journey chronologically without sounding like an advertisement.
With both Jess and her mum having friendly voices and talking naturally like they were talking to a friend, we wanted to keep the story sounding light as the product itself, slime, is typically a toy designed for fun or to reduce stress.
We also utilised the concept of “Active Sound” taken from Macadam’s “Active sound: How to find it, record it and use it” and chose to record some sounds made from real slime and implement that within the piece.

I think the fact that both Jess and her mum went through the same experience but from different sides of the business really helped us to intertwine their audio grabs and tell the exact same story from differing views.
I feel that this kept the piece interesting as you were still only focusing on the one narrative, but were able to keep your interest with different voices and opinions.

From the overall production process, I have learned that better communication with team members will make the process much easier. Due to minimal easy communication, many decisions were made individually that may not have been run by other team members. This may have been done due to either not attempting to communicate with the team or due to not being able to communicate with the team in a timely fashion.

From the feedback received, a big thing that needed to be changed was the pacing of Jess’ dialogue. As she talks quite fast and with high energy, we have added some space between segments as well as changing between Jess and her mum if discussing the same topic when possible to keep the piece sounding interesting and refreshing.
Also, the introduction of a quick explanation to ensure that listeners understand what slime is to ensure they know what Jess’ business sold. This was done in a similar way discussed in Macadam’s “Writing through sound: A toolbox for getting into and out of your tape” when talking about “Getting into your tape” by offering a tease and then a backID.

I think to improve the standard of the work, there needs to be a focus on communication and being prepared in advance.
Much of the piece was discussed well in advance, however, due to the lack of communication, there was not much progress made on the piece unless directly discussed. However, as we were also putting much of our focus on our radio show, this may have also been why much of the progress was left to the last minute.

Compared to the demo, the biggest thing we improved on was preparedness.
Coming into the demo, we had minimal chance to practice in the live to air booth and needed to do a quick run through to ensure we were comfortable with how it would run before recording.
For the live show, we did a test of our levels, confirmed if any segments needed to be read by a particular person and then jumped straight into it.

We really took the idea of doing the show in a single take to heart however, unfortunately, due to a lack of communication on the total length of one of the interviews, we found ourselves scheduled to go over our time limit.
We attempted to compensate for this by cutting out one of our songs, however, there was some miscommunication regarding the end of some music which had instead left us roughly 30 seconds short.

As a result, we did need to go back and rerecord the last 5-8 minutes of the show to ensure that we hit the 57:59 requested timeframe for our radio show.

When deciding on interviews for our show, the piece “Who Gets To Tell Australian Stories?” published by Media Diversity Australia helped us to pick between potential ideas. While most Australian’s have now experienced the lockdowns of 2020, this gave us the inspiration to seek a story from someone on their experience on being locked out of the country instead of just locked down.

Additionally, “Defamation – Legal information for community organisations” published by Justice Connect, helped when interviewing about the tattooing industry as the talent had been stood down by his previous employer, also as we were being given a public platform, we had to ensure that we did not say anything that would be defamatory

Beaman’s “Interviewing for Radio” – Helped us when deciding the official interviews to go ahead with by focusing on what actually is the story at hand and is it interesting or relevant enough for our potential audience?
We wanted the interviews to all be relevant to the theme of overcoming the struggles of 2020, and with interviews about what people’s experiences being locked down, locked out and even thriving in a primarily online setting, I think we kept the interviews different enough to remain interesting but still relevant to the primary theme.

Much of our feedback tended to revolve around encouraging the discussion segments between myself and Caitlin due to them feeling natural and friendly and also amending some of the language we use as well as our transitions to improve the flow of the show.
We took this information to heart and made the effort to include additional moments where Caitlin and I could talk to each other, even using this as an introduction to one of the interviews.

Similarly, we purposefully amended the way we reintroduced ourselves after a song break to try and feel less jagged and avoid using terms like “Welcome back” or referring to our pieces as “interviews”.

Overall, while the show was by no means perfect, I’m pretty happy with how this radio show turned out and was pleasantly surprised with how calm and not rushed we were in the recording booth.

Week 4 Room With A View Reflection

Room With A View – Week 5 Reflection

Room With A View Week 6 Reflection

Room With A View Week 6 Reflection.

Week 5 Reflection for Room With A View

Week 4 Reflection