With assignment 3 completed, it’s time to head back to the beginning one final time and create one final project in Thinking in Fragments. This assignment asks that we build further on assignment three and incorporate four characteristics into our final online screen media piece. In opposition to our last task, this time the parameters are much broader, with no set guidelines being made with regards to how much we have to produce. This honestly does make me nervous, as I am someone that prefers to work with strong constraints.
One of the strong points of our initial project was the way that it truly captured our first impressions, and looked at the idea of first impressions in a visual way. We still feel that the idea of first impressions is something interesting to explore, and something we would like to look at in further detail. To do this, we have discussed taking it a step further, and looking at how people’s first impressions differ from one another, how we all have a unique look on things.
In her journal article ‘Storyworld: the Bigger Picture, investigating the world of multi-platform/ transmedia production and its affect on storytelling processes‘, Anna Zaluczkowska discusses the new phenomenon of multi-platform production, how storytelling is changing, and how writers need to become content creators.
While Zaluczkowska highlights many of the positives of this kind of production, she also mentions the problems associated with this form. She notes that ‘many drama experiments have failed due to small numbers of audience or participants’ (98). This perfectly encapsulates our worries with looking at other people’s first impressions. While it’s one thing to create a project of our own, it’s a whole other thing relying on an external audience to create our piece. In this day and age, content viewers are ‘skimming the surface’ of content, and relying on audiences to write long passages or create first impressions themselves would be unlikely to work. Knowing this, it has been important for us to think about creating something that explores the idea of everyone’s different first impressions that we know will actually be feasible.
This has left us with the question: to what degree are people likely to interact with online content?
While we initially found this question to be a challenge, we have decided to embrace it and use our project to test how far people are willing to contribute online, whether people are more likely to comment their thoughts or complete a more extensive competitive quiz. A piece of feedback we received from our last assignment was that the audience enjoyed the ‘guessing game’ style of the piece, and feel as though a quiz could take this idea one step further.
In her piece, Zaluczkowska discusses Jeff Gomez’ principles of transmedia narrative and how they lead to the success of multi-platform production. One thing she notes is the importance of using more than three platforms, and ensuring that each of these platforms ‘introduce the audience to new story elements that expand the world’ (93). We feel as though publishing our video on Korsakow, creating a quiz and using both a Facebook and Wix site allows us to expand our story. Our quiz will offer the answers to which exact album covers we recreated in Judging by the Cover, while the Facebook page will act as a communication platform that will allow our audience to share their own first impressions.
We hope to incorporate two elements to our project. Using a Wix website as our main point of contact, we will be using an external website to create a basic quiz for our audience to complete. The questions will reveal the album covers we recreated in our Korsakow project, giving the more competitive audience members incentive to take the quiz. Not only will the link live alongside the Korsakow project on our website, however it will also be promoted on a Facebook page. On our Facebook page, we will be splitting the posts so that half cover the quiz, and the other half covers our second element. Our second element will involve us choosing a new album cover and writing posts on our Facebook page that will ask our followers to comment their first impressions of the album cover, which we will put together and make into one cohesive video. There are always risks with something like this, as we are placing a lot of our success on our audience and potentially setting ourselves up for failure as spoken about in Zaluczkowska’s text, however, failure in gaining responses will help to show us how deep the audiences engagement is.
The piece surrounding our audiences first impressions will not only work to show how peoples first impressions can either be so similar or so different, but it will also create an interesting piece of interactive online screen media. While we will be filming and directing the final product, the entire video will be based off other people’s ideas, it will be the audiences story, not ours.
Thirst is an online collaborative documentary created in Western Sydney by members of the community. Thirst was an experiment that explored the idea of giving regular people in the community with no particular experience with documentary or film making ‘the tools to create what they want to see in a documentary and determine how they want it portrayed, with the support of a professional production team’. (WSROC, para.3) The project uses the website CrowdTV to help instil the collaborative nature, and looks at the uses and meanings of water across Western Sydney in different cultures. The 17 minute documentary that resulted from the experiment not only brings awareness to issues surrounding water and the environment, but it also allowed people to use CrowdTV to submit their ideas and create something based off what the audience was thinking. This project has shown us that allowing the audience to create the story can be done quite successfully. The project was also completely run through Facebook and Twitter, as well as CrowdTV, showing us that it is possible to reach enough people through social media to create a far-reaching project.
Choosing the social media platform to use has been a very important part of the early stage of our project, as it could completely impact the amount of interaction we receive and, as we are relying heavily on our audience for our assignments completion, we need to ensure the audience is willing to interact with that platform. While we have decided on Facebook, we initially thought of using Instagram, as there have been many examples of strong and successful Instagram campaigns. An example of this is the lingerie and intimates brand Aerie, who started a movement called #aerieREAL, where the company asked users to post images of themselves that showed their body confidence, no matter their size, with the hashtag #aerieREAL. The organisation pledged to donate $1 to the National Eating Disorders Association for each post, offering both incentive to the audience to contribute, and spreading a strong message.
Comparing this project to ours, while there are some clear things we could have taken from this campaign to create our own Instagram account, there were also some aims that we had that didn’t fit the Instagram mould so well. This campaign relied heavily on people creating their own posts and using hashtags to connect all of the pieces together. While this was effective for this specific campaign, I’m not sure that we would get enough people willing to go out of their way to make a post and hashtag it. I also feel that, with our project, people’s written comments surrounding their first impressions will be of more importance than the images that Instagram is built for.
Our next steps will be to set up our website, quiz and Facebook page to ensure we are beginning to reach a large enough audience and gain the appropriate information that we need to produce the last piece of our final product.
Research (as featured in the above post):
Academic: Zaluczkowska, A 2011, ‘Storyworld: the Bigger Picture, investigating the world of multi-platform/transmedia production and its affect on storytelling processes’, Journal of Screenwriting, Volume 3, Number 1, pp. 83-101
Project: WSCOR 2011, Premier of Thirst, a film made by Western Sydney about Western Sydney, WSCOR, viewed 15 May 2018, <https://wsroc.com.au/media-a-resources/releases/media-release-november-2011 >
Project: Rella, E 2017, ‘Aerie launches new campaign to donate $1 to the NEDA for every unretouched Instagram posted’, AOL.COM, March 21st, viewed 17 May 2018, < https://www.aol.com/article/finance/2017/03/21/aerie-campaign-NEDA-donation-instagram/21904540/ >