When deciding on the flow for our interactive, multifaceted piece, my partner Olivia interestingly brought up Buzzfeed quizzes. It is no secret that Buzzfeed quizzes are completely ridiculous. There is even one that lets you find out what cookie you are. However, the reason that Buzzfeed was brought up was not because we wanted to replicate the craziness of their quizzes, but more in particular the question and answer format. While some create your own story pieces merely give you options on what you should do next, we wished to ask our audience relevant questions to lead them in the right direction.
We decided to start with a question that majority of people that attend university at RMIT can answer: did you catch the train or tram to university? While this may constrict some people a little, the most common ways of travelling to RMIT University are the train and the tram. We planned to then follow this questioning theme through the piece to give those interacting a chance to choose their own path that was ordered and made sense.
An interesting point that has been raised when thinking about the interactivity of our piece is the idea that interactive pieces are typically non-linear. As we have first started to plan our piece I found this concept much more confusing than it needed to be. I considered our idea to be linear as the story followed in a sequential, linear order and could not make sense of how it was non-linear. It took me a long read on Wikipedia about Non-Linear Media to realise that linear media is when the publisher selects the content to be viewed passively by the viewer, where as non-linear media is all about allowing the consumer the chance to be interactive, which is exactly why we are creating this piece.
Of course, interactivity was not the only thing we needed to create, we needed to create something multifaceted. One thing I really enjoyed about Deprogrammed, one of the pieces that I spoke about in my earlier post. was that the piece had pop ups with article length pieces that the audience could read into if they wished too. One thing I have learnt about online screen media in the last few weeks is that content does not necessarily need to be visual, it can be text based. Not only do I want to be able to display this revolution in my piece, but I also like the idea of being able to give the audience extra information as well.
In saying this, it was important that we let our text information be an optional source for viewers. Wistia is an internet video hosting and analytics company that used data from the many videos they had engaged with to judge people’s engagement with videos and articles. In their article ‘How long should your next video be?’, the guys at Wistia noted that SumoMe found from 650,000 sessions that only 20% of people read articles from start to finish. The article also proved that people’s attention spans really are shortening, with their findings showing that the best length for a video is 2 minutes long, with the audience quickly dropping off after this time.
We needed to keep this in mind when creating our piece, especially considering our audience are busy university students who are constantly immersed in multiple online platforms at the same time. We planned out a branched map of our questions and where we could send our audience on their own adventure before we got into filming, ensuring in this planning that we brainstormed ideas that could be made into short yet concise videos. When it came time to actually filming our plan, we decided to use an iPhone, due both to the relatively good quality of the footage it is able to capture, and more importantly, the time-lapse feature. We wished for some of our videos, such as the walking to the library and food precinct videos, to be directional, and actually show the way to these places, however knew that to do this the videos would be very long and not particularly interesting, which is why we decided to try out time-lapse to remove this issue.
In Language of New Media, Lev Manovich discusses the idea of automation. In the new media world, our computers and our smart phones have the potential to do all the work for us. On our phones specifically, the cameras are now made with a relatively high quality camera that has automatic settings that make filming a masterpiece much easier than it once was, and automatic filters that are able to make our images look completely different in seconds. The entire way we plan to film our project and use of the time-lapse feature are examples of this in the real world today. We are now able to generate a sped up version of a video with the touch of a button, something that really would have been a struggle with traditional media in the past.
Thinking more about Lev Manovich and his principles, one clearly stands out to me with regards to the project we have in the works. Something that I feel is particularly strong about out idea is that, while this product when finished can be engaged with as a single media item, the individual videos could act as stand alone, single tutorials for the audience to seek out when they need to know something specific. Lev Manovich names this principle ‘modularity’. Modularity allows for several pieces of online media to function together efficiently yet separate as well, meaning that it is important for each media piece be thought out independently as well as a whole. He discusses the way that films can be thought about frame by frame or shot by shot, however are placed together as a whole. This is similar to our production, where our videos each make up part of our overall create your own adventure story, however could easily be thought of and consumed individually.
An interesting question that has been present thought my development so far of this piece has been whether or not what we plan to create is something fictional or non-fictional. This, to me, still does have a bit of a question mark hovering over it. While we plan to create something that is factual and shows something that is real and truthful, it really is just a representation. We have mapped out which video clips will be displayed first, how we would film the pieces and what the character (in this case Olivia) would do whilst the camera was on. We have also asked questions that guide the audience in a specific way, leading them on a couple of different paths depending on what they choose.
With the development of the piece now completed, I look forward to producing our work and seeing how our interactive, multifaceted piece comes together in the end!