Jess Else's Media Factory Blog

Lev Manovich writes about five major principles of new media in his text The Language of New Media, two of these being variability and modularity. Manovich describes modularity as being ‘the fractal structure of new media’, meaning that each piece of media can be broken down into very small pieces, for example, a film can be broken down into scenes, then broken down further into hundreds of still images and separate sound files. The important piece of this theory that relates to our projects is that each piece or fragment is able to act independently as well as within the project as a whole. When speaking about variability, Manovich notes that, with old media, the creator would assemble the media piece manually and it would be permanently fixed, with each viewer then watching the same piece. With new media however, pieces are often assembled by a computer and give rise to many different versions, with variability relying heavily on modularity. Modularity and variability are the two major things we needed to think about when deciding what to make our project about and how to construct it.

Having had some time to think about the project over the mid-semester break, we decided to explore the idea of recreating album covers, and matching the movements in these recreations to music. While we liked the idea of doing this in time to music from the album, copyright issues sent us metaphorically packing on that idea. We knew that it was going to be very important for us to make something with a unique angle, as album cover recreation is something that has been done many times before, especially in a comedic sense.

Cover for Me is a part of the ‘Music is the Answer’ quiz, held monthly at The Gun Pub in Hackney. The challenge involves people recreating album covers in under ten minutes, with many of the results posted on a Tumblr blog. Because of the time constraint, the results are very haphazard and entertaining. This blog is a great example of an interactive piece of online screen media, as it allows the audience to contribute to the project, while also looking at album cover recreation in a unique way. ‘The Kitten Covers’ is another Tumblr blog completely devoted to the recreation of album covers, with this blog getting album covers and replacing every human on the cover with a different kitten.

Through researching already existing album cover recreation pieces, it was clear to see that the most common ideas are comedic, photograph based projects, and that while those listed above have been very successful, there is a clear gap with regards to video and audio based recreations. Another thing noted was that album covers are always thought of with regards to the music on them, they are merely seen as a visual representation of the music. However, album covers are also individual art forms that have the ability to make the audience feel something when looking at them, without actually thinking about the music they’re based on. We saw this as an interesting idea to look at, and have decided to use video and audio to act out our first impressions of eleven album artworks, disregarding the actual music on the piece. Each individual fragment will be tied together by the theme of ‘first impressions’.

We will be working within some constraints that will be important to remember when brainstorming and finalising our idea. Each of the pieces we create will be based off art forms that already exist, we cannot create new album covers to suit what we wish to make. We are also constrained in the way that, to create consistency, we do hope that all of our videos can sit around the 30 second mark. We are also constrained in the way that we need to choose album covers that we actually have the technological ability to create, whilst also choosing pieces that we can look at objectively and that are elaborate enough to recreate.

Discussing our idea with some other groups helped us to further develop our piece. One group suggested that we think about our piece in terms of ‘judging something by its cover’ and the fact that we are changing the way we think about music. It was also suggested that we think about genres as a possible way to choose our covers or organise our final product. While we haven’t thought that far ahead as of yet, we will keep this in mind when deciding how to organise our piece.

Our project will be non-linear, whilst also falling into an interesting grey area between fiction and nonfiction. In creating this piece, we are recreating our real, non-fictional thoughts based off real album covers, however the actual micro stories within the fragments are fictional. The idea of fiction and nonfiction was something I discussed when thinking about my last assignment, where I questioned whether or not anything can truly be nonfictional. Nonfiction is simply a representation of how one person sees the truth, and it could be said that, while the aim is to be truthful, this isn’t always the case. The first time I heard the term ‘lie’ in terms of an online media piece was in the text ‘Making with the Korsakow system’ by Matt Soar. Soar uses the term lie when talking about linear films, where he discusses the idea that linear films lie.  The idea of linear and non-linear pieces was something I discussed with regards to my last project, where I discovered that nonlinearity does not necessarily relate to the order of the story, rather relating to the interactivity of a piece, and the ability for the viewer to choose their path. Soar notes that to create a piece with a beginning, middle and end like a linear film has, ‘a great deal gets left on the cutting room floor’, as the piece needs to be structured in a certain way. With nonlinear pieces, less gets left out as more possibilities can be explored and much less structure is required. This description clearly matches what we hope to create, a piece with multiple different stories and possibilities for the audience to click through.

The idea that ‘linear films lie’ has brought up more feelings surrounding the idea of nonfiction films and whether or not they can ever tell a true story. The suggestion that nonlinear films are more honest makes me wonder whether nonfiction, nonlinear pieces are likely to be closer to actual nonfiction. While this is simply a thought wondering wild in my head at this point, I hope to think and grow on this concept as we work on our piece. Our next step with regards to moving forward with this assignment will be to settle on our album covers and commence the process of filming.

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Balloons in Bhutan  is an online documentary by Jonathan Harris that explores the idea of Happiness in Bhutan. Bhutan takes happiness very seriously, measuring Gross National Happiness as opposed to Gross National Product to measure its socio-economic prosperity. With this in mind, Harris created an interactive documentary style piece, where he asked a diverse range of people questions about their happiness, and rewarded them with a certain number of balloons, depending on how they rated their happiness.  He asked each person five questions: what makes you happy now in your life?, can you tell me a little more about yourself?, what is your favourite joke?, what is a memory that makes you very happy? and, after asking them to choose a balloon and write a wish on it, why did you choose that colour balloon? He split each of these questions into individual, very short pieces entitled happiness, identity, imagination, memory and hope. He spoke to a total number of 117 people, creating a collection of close to 600 short, relatively unedited pieces that involved the audio piece of the question/answer and an overlaying, corresponding image.

Harris has created a number of different pieces that represent the idea of interactive online screen media. In their piece ‘We’re happy and we know it: Documentary, data, montage’, Jon Dovey and Mandy Rose discuss one of Harris’ earlier pieces ‘We Feel Fine’. We Feel Fine is a project that involves a system searching the web for mentions of ‘I am feeling’ or ‘I feel’ in blog posts every few minutes, and recording the sentence the phrase is within. The system is also able to record information off the corresponding blogs such as the authors age, gender and location, and records this alongside the sentence, creating a large database of human feelings, which has the ability to be analysed and used for larger data purposes. In the Dovey and Rose piece, the authors mention that, by telling Harris’ story, they hope to make clear that “the Web is now a vast repository of social information that is potential documentary content. The live and changing nature of that data is a new affordance. We Feel Fine is not static, but generative”. They note that during his schooling days, Harris saw the fragments of information left behind by bloggers and other web users, and saw that some of this information had the potential to be grouped together, creating an interesting new way of analysing people and gathering information. While Harris and his partner on the project Kamvar hope the piece “makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life”, they managed to create something almost revolutionary, something that can completely change the way that myself and other online screen media makers think about our work and the impact it can have.

Turning back specifically to Balloons of Bhutan, there were many noticeable recurring themes within the piece. To start with, the basis of Harris’ piece was the idea of happiness, exploring the happiness of people in Bhutan. Questions relating to happiness occur right across the piece, with the overall premise of the piece following the theme of happiness and what makes people feel this way. Another key theme I noticed when engaging with the piece that was probably a little less obvious than happiness was colour, specifically within the balloons in the project. While the project was photography based with audio overlaying, many of the images featured balloons, with some of the videos also including discussions on the subjects favourite colours and their feelings towards them.

When thinking of themes for projects, it’s easy to instantly think of themes relating to the actual story you plan to create. In the case of Balloons in Bhutan, happiness was quite an obvious theme of the piece. However, it is important to also look at some of the less obvious themes that can occur within pieces, things that subtly tie the pieces together.

Assignment three asks us to create an interactive piece that displays both variability and modularity, and asks us to think about our pieces in smaller fragments that can be tied together with a common theme, such as those present in Balloons in Bhutan. When choosing our group for this project, we were asked to look at the classic production process of an online screen media piece, and rate each step with regards to what we enjoy most and where we think our skills lie. Of the entire process, I rated the process of actually coming up with an idea the lowest as I find it very difficult actually deciding on solid ideas that I have some passion about. I do, however, quite enjoy researching, writing and actually producing content, so it was important for me to find a group of people that complimented some of these skills. My group officially consists of Liv, Jackson and Natalie, and I look forward to seeing the work we complete. With the semester break just around the corner, we need to take some time to think about some potential themes for our own piece, and begin brainstorming ways that we can create something that is both modular and variable, while also being interactive.

My final aim for assignment two has been to create an interactive, multifaceted piece of online screen media that offers instructions to RMIT students about getting around the city campus. I feel as though, on a very basic level myself and my partner have been able to achieve this.

Our final piece for assignment two is called Explore RMIT  a ‘create your own adventure’ style piece that helps returning and new students find their way around the confusion of the city campus. We drew on our own experiences to pinpoint the things that can be confusing for students including using the library, finding places to eat and reading the timetable. We filmed various short videos around RMIT answering these questions, before using a WordPress blog to put them all together. Our WordPress blog has a ‘Start your Adventure’ tab at the top that, when clicked leads you to your first question, ‘did you catch the train or the tram to get to university today?’ Clicking on the words train or tram redirects you to a new blog post with a video. Below the video is another question that can be answered after watching the video. The next question takes you through to a similar situation and so on. The piece allows for the audience to make their own path and directly interact with the content they see on their screens. For some of our pages, for example the rocking chair room and the silent area, we simply took a picture of the room as it was heavily populated with studying students at the time of our filming. We also added some links to information about the study areas, further information on printing and book borrowing, and images of Google Maps to create a piece that was multi faceted and interesting for all members of the audience.

This project has certainly been a new challenge for me, as I have never put together something that is interactive in the online world before. One large challenge we faced came with deciding how we would put the piece together in a way that showed off the desired effect. We decided that the best way to do this was to make individual posts on one of our blogs for each possible branch, then hyperlink each one together through the questions. We felt this was the most appropriate way to display the interactiveness that also allowed us to include links to external sites, photos and extra information. This was not necessarily easy. Doing it this way meant that the blogs had to generate close to fifteen different posts. As we felt this would not be ideal to have on our own blogs, we moved onto a WordPress blog specific to Explore RMIT. This, however, did come with its own challenges, as the free WordPress version forced us to upload each video to Youtube as opposed to imbedding them in the blog itself. While we were faced with many last minute challenges, I believe that this piece helps make clear exactly what our aim was and works as a fully functioning interactive, multifaceted piece. The interactivity came through in the ‘create your own adventure’ form of the piece, while the multifaceted aspect came through in the multimedia we used, including traditional video, screen recordings, photos, text based website links and map screen shots. While interactive and multifaceted were the two forms we decided to display, it is clear to see that our piece did involve other characteristics as well. The videos could be seen as episodic, with each video looking at a different aspect of RMIT life, and could also be seen as cross-platformed, as we published the videos on Youtube and our WordPress blog.

The piece we created would have been a much different piece had we of had certain technological knowledge. The way that our project currently stands, the audience has to click on the answer to the questions we pose through a hyperlink and watch the video separately on Youtube and access the external links through this. If we had of been able to, we would have created this transition in a more seamless way. I envision that we would of created one overall piece of media as opposed to multiple. The audience would have started their story, and the first question “did you catch the train or the tram?” would have actually overlaid a piece of media during the video. The audience would have been able to simply keep watching the videos with the questions popping up at the end of each of the clips, allowing them to choose their options while still immersed in the piece, which would of made the process much smoother. For the pages where we added extra written information and articles, such as on the study areas pages, we would have had a corresponding word pop up on the screen that the audience could click that could open the link over the video, making the whole thing one.

I was happy with majority of the actual video execution, though there were things I would do differently next time. For some reason, maybe as a result of the format, Youtube did not convert the time-lapse videos with the same high quality that the iPhone did, and most of those shots looked grainy and not well done. We also didn’t think much about the sound we attached to our videos, and some of the videos ended up with no sound at all, which is a factor when making something non-fiction. In the future I will work on giving all components of my project a consistent sound.

This piece, and the development of it, has helped further develop my knowledge of online screen media that I gained through my first assignment. The most important thing I have learnt during my progress is the definition of interaction in online screen media. I always presumed that interactive online media spoke of the interaction between people over platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. What i’ve come to realise is that interaction can take many forms, and can be defined as any thing that the audience can actively engage in and make their own decisions on. While there are degrees to interaction, some pieces of online screen media may ask you to vote on something or answer questions, interaction is such a broad term that needs to be treated that way. I’ve also begun to answer one of the questions I posed early on in this course about the parameters of online screen media. Having interacted with non-fiction online screen media and looked at some interactive fiction, I have been able to see more broadly what online screen media is and all it can encompass. I’ve also learnt a lot more about the wide range of platforms with the ability to handle interactive media. Social media platforms are important for this, however there are so many other platforms with the possibility of taking on interactive online screen media.

In saying this, there is still so much more I want to know about online screen media, and as much as this test has answered so many questions, I feel that it has also created so many more. My partner and I created this piece on an iPhone with a lot of help from automation after a relatively short planning session. What interests me is the difference between creating something like this and something more professional, perhaps for marketing purposes. What process do professional makers of online screen media need to go through to create it and how does this process differ to ours?

This experiment has opened up two other main questions I hope to be able to answer by the conclusion of the course. The first is ‘how can I make a proper online interactive piece?’ While i’m so proud of what we created, as I said above, I would have loved to have had the technological expertise to join it all together and make the whole product smoother. I would be interested in learning whether there are specific technologies to do this and how this can be done.

I am also interested in exploring the idea of non-fiction in more detail. I’ve always been someone that turns to fiction for almost everything, having strayed away from what I considered to be the harder genre. I am interested in creating non-fiction, what is involved and most importantly what makes something truly non-fiction. As I spoke about often during my development posts, non-fiction always involves elements of construction. I would like to understand why this is and if there is ever a way of making online screen media that is completely non-fictional. These questions are sure to give me a lot to think about when completing my next task!

Start Your Adventure

Click the link above to start your very own Explore RMIT adventure!

(Credit goes to RMIT for some of the links provided in this adventure.)

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!

 

Mosaic is a television series on HBO with a twist. While the show aired on television in January, director Steven Soderbergh created what has been named a ‘standalone app’, an app that provides hours of further footage for viewers to engage with. The app has multiple “choice moments” where the viewer themselves must choose who’s perspective to watch the content from and what they’re viewing. While Soderbergh does not see his app as a ‘Choose your own adventure’ story, it still allows the audience some interaction and choice with their viewing.

This is just one of many ways directors are creating pieces for audiences to interact with. While Soderbergh did decide to keep his piece away from a ‘create your own adventure’ story, this style of interaction is becoming a popular way to interact with audiences. Last year Netflix released a create your own story series for children on their popular service, using the series to gain feedback on how create your own story works. While the series is not currently available as an online screen media piece, it has the potential to grow into an interesting part of the interactive media spectrum. Another example of this is Episode, a mobile storytelling app that features billions of different episodes based around real life Hollywood stories that is completely interactive and allows the audience to choose the path of their story.

When looking at new media technology, Lev Manovich discusses the idea of variability in his text The Language of New Media, and how similar information is now organised in a way that makes each experience tailor made for the particular viewer. While Manovich may not have been describing interactive media when describing this principle, create your own story could be seen as an example of variability, creating a different experience using very similar information for each online media user, based on their interests.

When thinking about the word ‘Interactive’, my partner and I knew that we had to decide on something achievable to put together. While I loved some of the pieces I interacted with on Docubase, I simply do not have the technology skills to create something so advanced. A ‘create your own adventure story’, on the other hand, felt like something that, if it was simplified enough, would be achievable to create.

Our first thoughts for our project centred around the movie Sliding Doors, which shows the life of a woman from two perspectives, one as if she had of caught her train in the morning, and one as if she missed it. We discussed the idea of filming someone going through tasks in their day and reaching many moments where they would need to make a choice. However, instead of showing the consequences to both the choices, we would make the choices episodic, a key form in online screen media, with the end of each episode ending with a decision. The decision the audience would make would effect the next episode they would watch, they would not necessarily view all of the content and it would be tailor-made for them.

However, as spoken about in my last blog post, the concept and overall purpose of our production was very important to us, and the idea of ‘going through tasks’ felt incredibly vague and did not have a message or purpose for its creation. This made us turn to our own experience to decide exactly what we wished to make. We looked around our own environment to think about the possibilities of what we could make, and how we could use our own experiences to work on it.

In the end, we have decided to go down the instructional road, and make an interactive piece for someone new to RMIT who may not know their way around, an issue that majority of first year students, and many students beyond that face. We thought about some of the things we find difficult as students, such as borrowing from the library, finding a good place to study and reading our timetable, and used these experiences to create a bit of a map to outline how we could show these things to our audience in a way that was interactive, multifaceted and followed a create your own story format.

While our idea is still forming, it feels good to know that we now have a clearer idea of what we hope to create, and the structure our piece will take.

 

As my partner and I have started the long process of brainstorming ways to show off the ideas of interactive and multifaceted, one big question has come up: should we create something fictional or non-fictional?

Our recent discoveries on interactive pieces had been surrounding non-fiction, so my initial thoughts were to make something non-fictional. However, I did also feel that finding something that was a completely real, fully formed story all on its own would present many difficulties, so it was important that I explored exactly what interactive fiction can look like before finalising the decision.

I explored some pieces of fiction work from The Interactive Fiction Competition. The first thing I noticed as I scrolled through the pieces is that nearly every piece was in a game format. I engaged with a piece called Future Threads, which was set against a white background, with only one small visual of two icons on a map. The user had to give the character Kayla directions through the various settings and command her every move without actually being able to see the space. Like with the non-fiction pieces I engaged with, I found that engaging with this piece helped push the boundaries even further on what can be considered to be an interactive piece. The game told a story, and allowed me to interact and choose my own path, however basically none of the content was in a video format like I had previously imagined pieces needed to be.

These explorations have been an important part of working out the differences between fiction and non-fiction online screen media and what I am able to create for this project. In terms of non-fiction, the parameters are much broader. With a fiction piece, the entire universe has been constructed and the story planned to sit a certain way. With non-fiction, while you are always going to have a plan with regards to what you plan to film, there is always a chance more will happen, that other things will appear to film. Yet, fiction also has the chance to be more experimental, stories can be about anything and do not necessarily need to be fact checked or even politically correct.

While there are many clear differences between fiction and non-fiction works, there is also a very important, seemingly hidden, similarity between the two. It’s this idea that everything in the media is constructed, no matter how real a piece may seem, the piece is merely a construction. I discovered this first hand when making our first assignment. While we did create a piece that displayed the typical things we would do on our phones, we did not actually do these things, rather, we planned them and completed them in a specific sequence.

This idea of the media’s construction takes me back to my early days as a media student in high school, where a whole term was spent talking about the idea of media representation: everything in the media is a representation of something. Media educator Brett Lamb, creator of Lesson Bucket, summarises this idea quite well in his piece on representation: ‘ Representation refers to the idea that everything we see or hear in the media has been constructed. While some media representations – like television news and documentary film – may seem realistic, we have to remember that they’re just constructions. At best, the media can only represent reality. What we see on our television screens or on the front page of our daily newspapers is someone else’s interpretation of reality’. While fiction is much more highly and obviously constructed, both fiction and non-fiction pieces are constructed in some way.

Keeping all of this in mind, we felt that starting to think about a concept would be a good way to decide whether we would create something fictional or non-fictional. Having a good concept is incredibly important when creating a media artefact, as it helps to drive the production of the work and ensure that people actually want to view it at the end. I recently engaged in a Youtube web series called City Girl: A Rom Com by a 12 year old, which followed the life of a young lady who worked in a store and had really bad headaches. The only way to describe the acting, characters and overall story was bad. But, that was exactly the overall concept. The lead actor Sarah Ramos found the script of this web series when going through her old things; she had written it when she was 12 years old. With such a clever concept it was hard to turn my eyes away from the piece.

My partner and I considered a few things when coming up with our own concept, obviously whether we preferred fiction or non-fiction, what life experiences we could tap into, and what the actual purpose or final end goal would be. We also thought about what we could create that was interactive, yet achievable to create. And that, is how we came up with our concept.

 

With assignment one now done and dusted, it is time to start thinking about assignment two for Thinking in Fragments. Assignment two is asking that we build on our work from assignment one, however, instead of displaying one element of online screen media, we have been asked to combine and display two elements.

For assignment one, my partner and I worked with the word ‘Unregulated’. While I was really happy with what we were able to produce in the end, despite the fact our idea took so long to form, neither of us are so sure about taking that road again. For me personally, I am interested in seeing how professional, often more constrained pieces with a strong purpose are made, and feel that making something unregulated may not be able to help me on that discovery in the same way that other forms can.

One word that my partner and I kept coming back to was the idea of ‘Interactive’. While we hoped to use this in our first assignment, we were not exactly sure how to achieve this. In some ways we had quite tunnel vision with regards to how interactive online screen media should work. We focussed heavily on the idea of the creator of the content and the audience being able to interact with one another over the piece that was created, something we found most likely to happen over social media websites. We felt that attempting to achieve this was problematic, as we were relying on the audience for the interaction to shine through.

What I did not think about when brainstorming this was other ways that interaction can be displayed. Interaction does not have to mean interaction with one-another, it can step away from the social media sphere.

This week I watched a non-fiction documentary called ‘Out My Window‘ on Docubase. The piece opened with an explore button that, when clicked, led to a make shift image of a high rise building, with each window of the high rise containing a black and white image. When the cursor is moved over the window,

the image lights up with some facts about the buildings location. The user is able to click on whichever window they like, which takes them through the window into a 360 degree shot of the apartment. 

As you move around the apartment, a couple of cut out images of people working, the view outside the window and people interacting within the room are shown, with the option to click through them once more. Each image has a very short related documentary attached, with a real sense that these cut out images are coming to life.

It wasn’t until I interacted with the piece myself that I realised I had set the boundaries of what is considered ‘interactive’ too small. Interactive does not have to rely on back and forth interaction between the audience and the creator, the creator is able to create something that the audience can work through on their own, something that they can’t just sit and watch but something they actually have to engage with.

The thing that struck me most about the piece was the form that it took on. This piece was an example of documentary, however it moved away from some of the more traditional forms of documentary and took on a much more wild and unique form. In her article ‘Is Documentary Film Entering Its “Creative Nonfiction” Phase?’ , Elisabeth Donnelly suggests that the line between documentary, one of the largest form of non-fiction film making, and fiction film is much closer than people think. She notes how there is more of a ‘playfulness’ with regards to documentary form in this day and age, and that the idea of creative non-fiction could be a good way for documentary makers to show that the ‘solid truth’ isn’t necessarily a boundary anymore. I feel that this article helps to give a definition to ‘Out my Window’, as the format moves away from being a simple linear piece into something much more creative.

With a broader definition now in mind, my partner and I have decided that one of the two key form points we are going to focus on is interactive. When choosing our second word, it was important to ensure we chose something that could actually work well with interactive. My partner in this project Olivia had also spent some time on Docubase, and had engaged with the project entitled ‘Deprogrammed‘. Deprogrammed is a documentary that aims to depict what life was like for three members of cult and extremist groups with their voices overlaying a completely animated piece. The viewers engage using the arrow keys to walk through a variety of immersive yet simple spaces. The interesting thing about this documentary was that, even though it was narrated, there was options for the audience to click through various article-lengthed pieces of text that gave even more information. I personally found this an effective touch, as it allowed the audience to decide how much content they hoped to engage in. What my partner and I both really liked was the online screen media piece captured elements of both video and print. Having seen a good example of how this was used, we have decided to choose the form word ‘multi-faceted’ for our piece, as we too hope to explore what can happen if we include moments of text or other forms besides traditional video in our piece.

Moving forward, our next step is to decide exactly what we wish to create, and how best to display the ideas of interactive and multifaceted.

 

For assignment one, we were asked to complete a practical test that demonstrated one of the form based criteria of online screen production.

After much deliberation, my partner and I decided on the word ‘unregulated.’ During our first week of discussions, we came to realise how much content truly exists on the internet and how much of this content could be seen as useless and boring. In the past, creating video content was always seen as such an expensive process that needed to be really thought out and planned before it was shot and shared. In this day and age, anyone has the potential to shoot anything at all that they like, which is what we decided to explore.

To explore this idea, we decided to use the Apple Screen Capture feature on one of our iPhones to record our typical phone usage for half an hour. From here, we posted the video on Youtube as a ‘Half an hour on my phone’ video. We felt that creating a video that just showed the screen of a phone for half an hour with long expanses of time where only the home screen was displayed was a highly unregulated video, both in terms of content and length, as the content itself was not overly interesting or useful and expanded across quite an unnecessary amount of time. Despite the fact neither of us had used the Screen Capture function before, we felt it did work quite well to show off how we would typically use our phones.

The piece of work we created is not an uncommon form of online screen media. These days, Youtubers are creating videos where they literally explain to their audiences what can be found on their phones (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjsQkOt553Q), with this even extending further to ‘What’s in my bag?’ or ‘What’s in my purse?’ videos, like this one by SadieSaysHey, that is literally a 9 minute video of a girl emptying out her purses. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKoYTOXL9LA)

This experiment has helped to grow my knowledge from week one, as I have now come to realise how broad the spectrum of what can be considered ‘online screen media’ is. Prior to starting class I always saw online screen media as a professional piece of work. While I knew this could involve Facebook and other social media videos, I never thought about how other content could be seen as online screen media. Because the spectrum is so broad, the edges of what exactly can be classified as online screen media is still blurred in my mind. I hope to learn more about what exactly can be classified as online screen media throughout this course. Does online screen media stop at film and images, can it spread further? Do blogs count as screen media? Does The Akinator, an online app that is interactive and allows you to think of a well known person for it to try and guess, count as online screen media? (http://en.akinator.com)

Another thing of interest to me moving forward from this experiment is the idea of construction in videos. For our video, we wanted to create something really natural, capturing exactly how we use our phones and what we do. However, we actually did construct our piece, as we planned exactly what apps to use when and what we wanted to do on them. While so many videos on the net could be seen as the type where a camera was just switched on and something recorded, this is unlikely to be the case. I want to learn more about how online screen media of different types is constructed and put together.

Finally, linking to this idea of how online screen media is put together, I want to learn about what is involved in making more professional pieces of online screen media and the production process. For this test, we brainstormed our word, came up with our idea and mapped out exactly what aspects of our phone usage we wished to highlight. I want to understand if this basic plan we used is similar to what other people do with their own screen productions, or whether more professional production plans are used. As I am looking to make online screen productions for organisations in the future I feel as though I need to know more about the professional side of online screen production.

Funnily enough, when creating this test, I actually thought of one of the oldest screen productions to be made. In 1895 the Lumiere brothers made the piece ‘Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat’  , which literally just showed a train arriving at a train station. When making my own online screen production piece I felt that there were parallels with regards to the simplicity of the project they made and the one we did, despite the fact they are so very different. I also noticed an interesting similarity in the way that both of these videos on a basic level were probably seen as unconstructed or completely non-fiction though this was not the case. 

 

 

 

Please follow the below link to view our half an hour screen capture video that looks at how half an hour is typically spent on a phone. The video looks at the word ‘unregulated’, as the content is not particularly interesting or useful, and expands quite unnecessarily across half an hour.

LINK: https://youtu.be/LfwPhFL9wHI