This project has been a huge learning experience for both myself and my group mates Gigi and Matt, and the ideas and concepts we’ve explored have given us valuable skills and a deeper understanding of online screen content. During this project we wanted to expand on the ideas of boredom, attentiveness and engagement through the concept of the ‘attractiveness’ of social media by developing a series of videos that test user’s attention span and level of engagement.
This project displayed formal qualities of online content such as variability since it was enclosed within itself, where no context or prior knowledge is needed to experience the project. However, the video and the subsequent quiz that followed wasn’t exactly modular since it was set up as one video, but it also created a very linear experience, which helped serve the purpose of our experiment and in drawing accurate results. The idea at the start of formulating the concept was to set up the series of videos in a social media like format where users could scroll through their feed and select content to view, however along the development process that concept was lost due to impracticality and the lack of our ability to make it happen. However we believe that the current format where the singular video is followed by a quiz is able to better explore the ideas that we want to share with our audience, while retaining a similar level of audience interaction and engagement.
During this project i have learnt many things relating to the aspects of online screen production and how it differs from traditional screen production. speaking from my experience making this project, in the case of online screen-making the focus is more on the ideas raised behind the footage, rather than the footage itself. Where traditional film making revolves around what the final product is going to look like, I’ve learnt that when making content that is fixated on an online platform, filming what you see and what happens around you without necessarily directly relating to the finished video has its merits. Throughout the semester we have been encouraged to just film; to gather random bits of footage, collate them in post-production, find correlations and patterns within them and then develop ideas and concepts from there, which thus far has proven to be an interesting but effective way of gathering footage and content and has been a tactic that we employed in the making of this project.
In completing this project it has allowed me to reflect on myself at the start of the course, where I knew little about online screen making, and the concepts raised in class. Looking back at some of the questions that were raised of us and by us, I think I have a better idea of the nature of the online space that we can contribute to, and take ideas away from. Comparing our project to the ideas raised of us, I am able to draw conclusions of some of them.
“How can we make engaging online content?”
This is a question that has bugged me, my group and many others in my position as well as we want our work to be interesting, but trends and quality content seemingly pop up at random at different times. It’s difficult to know what people will engage with and how, and I’ve played with the idea that if the content is interactive, and encourages the user to contribute to what they are experiencing, it will be engaging. However now I think that while this aspect helps in creating engaging content, it is not limited to this. Interactive content can improve the level of engagement in a video or project, but at the end of the day a creator should create something they can engage with and find interesting, and in turn someone will want to engage with that in the future as well.
“What are the limits of what we can do online?”
Everyone is different, and ideas can come from a near infinite number of sources, but I feel like there are some limits for what is possible online. The internet is a culmination of billions of ideas developed by millions of people, and the themes and concepts developed globally is immense, and will continue to grow exponentially in the future however there are always constraints. When developing our project, we had an idea to make something, but it was a very sophisticated idea and none of us had the skills to pull it off, so we had to compromise and create something smaller. Constraints can come in many various forms, like lack of software, skills, ideas or opportunities, but the things that people can accomplish while working with, against or around these obstacles will often turn out for the better. The challenges presented to us when creating are there to prove to us that if we can overcome them, we are capable of making something truly magnificent.
Although I said that i can draw these conclusions from what I’ve learnt, I highly doubt that these definitions are final. The internet is a constantly growing and changing organism made up of the ideas of millions of users, and with these traits of this online sandbox, I can only assume that my interpretation and perspective of such a space will grow and change with it as I experience more and more content that is created here.
