https://mattkennedy1324.wixsite.com/tifassignment4

For our final week of working on this project, we dedicated ourselves to getting the website working and all of our content into a cohesive, condensed format. Afterpresenting our work to the people in our class, we took the following notes and creative decisions we took away and adapted our project to:

For how attentive and engaged our audiences will be with our project and what we wanted them to get out of it, we decided to make it a bit more challenging in how we presented it. Originally we wanted to quiz our audience after each clip on what they engaged with the most, but instead we decided to show all the clips together and then quiz them on everything afterwards despite concerns that people would forget what they just watched and wouldn’t be able to respond to everything. However, we saw this as a desirable effect; it would be too easy to watch a video and answer some questions about what they just saw, but if the clips were shown in a clump, it would encourage our users to forget details, thus we would get results that better establish what parts of the project as a whole that they interacted with the best.

Another student also mentioned a potential problem during the presentation feedback that users could just pause or go back and re-watch the project to ingrain it into their mind before attempting the quiz. This aspect could definitely skew our results and cause us detriment, so we made an effort to put a disclaimer at the start of the video, however I am still undecided on how effective that will be.

Despite the interactive aspects of our project we were worried that maybe we weren’t doing enough to interact with our audience and there was no incentive to participate or see the results. Therefore from this, we concluded that we will have another laptop open where we will log in as admins of the site and from there, we will display the collective results that we hope to gather on the day so our users, after experiencing our project, can see how their results compared with others who also took part.

The third week of our project was dedicated to filming and producing our project and starting on our Wix website. Going into filming was a bit difficult as we were still a bit unclear on some of our ideas and concepts regarding our content. Before we started, we only had ideas that we wanted to portray and styles of videos that we wanted to film, but we had no specifics on what we wanted to film, which was worrying but we wanted to see what we could film and how we could turn it into a clear project that addresses the ideas that we wanted to put across. After testing some shots, we felt fairly confident that we could adapt what we were about to film into our final piece, but we resolved to go away on our own after the shoot and film our own things to contribute to the project as we wouldn’t have enough. The shooting process itself however, was seamless and passed by without any major issues.

Since we hadn’t filmed enough and were a bit stuck on inspiration, we started brainstorming what new twist we could add to our project. So far we had a lot of visually engaging content, most relying on the idea of remembering what is seen on screen, so Gigi suggested we experiment with colours and/or sounds. This got us thinking of how we could use these new aspects of engagement and how colours and sounds affect the way people pay attention or take in information, as opposed to absorbing it visually. From there we explored visual effects achieved through Adobe After Effects, how colour affects memory and how we could use music in our project. This posed a new problem however as we had to either find copyright free music or compose music of our own (which none of us had any experience in). These new problems we looked at continued into the following week when we tried to tackle applying our content into our website and ironing out the final details.

During the second week of the development of our project, my group members and I set a course of action to explore the practicality of our project in order to make it work, and did research to find more in-depth ideas relating to our topic and further explore the concept we already have.

Following up on some feedback that we got from the previous week, we started by looking for a suitable online software that could pull off what we wanted to achieve. Someone mentioned us some sites that might serve our purposes, such as Racontr, but for various reasons, including needing to pay for most of them, we decided to develop our project on Wix after exploring its easy and simpler interface.

A journal article that I found called ‘The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography For Marketing Research in Online Communities’ explored ideas that I thought may be useful in developing our content, and in looking at the results of our project, in terms of Netnography. It talks about using internet history and online consumption patterns by studying internet communities, and while it doesn’t directly relate to our project, the idea of obtaining information based off what users engage with is what we are trying to do to learn about the interactive and appealing nature of online media content.

In researching what type of content we wanted to produce, I took inspiration from Childish Gambino’s music video for his song ‘This is America.’ What we are trying to create are a series of media content that while engaging, test the user’s attention and attempt to distract them from the true meaning of our work. This will hopefully fleshed out in our final project which we’ll be filming next week

Research articles

Andrade, J 2013, ‘Sensory Imagery In Craving’, Principles of Addiction: Comprehensive Addictive Behaviors and Disorders, Volume 1, p. 445 – 452.

Kozinets, R 2002, ‘The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography For Marketing Research in Online Communities’, Journal of Marketing Research, 39 (February), p. 61-72.

Rosen, L 2017, The distracted student mind — enhancing its focus and attention, Kappan, viewed 15 May 2018, <http://www.kappanonline.org/rosen-distracted-student-mind-attention/>.

Audio/visual material

Childish Gambino – This Is America (2018), Hiro Murai

Her (2013), Spike Jonze

MAX – Lights Down Low feat. gnash (2016), Scranton and No. 2 Pencil

In making a start from our final assignment, Matt, Gigi and I had ideas that we got from the feedback from our last assignment, but we had no idea what form they would take.

We want to focus on specific aspects of boredom in modern society; narrowing down on the ideas of how people nowadays have shorter attention spans and go to extraordinary lengths to escape our boredom. From that idea, the prominent aspects that we decided that we want to explore are attention, memory and engagement, and we started to ask questions like why do we feel the need to be constantly engaged and where does this fear of stagnancy come from?

After brainstorming our ideas with our instructor, we developed the concept of addressing our ideas in the form of social media. This seemed like an ideal concept as most of the time to escape boredom, people turn to their phones and social media to escape their boredom, however we didn’t want to make our project on a social media platform as we recognized many potential problems  such as followers/friends, video players and organizing content to name a few. We eventually decided to put our project into a social media format, where our content will be set up to look like a social ‘feed’, where users can scroll through and watch videos etc. and like/up-vote the content that they enjoy the most. However, despite the concept solidifying, we didn’t know how we were going to present it all in terms of what software we would use and how people would interact with it.

After developing the concept, we pitched our idea to other groups, where received a lot of feedback, like timing the users on how fast/slow they took everything in and how long their attention spans lasted, adding in sound effects in the background to emphasize boring/suspenseful atmospheres and some sources we can research for social media content ideas like SBS Satire, Reductress and The Betoota Advocate. We were also suggested a software that we could implement, called Racontr, so we decided to look into it and plan our content from there.

This past assignment has been a big learning experience for me, in terms of the nature of online content as well as learning how to choose one topic and really explore it in depth, the ideas that it presents, and the possibilities of portraying these ideas with aspects of creating online content. My group: Matt, Gigi and myself, created a multi linear film in Korsakow exploring the idea of boredom, what it looks like, situations that show boredom in different ways and how it as a state of mind reflects on us as humans. We used elements of both fiction and non-fiction to express these ideas and situations and I feel as though we as a group were able to better express our ideas using this structure.

The multi-linear aspect of this project follows the format of a Korsakow project in that each edit or short sketch are connected to each other via key words and themes explored in the videos, but it contains some aspects of linear storytelling in the way we chose to weave in between them. Each non-fiction clip accessible from the home screen is then followed by a fictional short, with the intent to explain more to the audience

These shorts embody the qualities of online content, as they are variable in that each couple of clips can be watched in any order and that they only have one life each, prompting the user to create their own story while unable to repeat clips. They also possess qualities of modularity, as each couple of videos are separate and follow their own ideas, while still paying homage to an overarching topic. I believe that my group and I were able to explore and experience the concept of making variable and modular online content, but while still retaining some linearity, possibly not to the fullest extent that we could have.

While producing this project, I have learnt how to adapt ideas into projects that can make full use of the interchangeable and interactive nature of online content. At the start of this project, as I was more used to traditional forms of cinema, I wasn’t quite sure how to express these ideas and create multiple varying shorts to create a larger image of an theme that I wanted to explore. This showed in my earlier discussion blog posts as my ideas that I wanted to present to the group, as well as the ideas I took away from our meetings to develop were constantly changing, However, the group’s ideas towards the types of content that we wanted to make slowly changed over these weeks and now while I can’t say we made a perfect project, it is one I can be proud of.

Incorporating some feedback from our presentation, we have the ability to take this project in new directions. We can explore boredom among people in today’s society, where we constantly look at our phones as a source of engagement and entertainment to escape the feeling of being bored, and experiment with ideas of shortened attention and constantly shifting focus through formats of  fictional content inspired by non-fiction experiences, documentaries, interviews and many more. It is exciting to build on the ideas that we have already made a start on, and our projects can only get bigger and better from here.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vW4pdidWbC-CJP61pQEPl8dS0huCl80v

Following our group’s consultation session in class, we set out to film and edit the different fragments that we decided on for our final Korsakow film. Filming was pretty straight forward, as most of our fragments were similar an not too demanding on locations or scripts. In particular, the fictional videos were fairly simple, as we decided to make them into a old school instructional video format, similar to this. However, it was difficult to organise times when all of our group members were free to film the shorts and edit them as well. We decided to allocate different tasks to each other that went with each of our specialties and what we were confident with doing. I was tasked with filming, and a bit of editing, Matt acted and edited the majority of the shorts and Gigi uploaded all the finished shorts to Korsakow. Everyone was able to go home and film various segments in their own time as well, to make our filming days run more smoothly.

Another aspect that we hadn’t considered until mid way through was the idea that we could film an introduction, or an opening clip to give the other shorts some context, or even just to get the ‘ball rolling’. We thought maybe if we added an introductory bit of footage, or even a slide of credits, it could serve to warm up our audience to the ideas that we are about to present and hint at the format that our project would be set in. However, we decided instead to just implement a still image; a dictionary definition of boredom, as well as a small list of musical/footage credits where necessary.

While filming, we took note of various aspects of boredom that we noticed around us, to prepare and continue to develop our ideas for our presentation.

This week during class time, our group decided to gather our ideas and put them towards a final project that we could start working on and filming/editing for. We had two main ideas, however we were unsure about which path we should take, in terms of what themes we should explore, how in depth we should go, how linear or fragmented we should make the project and what we wanted our audience to take away from the project.

Our first idea was that we show a series of clips or sketches, half of which were fiction and half were non-fiction, about different areas and ideas behind boredom and exploring that in everyday life. For this, we intended to make the sketches into fictional short stories in which a scenario would play out describing an aspect of boredom, followed by a non-fictional clip explaining what the idea was that we were trying to portray.

Our second idea that we wanted to do was similar to the first in that we’d be exploring both fictional and non-fictional aspects of different types of boredom, but we decided to do so by using a more multi linear form. The idea was that the viewer would be presented with a situation (e.g. a student studying) and offer links to different ways in which the student could either alleviate or worsen their boredom, followed by a non-fictional explanation, in a sort of choose-your-ending type format.

Taking both of these ideas to a group consultation meeting, we presented them both to a universally positive response. We got feedback from our instructor and our peers on what aspects of the ideas they liked, such as the idea of a multilinear approach, as well as the fictional vs non-fictional alternatives. Taking this feedback, we settled for a mixture of these ideas; a multilinear series of keyword-related fragments, with non-fictional takes, followed by a fictional explanation of the particular aspect of boredom we explored, with elements of comedy. This new direction gave us the confidence to begin shooting and developing our project.

During our week 7 class, my group and I continued to discuss our concept of boredom and how we could explore it in 12 different fragments. This was a struggle for us, as we could only brainstorm about ten or so ideas about different situations in where boredom is seen; situations that we’ve taken from our own experiences that we can remember. We decided to settle on six of our favourite ideas and explore and expand more on those six, creating two different pieces of content for each, as fiction and non-fiction. The concepts that we chose were: boredom of work, lack of stimulation, lack of interest, routine, stagnant waiting and indecisiveness.

We decided that in relation to modularity and variability, each of the different clips relating to the areas of boredom that we’re exploring wouldn’t be following a linear narrative style of layout: that each clip would have a meaning exclusive to itself and that the clips would be linked only in thematic choices alone.  Furthermore, each clip would only be viewed once, in order for each clip to be seen at least once; branching out from one starting point until all areas are covered once.

For constraints, we lightly decided to mainly focus on the duration of shots or clips, although we have yet to solidify these ideas and commit. We also debated filming the projects on a phone rather than a camera, seeing merits with each facet. At this point, we remain undecided.

Part of the class was pitching our ideas, constraints and mediums to other groups around the class. For most of the groups that we pitched our project to, most were supportive and liked the theme and the ideas that we came up with, but suggested we figure out the finer details of each, as they were a bit lacking. Another issue that was brought up multiple times was the idea of interactivity, and how could we make the project more interactive. This is something that we will continue to consider for next week.