Project 2 Reflection and where we’re heading from now. (This is a long read so buckle up.)

So it’s been a month since my last blog post but nevertheless, I’ve decided to reflect on the project Niklas and I have been working on.

To put it short, what me and Niklas aim to explore in terms of using this theme of cycling is how we can utilize the Korsakow program to create a map of interviews with various people under the question ‘what is cycling to you?’

Although it may seem broad, what we aim to do is ask a couple of people what cycling means to them and what their experience with cycling is like and hopefully be able to put their different opinions in Korsakow, linking them together through keywords. In short, we’re hoping to get a variety of responses depending on our subject’s experience with cycling and then linking them together in Korsakow, using the similarities they may share.

E.g. We may ask one person what their experience with cycling is – they may say that they fundamentally use cycling as a means of commuting to work, school, places, etc. However, they may also say that it plays a small part socially where he/she get together to have a simple bike ride together – hence we may utilize that small factor of sociability and relate it to someone’s experience with cycling in which they claim that cycling for them heavily reflects their social nature and network.

What we’re hoping to expand on for project 3 is the variety of responses we can work with as well as going deeper into using Korsakow to showcase this – this also means we’ll be using a ton of keywords so organization is one of the key things we’ll need to address when moving onto our final product. Even though in project 2 we asked a couple of questions addressing this theme of cycling.

  1. What makes cycling enjoyable for you?
  2. What do you think cycling brings out when we’re riding as opposed to driving a car?
  3. How has cycling affected your life?
  4. What is cycling to you?
  5. How does this idea of cycling fit into certain aspects of your daily life?
  6. Are there any interesting stories involving cycling that have stood out to you?

Above are a couple of the questions we asked, as you can see they’re quite specific. The conclusion we came to at the end of the 2nd project however is that we should really focus on asking the one main question being ‘What does cycling mean to you?’ / ‘What is your experience with cycling?’

Following that question depending on how they answer, we would compile a list of sub questions to ask them based on their responses. This would allow us to delve deeper into their perception of cycling that would hopefully link to other’s perspective, even despite these subject’s not even being related to each other.

A key factor that came into play that influenced us to take this route was the structure of Korsakow, how the program allowed us to expand our horizon as opposed to traditional linear documentary. What we’re looking at is a multi-linear documentary in which Korsakow provides effectively despite it’s seemingly simple and more or less ‘outdated’ design.

We also feel in order to create an effective multi-linear documentary, given the time and resource constraints as well, it’d be better off if rather than spend massive amounts of time with each subject, we’d create a decent length interactive documentary that outlines the various perspectives on cycling and what they mean to people as opposed to going deeper into their lives to find out more about what their specific schedules and thought about cycling are. As said, we’re aiming to give viewers an interactive experience that gives them a broad insight as to how cycling affects different people.

To make this more interesting we’ve decided to work with both machinima as a video form and live action footage using drones and cameras. The audio will mostly be recorded and placed together separately in the post production process, speaking of which is another issue we’re faced with since machinima does take a considerable amount of time to edit and place into korsakow, we’re constrained even more in terms of time – hence the shorter interviews.

TL:DR – What we’re aiming to explore further into project 3 is how cycling affects the lives of various people depending on their experience with it – this will be achieved under a single main question; ‘what does cycling mean to you?’. How we’re structuring this is by linking the responses together with an aspect/perspective/idea that they may share together. This aims to provide the audience with a broad insight of how cycling is perceived by many people and how cycling can apply to people’s lives in my situations. We’ll also be merging machinima footage and live action footage to hopefully try to create something interesting all whilst using Korsakow to link them – creating a multi-linear online interactive documentary.