After finishing our 3rd assignment that was a more abstract, emotion driven online work, we wanted to try something different for our next project and the world of interactive documentary really stood out. We deliberated for over a week deciding on a topic to base our work around, eventually landing on a question; How was the internet and online culture influenced different creative industries? This question allowed us to explore different industries and ideas, pondering how creatives are adapting and possibly thriving in the age of the internet.
While we didn’t immediately know what conceptual idea we wanted to focus on for our documentary, we did know almost immediately the style of interactive documentary, focusing on The Guardian and NFB project “Seven Deadly Sins“.
What really stood out to us with this project is its focus on displaying multiple perspectives in an organic and democratic way, not giving any one piece of content a greater importance than another. The most powerful aspect of the internet and content created for the internet is its democratic nature, the idea that online spaces are level playing fields for anyone to explore and excel in. Our main issues with this certain project is more on the content side as we felt that it isn’t the most interesting or accessible interviews to view, as all of the people involved are quite old and talking about the internet in very abstract or basic terms, which might appeal to an older demographic watching this work, it doesn’t really give insight into each interviewee’s perspective. These are avenues we are looking to dive into and really explore in our work to make it something we are really proud of.
Another project we explored was this collage by Jonathon Harris, “Balloons of Bhutan“, which is an incredibly dense but accessible documentary that poses a simple question about happiness to a large group of people for Bhutan. We really like the layout and display of this piece as it gave you the option to click anywhere to discover a different perspective and answer to the same question, the issue we had with this though is that it is almost an overload of choice where you are essentially stunned, not being able to make a decision of where to click. By making these thumbnails very small, Harris has created a very appealing collage, but in terms of giving his audience a wealth of options to pick what interests them, the results become an audience that is overwhelmed with choices and so they must choose randomly and essentially without thought. These are aspects we hope to avoid in our project.
“The Internet is just another experiment showing us more sides of us.” – Frank Ocean
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