Over the development of our project, our group was constantly asking ourselves whether what we were making was suited to an online space, and not just a fairly linear documentary that had been split apart. There were four main online characteristics that were discussed in class throughout the semester that we focused our project on; interactivity, muli-linearity, cross-platform content, and modularity.

Modularity in our project was achieved by segmenting each question from each interviewee into its own video, that I edited so that it could stand apart as its own piece of media. This resulted in over 30 videos! This I feel gives a lot of life to our project, in contrast to our last project, which was very minimal.

Making our project interactive was paramount to creating the best content possible, as the area we were exploring was the interactive documentary format. The way we planned on achieving this was through using the program Korsakow and laying out our documentary series as a sort of mind map, where you could explore the different areas depending on what you were most interested in. This also explores the ideas of multi-linearity, as the format of the mind-map creates a large amount of linear threads in the work that the user that traverse, with the only objects we curate are the industry categories, the rest is up to them to decide what they are most interested in.

During a few of our class discussions, the main area the class noted as being crucial to good online screen making was creating something that will get the attention of an audience, whether that be a niche audience, or a wide audience. This was an idea that we also brought into the questions for our interviews, which made for an interesting meta piece of online content that is commenting on and asking the question it is hoping to achieve.

In terms of making our project cross-platform, we have achieved this by having several of our interviews as written text. We thought this was an interesting way to show our audience how people respond to the same questions while they are in front of the camera or just typing it out in an email. This is an area however I would have loved to explore further if given more time with the project, expanding the reach and depth of our project into several different places, possibly introducing a social media element asking the same set of questions to a new audience in a less formal setting, possibly showing an extra point of contrast to the two forms we have already.

 

“Doing a documentary is about discovering, being open, learning, and following curiosity.” – Spike Jonze.