After collaboratively talking to the group I was able to receive a sense of what they found, and how the journal articles and projects have impacted their thinking, and if ideas have been spouted from it. Olivia and Antonia did the same article called “The Living Documentary: from representing reality to co-creating reality in digital interactive documentary” which mainly talks about the multiple ways in which we participate, shape and are shaped by interactive documentaries. It argues that interactive documentaries are ways to construct and experience the real rather than to represent it. Whilst focusing on the modes of interaction – where types of interactions are seen as the fundamental differentiator between interactive documentaries. Antonia used this to help categorise our what mode our documentary falls under, if it is a participatory mode of interaction then what characteristics does our documentary have to excel in and how this can help our project. Olivia’s part focused on defining documentary but one part that I remember was how she was talking about the hypertext mode. The hypertext mode has been very popular and a multitude of hypertext projects have been produced, varying platforms, vastness of content and structure of the branching narrative. They all attempt to explore ways to give some freedom of action to the user but ‘the purpose of the user’s agency is to progress along a fixed storyline, and the system remains in firm control of the narrative trajectory. Which allowed gave her greater knowledge into approaching the next step of our work (much like Antonia).

Then we talked about our projects; Olivia’s was Viewfinder, which focused on exploring what the 21^st century means for mobile film – its impact on both creation and viewing. The project basically told you to contribute raw footage filmed on mobile devices of between 5 and 50 seconds, capturing the experience of being on the move by using only the travelling shot. This project didn’t really work in parallel with ours, but the aspects that did was that we need to set constraints for people to work with, eg. Under a minute of recorded sound. Also once you opened the project it told you to contribute, nothing else. This is a smart idea because it goes straight to the point, in that we want you to provide content for us. This gave us thought to somehow implement, text or a button for someone to submit content straight away. However, Google’s platform doesn’t have anything that can allow this to happen, instead we used our Facebook page as the source for people to contribute, and take them to the Google form.

Antonia’s project was a 360 video on the NY Times about Iraqi forces as they retake a city from ISIS – and experience the battle’s aftermath. This didn’t really connect with our project, but showed how being interactive and participating in the viewing process of a documentary is integral.