The growth of user contribution as a form of interaction within online documentary projects is causing a shift in the way screen-based documentary is conceived. Viewers become participants, taking on greater agency in forming the experience of the work as they engage by contributing personal responses to the exploration of a subject. As this idea has become our main focus for Crash Course, the University of Queensland in their journal article ‘Moving beyond the evidence’ (2015) also looks further into the how this complex and changeful format works to stimulate poetic and affective webs of connection. Through reading this, it has given me a realisation that the work we are doing may have a significant positive, and useful affect for individuals to be educated on these different countries whilst having fun, laughing and engaging in friends and random’s content. “The online storytelling platform Cowbird establishes a social media space that engages a range of aesthetic, structural and organisational techniques to facilitate the sequence of diverse sources into multi-vocal chronicles of experience” (Frankham, 2015). Through looking at cowbird I researched into other works to see if there were any other ways we could make our platform more fun and exciting! Sandy Storyline is a participatory documentary that collects and shares stories about the impact of Hurricane Sandy, which is in a format of the website where you upload straight to the page. 18 Days in Egypt is participatory crowdsourced documentary about the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Finally, The Worry Box is a participatory documentary where mothers submit text confessions revealing their fears about raising children. All of which take on their own type of look and interaction into uploading their content. For our project, we weren’t able to have a upload link on the page due to using Google maps as our soul website link. However, we are able to use Google’s forms and Gdrive applications to combine the documentary, which gives it a uniform capability. Whilst, giving the viewers a sense of trust and credibility about our project (since Google is known to be safe worldwide). Therefore, by clicking on the link via our Facebook page (which I set up last week after talking about it with the group) the viewer is taken to the form where they will read a more thorough description on our work, how it works and what to do. They will have to complete a press release form and then upload from this form their voice, document, and picture. Where we will then formulate into a video, upload to Youtube and hyperlink into the project (depending on location). One thing that I think we should think about is making the crash course image more of a brand, which Cowbird and The Worry Box use. A kind of brand identifier.

Frankham, BL. (2015) “Moving beyond the evidence”, School of Comm. & Arts with the Centre for Critical & Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, No. 154, pp. 123 – 131