Assessment 3 Networked Media 2016

Jordan Williams, Andrea Blake, Hannah Tepoorten, Karl Vitolo

Muggle in Melbourne 

Link to Photo Map (Front Page)-   http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne

Links to All Pages:

Airport-  http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!airport/aar78 

Bar-  http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!bar/qzkzu

Cafes- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!cafe/lq5lj

Laneways- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!laneways/idqq4

Shopping Malls- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!shopping/qwqf4

Swanston Street- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!swanston-st/ot7dq

Zoo- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!zoo/ji904

Trams- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!trams/z1w0l

Myki- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!myki/y80j8

Kebab Stops-  http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!kebab/k0vru

Trains- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!train-station/k6ceu

Buskers- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!buskers/n1smg

ACMI- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!acmi/fmes3

State Library- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!library/gfydk

Food Court- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!foodcourt/cbo6l

Cinema- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!cinema/tqxi0

Botanical Gardens- http://s3583984.wix.com/muggleinmelbourne#!botanical-gardens/mpasc

Academic Reflection: 

For our final hypermedia story, our group titled Lemonade decided to explore the idea of building an image and text based website targeted at young people between the ages of 7 and 19. Our idea is basically summarised by the title ‘Muggles in Melbourne’, a comedic yet informative guide to Melbourne city, which targets those who aren’t necessarily familiar with human life.

Given that we wanted to target and younger audience, we decided to use humour as a device to engage and entertain the. Our research dictated that audience expectation is very important, and in order to maintain attention and receive positive feedback, the viewer must experience what they intended to. This is a concept explored by Gene Perret and Judy Carter in their educational books on comedy writing. Jay Oatway further confirms this theory by stating that in order to develop a strong online following, content must be consistent and accessed via relevant platforms where the expectation of what the content is has already been developed. Wix allowed us to create a story with engaging and immersive content for young people with shorter attention spans than adults, and a need for constant stimulation. We found it easy to drop in pictures and sounds onto the relevant page and to code image maps for added interactivity.

Our second point of consideration was to figure out how best to create our site in order for it to engage the audience. Since we knew our audience was young, we decided to go with large popping images as these would be easier to navigate and more intuitive. Mark Bernstein states that “muddled writing was more likely to be the source of confusion than hypertextual complexity” therefore, our writing was kept simple and concise, and where possible we used a clickable image map.

The image map was created to engage the viewer at more of a story level, allowing them to select what exactly they are exposed to. This is what is known as an interactive narrative, For example, from the homepage one could choose to look at public transport or at zoos, they are not forced to read through in order like a book. “The medium lends itself to circumstances where readers can play out alternative scenarios” (Douglas, J. Yellowlees). If considered at a deeper level, this effectively means that the audience can create their own expectation, resulting in them being more likely to maintain engagement.

Given time and work, the ideal outcome of a location-based website like the one we built would be to fit into an app format like MONA’s ‘O’ (https://www.mona.net.au/theo) but on a city-wide scale. It allows users to wander around a gallery at their will and reacts to the artworks the user is looking at by popping up useful information and interactive material on the screen, effectively letting the user wander around and determine their own path through the gallery.

Furthermore, the image based website is something that young people are becoming more and more familiar with, as image content grows on websites like Facebook and Tumblr. Adrian Miles refers to this as ‘network literacy’, or an understanding of textual spaces, such as an operating system or a social media website. Given more time, Google analytics could have been employed to allow for readjustments and feedback from viewers.

References:

Bernstein, Mark. “Delightful Vistas: Revisiting the Hypertext Garden.” Travels in Intermediality. Lebanon, US: Dartmouth, 2012. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 8 February 2016. 142-146

Carter, J. (2001). The comedy bible. New York: Fireside.

Douglas, J. Yellowlees. “Books without Pages—Novels without Endings.” The end of books or books without end? : reading interactive narratives. University of Michigan Press ; University Presses Marketing, 1999. 11-36

Guadagno, Rosanna E. et al. ‘What Makes A Video Go Viral? An Analysis Of Emotional Contagion And Internet Memes’. Computers in Human Behavior 29.6 (2013): 2312-2319. Web.

Miles, Adrian. Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge [online]. Screen Education, No. 45, 2007: 24-30.

Mona.net.au. (2016). Mona » The O. [online] Available at: https://www.mona.net.au/theo [Accessed 1 Jun. 2016].

Oatway, J. (2012). Mastering story, community and influence. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley.

Perret, G. (2007). The new comedy writing step by step. Sanger, CA: Quill Driver Books/Word Dancer Press.

We are now in the swing of the final project for Networked Media. We have completed the planning stages and nutted out what it is we really want to do. We have come up with the idea Melbourne for Muggle’s. Essentially it is a click through photo map that links to different parts of Melbourne. It is a way for people not of this Muggle world to see the different places in Melbourne. Each page/link will have a comical creative writing piece about the place and what the ‘normal’ actions/happenings and ways of life are in those individual places. I believe it will be strongly based on the technical elements of the project because if the user can not navigate the webpage effectively then they will become disinterested in the story/writing. The second element I think is a huge part of the project is the creative writing to keep people interested and to link different pages to each other to allow the audience to create a story in their own minds. Why are these two elements linked? Why are they relevant to each other? These are the questions we want the audience to be asking themselves when they go through the page. It allows them to create their own ideas and story conclusions. For now I need to start writing.

This week we began our final assessment for Networked Media. It is now time for us to implement what we have learned through the course from the workshops, lectures and readings and create our own interactive, inclusive and original hypermedia story. I was excited about this idea as I have found that a lot of the course I am doing is applicable to this project. Particularly the content I am learning in Story Lab about transmedia and we are now creating our own transmedia stories.

I think this project will need to focus most of its energy on making a story that lends itself to different mediums and final outcomes to truly make it enjoyable. Also I feel the experience needs to be fluid and without fault as an audience will become disinterested if they are experiencing problems with the technicalities. We then had to form our groups and I am quite happy with my group as we all have different abilities that we can contribute to make the project the best it can be. For example Andrea has a strong ability in writing and she likes to write and Hannah has the ability to understand the technical side of it. Jordan is a video developer and can help interject the different platforms the assessment requires. I hope to bring to the group help in all of these fields from text and story to mixed media and even helping the technical side of things along.