After altering our scrapbook sketch by replacing the background music with ambient audio from the café – as can be seen in this post – Jia Jia and I proceeded with thinking of more ways in which we could improve our prototype for Project Four.

We had some ideas to change the still images to moving visuals, as in having them in the form of a video instead of pictures. However, after talking to Seth, he reminded us that there is already a lot of potential in our current idea with the still images. We realised that we may be taking too big steps in trying to change it up, and that we should slow down.

Jia Jia and I then came up with a couple of different iterations, still following the same concept but making a slow move towards progress, one which would eventually be our final prototype. We find that this is important, because it gives us the opportunity to see things step-by-step, and not to rush into something that we are unsure of. Some of our ideas would play around with the visual quality of the images, the background audio, the stylistic techniques, and so on.

We plan to think of some ideas as to which cafés we could visit over the weekend, then get some sketches done on Monday. Thinking about it, we would need to find a café that allows us to film with ease; one that has decent lighting, and also sufficient space to do what we have planned out.

We had recorded some ambient sounds from some of the cafes while doing Project Three, and so we decided to edit them in our scrapbook idea, just to see what it would be like. Previously, we only used some royalty free music found online. The idea to capture sound from the places we visited was a good suggestion by one of the members of the panel in our last presentation.

We had a studio discussion today, in which we were all seated in a circle and told Seth and our classmates our ideas for Project Four. It was nice to hear everyone’s ideas and I look forward to what each group will present in the weeks to come.

As Seth helped us find a clearer direction for our sketches that would eventually lead to a prototype, we came up with a revised probe for Project Four:

How can we use stylistic techniques to create a hybrid form of travel review?

I like how it has become more focused as compared to the diverse amount of sketches from the previous project. Seeing as how we would be focusing on the idea of scrapbooks, Jia Jia and I came up with three ideas (so far) that played around with different stylistic techniques to produce different results:

1. Video of the place + Holding up cue cards
2. Instagram scrapbook: Mini videos + Text in the caption
3. Still images + Sounds from the place (Cowbird)

Hopefully Jia Jia and I will be able to come up with more ideas, and also take some time to explore a bit of the above sketches later this week.