Link to website

We’re now in the final stage of our development process – putting all of the elements together to create the final product. This is been going on for a little while now and is a bit complicated compared to a traditional film. We’ve got a few elements to juggle: editing the video, designing the website and putting the quiz together. This is really where we are focusing on the cross-platform characteristic of the project, trying to make it a seamless experience for the viewer that hopefully feels like one project rather than different platforms squashed together.

When picking a website design for our Wix page, we wanted something simple, bold and eye catching. There aren’t many pages or buttons, so the design needed to be clean. We looked at some websites made with Wix in order to get some inspiration. Here is an example, and another one. These encapsulate the simplicity of what we are going for – big writing, few options. We want people to go straight into our project rather than wander around a website.

Our current website design

For the quiz, we’re still going with the platform uQuiz, and we’re embedding it into the website to avoid outside links or webpages. We’ve run into a couple of problems designing the quiz, just technically so –  the pictures can only be a certain size when inside an answer, so we’ve had to compromise on one fragment and put the image in the question. However, for the most part it has come together well and is completely functional.

We’ve mostly edited the video itself with Adobe Premiere Pro, and just tried to make sure of a couple of things during the process:

a) Most videos have their own aesthetic ‘vibe’ and sound, so we get unique answers about which videos viewers found engaging.

b) The videos are chained together swiftly to create the ‘blur’ effect I talked about in my last blog post, which will hopefully end up meaning viewers won’t be able to remember everything, therefore they will selectively remember what stood out to them the most.

We believe these two characteristics are key to accurate answers from users of our quiz, ideally tying the whole thing together. We’ve just got to put the finishing touches on now and put all of our elements online.

We were given the opportunity to get some in-class feedback this week from other groups. The feedback was pretty positive, and we got some useful tips and pointers. Something we asked for feedback on specifically was whether we should put our videos together for one long video, or small individual videos with a quiz in-between. The general consensus, after some discussion, was that a longer video will work better for what we’re trying to do – gauge what people find engaging and why. If the viewer can’t conceivably remember everything because the video is too much of a blur, they’ll only remember what stood out to them.

There were some other great little ideas from different groups too. One student said putting a second computer next to the video during the media exhibition could display the results in a convenient way. This works out perfectly because through the quiz program we’re using (uQuiz) displays detailed results only when you are logged in. If we login on the separate computer, we can give people more specific answers to compare. We were also given a cool idea for a fragment by another student – an audio only piece where we ask viewers to listen in closely. It could be a nice way to mix up the rest of the AV material.

There was also a bit of feedback on the idea itself. We figured out with a couple of groups that we need to give some context at the beginning on the video, as well as a couple of instructions such as telling viewers not to rewind and to watch closely. We’ll make sure this is done as I think it will be pretty crucial to making the whole idea work. Overall, we have a better sense of direction now, and after we finish filming over the next day hopefully the whole project will start to come together.

Our concept is more concrete now, so we have been able to begin incorporating our research into the way we want to approach production. We’re going to begin filming tomorrow, and we’ve already begun playing around with our Wix site a bit, so this is the perfect time to break down a couple of the articles and AV materials we will draw from.

An article I found (Rosen, 2017) contained some staggering statistics regarding the distracted mind of today’s youth. Most notably, college students unlock their phones around 50 times a day and use their phones for 4 and a half hours per 24 hour cycle. This heavy use of technology backs up what we have suggested – that people feel the need to be constantly engaged with some form of media and their attention spans are suffering in the real world. The data found here has given us some inspiration as to what we want to find from our quiz and what kind of questions we want to ask. We know we want user generated/contributed content to be an integral part of our project through the quiz.

Liam also found an interesting article (Kozinets, 2002) regarding ‘netnography’, a new form of ethnography growing to become a more effective way of studying people. Since this article was written in 2002, online searches, history and application usage has surely become the most widely used way to study someone – spending over 4 hours on a mobile device alone can tell a lot. Marketers now advertise to people online based off this data and it is part of the world they are engaged in. In a similar way, we want to know as much as we can about our users based off how they engage with our project. Many of the ideas here can be applied to the way we approach our production. We want our findings through online data to be used as nonfiction content – it will in theory be a part of the whole experience for the viewer.

An audiovisual material I thought might be appropriate to discuss was Her (2013). The film directed by Spike Jonze follows the story of a man who enters a relationship with a siri-type android. Here’s the trailer if you haven’t seen it. The movie’s world is set in the future yet scarily close to our own. Everybody seems isolated yet so caught up interacting with their OS that they don’t seem to care. It gives some direct insight into the ideas and themes that we’re trying to explore and gives a different perspective what our lives may look like today, albeit to a lesser extent.

Gigi’s audiovisual material will give us more of an idea of what we can shoot tomorrow. The music video is somewhat similar to a something we looked at earlier in the week for inspiration, in that a single shot has constantly changing elements. We think something similar to these two AV materials could work quite well for our project. The interactive parts of our project will use similar ideas, with changing elements within shots to evaluate engagement.

Group Articles

Andrade, J 2013, ‘Sensory Imagery In Craving’, Principles of Addiction: Comprehensive Addictive Behaviors and Disorders, Volume 1, p. 445 – 452.

Kozinets, R 2002, ‘The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography For Marketing Research in Online Communities’, Journal of Marketing Research, 39 (February), p. 61-72.

Rosen, L 2017, The distracted student mind — enhancing its focus and attention, Kappan, viewed 15 May 2018, <http://www.kappanonline.org/rosen-distracted-student-mind-attention/>.

Group AV materials

Childish Gambino – This Is America (2018), Hiro Murai

Her (2013), Spike Jonze

MAX – Lights Down Low feat. gnash (2016), Scranton and No. 2 Pencil

After our last project, we knew we wanted to take our theme of boredom and dig deeper. Following our presentation from the previous assignment and some early discussions, we came to the conclusion that we liked the idea of focusing on engagement and attention spans in the modern world. It felt like a natural continuation and evolution of our theme of boredom – it should speak more deeply about why we avoid boredom and why we feel like we lack of meaning with nothing to do, both of which were questions we raised at the end of the last project. We’d also like to focus on interactivity with the audience this time around as an important characteristic, as well as some form of user choice/user generated content.

We’ve now spent a couple of classes working out exactly what we want to do for this final project. I think we struggled to find our footing at the beginning; there was a lack of cohesiveness in our ideas and we struggled explaining them to each other. We had something of a general consensus – some sort of interactive experience that would say something about the user and their engagement with our content. Liam had the idea of a social media feed that the user could scroll through, upvoting or downvoting content based on how engaging it was to them. I had the idea of a series of videos with some kind of skip button, allowing the user to pass on videos they felt were boring. However, neither of the concepts felt fleshed out enough to proceed with.

Feedback from other students was interesting. They had suggestions for us, such as timing the user and a quiz, but it never all came together. Hannah proposed the idea of a quiz at the end of something simple such as a Tumblr blog, which would allow us to measure the user’s engagement in an easy and achievable way. We think that could be a great direction to go in, so we’ve set out a timeline and chosen Wix as our platform. Over the next week we’re going to work out the details and what kind of content we want to shoot, and move on to the website and quiz from there.