Author: nanchen

Overall, our project Dear X has a high level of completion. Form the perspective of external form, the whole project is a public interactive website which contains 14 short videos, and the audience can go to the character’s Twitter account directly through this website.

The purpose of this project is exploring the application of trans-media, so we developed a fiction story through the suitable combination of video, interactive website and social media. So we built the interactivity and participatory with the characteristic form different medium.

One of the most valuable things is our crew kept learning and developing new skills in the creative process. Undoubtedly the process was laborious especially it is a low budget project, but we still complete this project within the production schedule with good quality. For me personally, this project makes me more professional and skilful as a producer, and it also makes me more mature in the teamwork.

However, there is some weakness we still need to improve, such as the sound recording and audience engagement. We did not have an adequately prepared for sound recording, and we should use the wireless mic as the backup instead of just using the boom mic. And regard to the audience engaging, we should try as much as possible method to attract the audience even without the budget.

Dear X is a simple attempt at the relationship between trans-media platform and audience interaction. We don’t have a definite end for the story, because we hope to build further audience participation through the social media, and develop the story based on the audience’s response. So the completion of Dear X makes me look forward to more is the potential and creative possibilities of the trans-media storytelling. There will be more and more medium can combine their advantages to create the innovative narrative with the development of technology.

In our project Dear X, we try to explore the how the fictional story attracts the audience to participate through trans-media platform.

Overall, we changed the primary platform for our project Dear X, and now the primary platform is an interactive website which created by Klynt. During the WIP presentation, we presented the pre-production work we have done, the shooting and post-production process, and how we create the interactive website. Furthermore, we showed the interactive site to tutor and classmates, they all think the website is quite interactive and exciting. The different video will be played by clicking different items in the room, and we made the button which the user can go to the character’s social media directly on each page to have further participation. And the tutor and classmates, they all like the selfie video on the website, it makes the audience more immersive and full of the sense of participation. Therefore, we will add more selfie video of character in the future.

And next, we will finish all post-production work in two weeks including renting a host to make the website public. And then keep posting the Twitter posts to develop the story and engage the audience.

With the employed demands for employees are getting higher, the competitive pressures in the media industry are gradually increasing. We need a more professional folio, showreel and website to get a better overall impression as the employee, also directly reflects on our feedback on competitiveness and personal ability.

Therefore, the first is to determine the purpose of the folio, showreel and website. The works are the most favourable evidence as a standard reference for the work experience, also one of the critical factors for success. On the one hand, the portfolio can show the results of the work experience, on the other hand, it can prove the working attitude and professional skills.

Secondly, the detailed format of the portfolio is also one of the elements that can display the profession, for example, a video file should be applied to most video software for employers to view. I learned in my part-time work experience that to remember to send a variety of different formats to the clients and boss which can be applied to different laptop systems and platforms to avoid reworking. Another example is trying to use horizontal version if the folio is a collection of images, because the other forms of images may cause problems such as large files, unfavourable full-screen viewing, poor page-turning experience, and difficulty in controlling the length range.

Lastly, the displayed order is also essential, I have seen many showreels from friends or classmates, no matter they are doing pre-production or post-production, but they do not know how to classify and sort their portfolios correctly. The most strongly related works according to the career goals should be classified firstly, followed by the direct or indirect connected works, and the practised works should be placed at the end. Moreover, it must put quality before quantity when selecting the works, and try to ensure that the beginning and ending are both excellent works.

Overall, to present the showreel professionally, not only need to accumulate good works continually but also need to know how to adjust the details of the showreel according to different employers and occupations to achieve the best results.

The audience of the trans-media project Dear X is people who use social media frequently, especially the female users aged between 16 and 50 because the topic and story could attract female users more. And regarding the media platform, Twitter is the essential one. And the power of the Twitter hashtag cannot be neglected, The benefits of hashtag are apparent. It can increase the brand exposure, enhance the user participation, also can give the feedback of campaign timely and attract more attention and donation. According to research, ‘a combination of directly used tags and tags applied by others is most effective in representing the user’s topics of interest. A recommender based on this tag profile yields items that are significantly more interesting to the user than the most effective people-based recommender demonstrated in a previous work’(Guy et al. 2010).

The hashtags can make the visitor’s search easier, enhance their user experience, and also can make them pay more attention to the content that what you want them concerned. ‘Using tags meticulously in posts makes it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for on your site. Blog post tags can lower your bounce rate and increase time on site–both behavioral factors that Google take into account–as they make websites easier to navigate (when utilized effectively). They provide the user with a convenient way to access relevant content and, if the user easily finds what they are looking for, they’re much more likely to stay on your site.’ (Aleh 2016).

For the further development, we should use the social media platform to build our fans culture. Fans help publish, produce, comment and spread the media project. Fans’ comments are almost free valuable information, on the other hand, these comments are also another attraction. ‘Transmedia storytelling facilitates collective intelligence and enhances fan involvement. Because it inherently leaves gaps in the world, fans actively seek other forms of media to fill them in. They work together to solve mysteries and no one fan knows enough that he/she does not need to discuss their findings with others’(Aaron 2017).

Ideally, we are going to publish the advertisement through Facebook if we got some budget. In the Yousif’s article ‘The extent of Facebook users’ interest in the advertising messages’, the author did a survey and showed ‘there is interest in the advertising messages by the Facebook users, that the content of the advertising messages is viewed as both exciting and reliable by them, that these messages motivate them to buy, and that Facebook represents a successful medium for products promoting’ (Yousif, 2012 p.122). There is no doubt that the ads on Facebook have significant commercial value.

References：

Aaron, S 2017  Advantages and Challenges in the Business of Transmedia Storytelling viewd 18 August, https://asmith50.wordpress.com

Aleh Barysevich, 2016, How important are tags in 2016 for SEO. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/important-tags-2016-seo/156440/

Guy, I., Zwerdling, N., Ronen, I., Carmel, D. and Uziel, E., 2010, July. Social media recommendation based on people and tags. In Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (pp. 194-201). ACM.

Yousif, R.O., 2012. The extent of facebook users’ interest in the advertising messages. International Journal of Marketing Studies, 4(3), p.122.

Regard to this topic, the media practitioner I want to talk about is Ryuichi Sakamoto who is one of the greatest composer, music producer, and pianist from Japan.

He is active in various art fields as a musician. He has built the hippest electronic band, written many symphonies, and also created the soundtrack for many movies, the most famous of these is the world-renowned Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, The Last Emperor, and The Revenant. ‘He has always made a point of bringing disparate things together in his music, not out of some ideological desire to “break down barriers” but out of a simple delight in the results. Electronic noise and impressionist harmonies, sweetly pentatonic melodies and driving dance beats, live happily together in his music’ (Iven 2011, para. 8).

His most creative point is exploring the types of music constantly and keep the balance between the commercial and experimental music besides these well-known business collaborations. He has asserted that the future belongs to the folk and electronic music, but he never pursued a particular music type, instead, he combines two or more kinds of music creatively. ‘1997, Iwai produced the masterful audiovisual performance Music Plays Images X Images Play Music, in collaboration with the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, which explored a wide variety of possible relationships between physical sound-actions and their virtual graphic representations’ (Levin & Lieberman 2004). In 1978, the YMO band he built used the electronic music as a form of expression to enrich and develop folk music, jazz and dance music as the content. The YMO band expands the type of electronic music and pushes Japanese electronic music to the world.

Ryuichi Sakamoto has moved to a broader art field after the film Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. He participated in the music production of The Last Emperor, he created 44 songs In the absence of the instrument, and won The Oscar for the best original song award, became the first Japanese to win this award.

Ryuichi Sakamoto keeps exploring the experimental music and ambient music in recent years. For example, the audience heard English, Italian, Chinese, Cantonese and other different languages have been repeating a movie monologue in his song fullmoon. In his album async, he recorded the voices that people usually ignore such as the sound of the foot on the leaf, the sound of animals and crowd. He tries to use these ‘sound moments’ to express an open attitude. Like Ryuichi Sakamoto said ‘I shouldn’t know what I’m making, or what it will be. I want to make something I don’t know, and that I’ve never done or never known. Hopefully, for me, it’s going to be a surprise, and a new experience’ (Brandon 2017, para. 4).

References:

Brandon, S 2017, ‘Ryuichi Sakamoto on how your work changes as you get older’, The Creative Independent, 13 October, viewed 12 August 2018, <https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/ryuichi-sakamoto-on-how-your-work-changes-as-you-get-older/>.

Ivan H 2011, ‘Ryuichi Sakamoto: the music dried up’, The Telegraph, blog post, 21 October, viewed 12 August 2018, <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/worldfolkandjazz/8841379/Ryuichi-Sakamoto-the-music-dried-up.html>.

Levin, G, and Lieberman, Z 2004, ‘In-situ speech visualization in real-time interactive installation and performance’, In NPAR, vol. 4, pp. 7-14.

Bio

Nan Chen is a Melbourne based Chinese content producer, director, actor and screenwriter. He is driven by his abiding passion for performing art and producing which encourages his work in film/TV and theatre producing. His constant pursuit and persistent exploration of art have brought him immense enthusiasm and motivation for the industry.

He has a bachelor degree in Theatre from Nanjing University of the Arts, and he is studying for his master degree in Media from RMIT University.

Nan Chen has developed a great deal of experience as the actor in the Mahua FunAge, which is one of the most successful entertainment company in China. In 2015, he starred in the national tour of the drama JiangHu College, and also produced the experimental theatre The maid as the dramaturg in the same year.

Nan Chen is more focus on the filmmaking skills in the last two years. He was involved in a collaborative media project ANZ Institutional launched by Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), as the producer. Currently, he is making the trans-media fictional project Dear X, and after a month of internship at Aullywood Films, which is a film production company in Melbourne, Nan Chen is working for this company as the project manager.

We have adjusted the direction of our project Dear X after receiving the feedback from the tutor and the classmates. We tried to use Twitter as the main social media platform before to enhance the participatory and interactivity of our project But after discussing, we decided to use an interactive website which is created by Klynt as the final work for this semester. There are two reasons, one is we only have 12 weeks to develop the project, it is limited that we will do such a heavy workload on the different medium, especially we need to build an ongoing storyline. The second reason is it is hard to achieve an ideal finished product for a small-scale crew composed of three people like us. We do not have a high budget, and we do not have a vibrant network in Australia, so we decided to make our project easier for this semester. And we will continue to do this project after graduation if it can be successful in the initial stage.
Overall, we scaled down the project to make a combination of the interactive website and visual materials as the final work.

My definition of my project <Dear X> is Trans-Media participatory fictional Project, and it is the combination of the short video and the social media platform, also the website. The short video is responsible for explaining the background and put questions to the audience, attracting them to the social media platform to further participate in the project. The social media platforms are the primary medium for audience participation and interaction, and Twitter is the ideal choices relatively.

The fictional story of the project is about ‘distrust’ in a relationship between Julie and Glen, and their problem will attract the audience to find the ‘truth’ through the protagonists’ social media to achieve the interactive participatory. As Claire Bishop (2012) briefly defines the general characteristics of participatory art is the artist is the collaborator and planner of the situation rather than the sole producer of an object, there will be some uninterrupted or long-term projects turn audiences from viewers into collaborators.

What I want to discuss through this project are from two perspectives, one is from a practical standpoint which I try to develop the storytelling through trans-media platform, and also want to practice to engage the audience through the appropriate method which suitable for the different medium. ‘the relationship between trans-media with users lies in the diffusion of stories, which are provided by trans-media storytellers to attract great amounts of potential users. At the meantime, users immerse themselves in these stories by participating in related interaction through different media platforms’ (Yang & Zisiadis 2014).

Besides, I try to explore the issue of trust between human beings, especially couples from the emotional perspective. It seems that trust is extremely fragile in modern society, and it will affect people and the environment around once the distrust appears. So it is tricky to figure out the relationship between the subjective guess and the objective fact. There are a lot of excellent films and tv series have discussed the similar question and received a good reputation. Like <Last Night>, <Gone Girl> and <Doctor Foster>, it can be said that people have a strong reaction with the balance and change of relationship, and they are willing to have a discussion.

I am responsible for screenwriting, casting, and promoting as the producer and writer. It is undoubtedly that the story is the most critical part of this project, no matter the story of the introduction video, or the follow-up development on the social media. We need to hide some intriguing clues in the twitter post and let the audience find them to cause discussion. And the actor is also one of the keys to attracting the audience.

References:

Bishop, C 2012, Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, Verso Books.

Yang, B & Zisiadis, M 2014, Transmedia marketing: strengthening multiplatform user participation through storytelling.