NDIN Blog Post Week7

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Nowadays, people show the unprecedented demand for the information. Transmedia appeared when a single form of media could not meet the needs of the audience. Moreover, the development of new technology, especially the network, provided the necessary technical support. The reason why transmedia is inevitable is every kind of media seek a better living environment and development opportunities. Of course, the advantages of transmedia are obvious transmedia can expand the audience coverage, reduce the cost, and improve the efficiency of information dissemination.

Jenkins (2007) defined ‘ Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.’ Take the <The Matrix> series as an example, Jenkins presents this new form of using the different medium to extend the story frame to people. It contains the commercial potential and promoting media industry to start thinking about the possibility of transmedia storytelling.

Fans play an indispensable role in the transmedia, and fans are more active than the general audience. Fans often spend on the media consumption enthusiastically, and they will put their worship of someone or something into their lifestyle. A brand needs the emotional support from fans, the value of fans is enormous, fans are willing to spend, they are high loyalty and high participation. ‘the relationship between transmedia with users lies in the diffusion of stories, which are provided by transmedia 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). The creator and the consumer complete the content filling and form extension of the work together. The creators need to decide the theme, storyline and narrative framework carefully according to the audiences’ preference and create conducive and collaborative content. The ultimate purpose is to attract more supporters.

The most effective transmedia storytelling tool is to create a part of story world beforehand. The audience can participate and have understanding in any perspective, and the audience will get a feeling of reality through virtual Website. For example, the website ‘Buy&Large’ in the film <WALL.E> was launched when the film released, and it allowed the audience ‘buy’ different robot from the website. It made the audience to experience the parts which are not represented in the movie, also understand the robot world. Take HBO as an example too. They aimed the fans of <Game of Thrones>, they want to make the fans who have never read the original story to understand the complex world and know the plots and the characters easier. They ‘decided to create a sensorial strategy and used the five senses to present Westeros and the characters before the pilot episode of the show aired on HBO. For each sense (sound, taste, touch, sight and smell), they developed a specific material, online or offline, which was supposed to make the audience feel as if they were in the same places as the characters in the series’ (Bourdaa 2014).

 

References:

Aaron, S 2017, Advantages and Challenges in the Business of Transmedia Storytelling, viewd 29 May, <https://asmith50.wordpress.com>.

Bourdaa, M 2014, ‘This is not marketing. This is HBO: Branding HBO with transmedia storytelling’, Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, vol. 7, no. 1.

Jenkins, H 2009, Transmedia storytelling, Volume.

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

 

NDIN Blog Post Week6

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The participatory art means the artwork that involves many participants. 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. Grant Kester (2004) does not focus on the ‘participation’. He divided it into ‘dialogical’ and ‘collaborative’ art.

Participatory art is an art form which emphasises audience involvement and interaction. The ‘Infinite Mirror Rooms’ created by Yayoi Kusama is a typical example which ‘using mirrors, she transformed the intense repetition of her earlier paintings and works on paper into a perceptual experience’ (). She turned the space that only existed in people’s imagination into reality through endless reflection. The audience had an unprecedented spiritual experience that evoked their most profound and vibrant memory. The artistic conception was completed in this kind of participatory experience.

With the development of the WEB 2.0, it is common to have the two-way communication online, and any interaction can be seen as generalized participation. The participation in the documentary can be defined as the interactive documentary that the audience change the modes of presentation and content by editing an existing movie or uploading a new one. It emphasises the ability of the audience to participate in the production process directly. For example, in the interactive documentary <18 Days in Egypt>, the viewer can upload videos they have taken with mobile phones or the other types of equipment to the website as a part of the whole project.

I believe there will be more new forms of participatory documentary, and the range of issues it can explore will be more extensive. The participatory documentary could use richer art resources to make the audience to participate the discussion easily and actively.

References:

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

Kester, Grant H 2004, Conversation Pieces : Community and Communication in Modern Art, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room, viewed 19 April 2018  <https://hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/infinity-rooms/>.

NDIN Blog Post Week 5

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Last week, our group did the presentation about ‘Interactive and immersive narrative’, we focused on the relationship between the space and the immersive interactive narrative, and gave some example projects that exist in spaces beyond the internet or small screen.

 

Immersive narratives use situations, characters, atmosphere, plots, and rhythm designs to engage the audience in the story. As dining said ‘Immersive storytelling is a medium of expression that permits the participant to witness an enhanced sensation of “being there” in the narrative story. Immersive storytelling is not a new form of narrative expression. Rather immersive stories have existed throughout history, with their presence in theatrical production, literature, interactive web-based narratives, and within gaming'(Dining 2017).

There is an immersive theatre example called “sleep no more’ which is the most successful immersive theatre. It adapted from Shakespeare’s <Macbeth>. “It breaks the fourth wall, this wall is what traditionally separates the viewer from the audience both physically and verbally’ (Bucher 2017, p. 81). The audience put on the mask and follow the actors they are interested in, and they can choose the perspective and order of the story. They will forget the real world through props, music, and smells. Also, they will be a part of the theatre. The actors will interact with the audience. For example,  Lady Macbeth will ask the audience to wear the necklace for her.

With the development of the internet, people have explored many different spaces of ‘interaction’.

GPS, WIFI and the mobile equipment connected the video and the realistic place to create a mixed media space. For example, the project about the development of Los Angeles called <34 North 118 West>. The audience walks on the streets of LA holding the Mobile devices like tablet or GPS device,  and they can listen to the history and watch the Historical video of a building or a street when they are at a specific location. So this project  Combine the reality with the virtual to make the audience experience the past and now of the same place.

The interactive and immersive narrative provides us many possibilities  to break the limitation of time and space.

But at the same time, the tutor gave us some useful feedback to make us think about the relationship between the immersive narrative especially VR set and emotional connection. Does VR evoke empathy? There is a VR project example called <Notes on Blindness> which is let people experience the feeling of blind people in our presentation. But can people feel the exact feeling through VR? How long will the empathy last? This question is complex and discussable.

Furthermore, will the development of virtual reality and immersive technology bring the significant negative for human society? People always talk about the advance of the new technology, but the technology could influence the social connection in real life. Image when people are addicted to the virtual world and do not want to build the connection in reality. Also, the immersive space become more and more real, the negative effect on children maybe becomes increasingly clear, like the violent game will blur the boundary between reality and virtual and affect children’s mental state.

Reference list:

Bucher, J 2017, ‘Storytelling for Virtual Reality: Methods and Principles for Crafting Immersive Narratives’, Taylor & Francis.

Dining, A 2017, ‘A User Study of Story Presence in an Immersive Narrative Experience tested with Variant Levels of Immersion’, In SMPTE 2017 Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, pp. 1-12.

ARTE Creative (2016, Apr 20). Notes on Blindness – Into Darkness [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9yIofiLa24&feature=youtu.be

 

 

NDIN Blog Post Week4

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Database narrative is an entirely new conception for me. As Lev Manovich mentioned in his book <The Language of New Media>, ‘in contrast to standard film editing (which consists of the selection and ordering of previously shot material according to a pre-existent script), here the process of relating shots to each other, ordering and reordering them in order to discover the hidden order of the world constitutes the film’s method’ (Manovich 1999, p. 97). It explained the difference and creativity which the database narrative could give to the film industry.

So I want to discuss two examples, for me, these two projects are innovative and experimental, but they are reasonable based on the database narrative. I believe the database narrative could bring new inspiration and the approach of film deconstruction to filmmakers.

The first project is a fiction film named <Dragonfly Eyes> created by a Chinese artist Xu Bing. He edited a 90 minutes fiction film from over ten thousands hours footage of surveillance camera all over China. The film tries to explore ‘How to define the truth’ and the change of the relationship between our daily life and surveillance system, the technology that we used to reduce the incidence of crimes has evolved to a medium which allows the general public to become a pryer even a direct participant. The footage from the surveillance camera is a huge database, and Xu created <Dragonfly Eyes> which is a combination of unrelated footage through the massive editing work and the constant adjustment of the voice over. As he said, the working method that matches contemporary civilisation is exploring the new possibility of art creation.

<Dragonfly Eyes>  trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ccfz77ifeU

The second project is <The Clock> created by Christian Ernest Marclay in 2010. <The Clock> is a 24-hour movie, and there is a timekeeping scene for every minute. All the shots in the film from existing movies and TV series, the selection work took Marclay’s team three years. There is no relationship between these shots, roles, scenes and events. Since all shots were taken from already released film and television works, and many of these works were widespread, so the audience could easily be evoked by past viewing experience and resonate with the other people who have the same experience. ‘The sequence of numbers acts as a narrative shell which ’convinces’ the viewer that s/he is watching a narrative. In reality the scenes which follow one another are not connected in any logical way’ (Manovich 1999, p.95).

Part of <The Clock> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp4EUryS6ac

The new technology made us can build a giant database that can never be filled. Therefore the filmmakers could use the database narrative to innovate and experiment continually.

 

Reference list:

HLGfilms 2011, Christian Marclay, The Clock, YouTube, 3 September, HLGfilms, viewed 28 March 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp4EUryS6ac>.

Manovich, L 1999, ‘Database as symbolic form’, Convergence, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 80-99.

Xu Bing Studio 2017, Dragonfly Eyes 蜻蜓之眼 Official Trailer (English and Chinese subtitles), YouTube, 11 August, Xu Bing Studio, viewed 28 March 2018, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ccfz77ifeU>.

NDIN BLOG POST WEEK 3

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Undoubtedly, the nonlinear narrative film has created a new filed for filmmaking. Directors represent their purpose different from the traditional narrative method through de-structure a film.
Montage is an essential and necessary technical element in nonlinear narratives, the transition of time and space, the combination of various storylines and the rhythm of plot development can be showed creatively by Montage. The narrative montage builds the storyline through combining a series shots in time or logical. For example, in the movie <Lola rennt>, the narrative montage greatly shortens the time of narration and speeds up the rhythm of the movie.
About the presentation, the most interesting thing is, they used the topic ‘Four ways to make the audience enjoy the presentation’ to run through the whole presentation, and also combine with the weekly topic to clarify the structure. They also provided some examples to explain the two main nonlinear narrative methods in their presentation. But if they can use some video footage or screen recording to elaborate it, it will be much better.
There is two general concept of my pitch. One is the combination of the social media platform and the interactive narrative. People can create not only the static content but also the short video on the different social media, such as Instagram. I can create an interactive fiction series through the tool of social media such as ‘hashtag’ ‘comment’ even the ‘forward’.
The other concept is an interactive documentary project inspired the interactive documentary <Global Lives>. Image there is a website which is an ‘Apartment’, and the people who upload their documentary of a specific topic, the website will create an animated character image for him/her based on the real person. Also, he/she will be assigned a ‘unit’ of the ‘Apartment’. The visitors, which is people in front of the computer, they can choose any unit to watch the unique documentary.
So these two concepts are really general, I will try to define and finalise the pitch through the research and practical experience.

NDIN Blog Post Week 2

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One of six typical traditional documentary type is the participatory mode, and the primary feature of this mode is  ‘the filmmakers does interact with his or her subjects rather than unobtrusively observe them’(Nichols, 2007 p.179). Such as the representative documentary <Chronicle of a summer>.

There is also a participatory type in the interactive documentary, although any interactive behaviour can be seen as a participatory method because of the development of the Internet. But the ‘participatory’ in an interactive documentary means the audience could change the content and structure of the project through their editing or their own videos. In the interactive documentary project <Global Lives>, the audience could not only upload the new videos to enrich the project topic, but also could change the project structure. This interactive documentary designed to ‘explore the diversity of human experience through the medium of video, and encourage discussion, reflection, and inquiry about the wide variety of cultures, ethnicities, languages, and religions on this planet’ (Global Lives Project 2010, Artist’s Statement). There is no ‘ending’ in a traditional perspective in the participatory interactive documentary. The project presents an evolutionary status. The interactive behaviour in the interactive documentary is physics, as Lister (2009) presented, the audience has the ability to directly change the video or the text they are involved in. The interactive is no longer people one-way control on the computers, the interactive reflected between the audience and the whole project. The audience changes the project through their interactive behaviour, at the same time, the project influenced their feeling and emotion.

The creator of an interactive narration is not the original filmmaker or the audience who provide the content, the interaction between the project and receiver is the true storyteller. On the other hand, the project changed its structure, and the other hand, it influenced the inner thinking of the audience. The most interesting point is, we used to think how the traditional documentary adapts and develop in the new media platform before, but the interactive documentary breaks the limitation of the tradition, it develops based on the new media platform and explore the boundary and possibility of the documentary constantly.

REFERENCE LIST:

Global Lives Project 2009, Artist’s Statement from 2010 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Exhibit, Global Lives Project, viewed 11 March 2018, <http://globallives.org/about/overview/>.

Lister, M 2009, New media: A critical introduction. Taylor & Francis.

Nichols, B 2017, Introduction to documentary. Indiana University Press.

NDIN Blog Post Week 1

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The development of various new technology and the popularisation of the multimedia brought us into an interactive social era. Is the creative form of the real person plus the live-action filming like <late shift> will be the new direction of the entertainment in the future?

Firstly, I think there are two different main type in the interactive movie. One is based on the movie and provides the audience with some simple operational elements. For example, the ‘Destiny Choice’ mode in the film <Final Destination 3> (DVD Version), it allows the audience to make a choice when the story at some specific moments which can lead to the different story.

<http://finaldestination.wikia.com/wiki/Choose_Their_Fate>

The most important revolution of the interactive movie is making the audience involved in the development of the movie. On the one hand, the audience could control the conflict, storyline, also the end With God perspective, they will have the maximised psychological satisfaction. On the other hand, the curiosity of human can be satisfied, the audience are willing to try, even every different development to satisfy their curiosity. Therefore, the interactive movie put forward a higher logic requirement to the filmmakers.

But in my opinion, this type interactive movie (based on the movie), it is reasonable as an extension of personal experience of watching a film, but it is hard to popularise among the audience widely. There are two main reasons, and one is the current technology and the design of the cinema unable to afford the chance for every audience to experience the interactive movie. So it cannot satisfy the needs of the diverse audience. The second reason is the audience will lose the fundamental discussion because of the film structure also the storyline is changeable. The audience will share their feeling based on their individual choice. ‘If the movie involves us, we leave our problems and preoccupations outside the theater, and enter a reverie state’ (Ebert 1994, para. 4).

The other main type is a game type. It has the cinematic narrative style, many twists, numerous options, and stronger sense of immersion. The player does not need too much operation, and the storyline is pushed forward by the different options at the important moment. It can bring a more immersive gaming experience by reducing operational freedom.Some games like <Red Alert> series used the real-shooting video as the cutscene before.  But the full-motion video game like <Late Shift> is definitely a new attempt. Also, there are not many this type of game on the market.

Image result for red alert cutscenes

<http://scientificgamer.com/thoughts-red-alert-3/>

I do think the ‘interactive’ part in <Late Shift> is successful, every option can match different storyline perfectly, and the player only has 3 to 5 seconds to decide to put forward the story timely. Therefore the players are required to concentrate on the story.

Image result for late shift

<http://fmvworld.com/lateshift_screening.html>

Compare with a typical commercial film. Obviously, the cost of <Late Shift> is minimal. ‘The £1.2m-budget film, created with three times as much footage as a normal movie’(The Irish Times 2016, Para. 5). But the interactive movie game needs to contend the market not only with the game companies but also the film companies, and it is not easy to attract the audience who already used to watching those big-budget commercial movies. But from the multimedia perspective, the interactive movie games can break the limitation of the equipment, which means it can be operated on almost any smart device. Undoubtedly, the interactive movie games will trigger a boom in the future, but whether it can be the mainstream influenced by many factors especially the perfect script and actors.

Reference List:

Ebert, R 1994, ‘Dim future for interactive film’, Roger Ebert’s Journal, viewed 4 March 2018, <https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/dim-future-for-interactive-film>/

Ganatra, S 2016, ‘Late Shift – the big-budget interactive film that allows viewers to decide the plot’, The Irish Times, 16 March, viewed 4 March 2018, <https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/late-shift-the-big-budget-interactive-film-that-allows-viewers-to-decide-the-plot-1.2575445>.