For those who are interested in progressing their NDIN EPOCs to SMP in 2018, we’ll be hearing brief overviews of your presentations today.
This week we’re getting into a bit of software and I’ll be running a workshop on 2 different platforms that can be used for interactive stories. These are Korsakow and Klynt.
I will spend the class introducing how to use each of these platforms so please bring some media – video, audio and stills in these formats (mp4, mp3, jpg). Video shot on phones are an easy format as they don’t need transcoding. Also download the trial versions of of both Korsakow and Klynt. Familiarise yourself with some of the projects made in each of the softwares.
Both of these platforms produce narratives in what Judith Aston and Sandra Gaudenzi call the Hypertext mode “because it links assets within a closed video archive and gives the user an exploratory role, normally enacted by clicking on pre-existing options.” (2014, 127). While both of these systems contain a finite amount of material within the projects, these platforms operate quite differently in terms of authorial control and user participation.
They are interactive – the viewer has influence on the film.
They are rule-based – tthe author decides on the rules by which the scenes relate to each other, but he does not create fixed paths.
They are generative – the order of the scenes is calculated while the viewer looks at a Korsakow-project.
Here is a database of Korskaow projects.
Images from Morgan Tam’s Two Horses.
Klynt operates more like a forking paths narrative where the audience is given a range of options to select from. So this could be described as multi-linear as there might be a range of linear progressions in the project. With Klynt, you can also create links to external websites, maps and media.
Elderscapes gives an overview of ageing in urban South-East Asia.
You can also build a gaming into these projects as well. Find Santa uses a simple premise to engage the audience although it presents limited opportunity for participation and interaction.
Further Reading about Interactive Documentary projects
This week we’re going to be breaking down the elements required for your EPOC. These are dependent to some extent on the nature of your project and you should chat to Stayci and I (Kim) to see whether what you are planning to do is relevant for your individual idea.
TASK: read through the following requirements and research the elements that are relevant to you. We will spend the tutorial breaking this down a bit further, addressing any questions and workshopping in your groups.
The EPOC task is modelled on an industry market, so really think about what makes your proposal unique, marketable and relevant. Why do you think it should it be made and what will help to sell your idea?
You should also start to schedule any shoot times for what you need for your EPOC.
You will produce a final proposal document and electronic proof of concept for your digital narrative. This is a template to follow.
OVERVIEW: ALL PROJECTS
Working title: this should be distinctive, relevant to the target market, and memorable.
Form and medium: What form will it take? What software and/or social media will you use? How long do you estimate?
Premise: 1-2 sentences outlining the basic premise, philosophy and purpose of the work
Market: short summary describing who the narrative is aimed at, where they will watch it and why. This Screen Australia Marketing Guide is a useful resource to guide you.
If you’re making a non-fiction project, you might want to look at this guide to Impact Producing.
FICTION
Main characters: briefly describe the characters that play an important role in the narrative, particularly the protagonist/s and antagonist/s.
Story world: briefly describe the settings for your narrative.
Narrative outline: 1-2 pages describing the narrative in simple, non-technical language (ie. no camera angles, transitions, etc.). Write in the active-voice in present tense. Tell the reader what they will see and hear on the screen, from the beginning to the end of the narrative.
Main characters: please ensure all character names appear in this section of the document with their names in bold type. If the user can choose the name of the character, choose a default name for the purposes of this document (it is harder to a story if the main character is variously referred to as ‘our protagonist’ or ‘our hero’).
Images can convey a lot about a character. Can you make a sketch or find an image to illustrate your character/s?
Narrative world: what is the look, sound and feel of the narrative environments? Is the narrative set in the past, present or future? Is it set in the city/country/wilderness? Is it a realistic or fantasy setting?
Images can convey a lot about a world – can you make a sketch or take a photo of your location/s?
Narrative Outline:
Images can convey a lot about a narrative – can you make a flowchart of your narrative describing audience choices?
or
NONFICTION
This template gives useful points to brainstorm documentary proposal ideas. Use this as a guideline for writing out your outline, characters, motivation, style and approach.
Main participants: briefly describe the participants and what they contribute to the project
Setting: briefly describe your locations
Narrative outline: 1-2 pages describing the narrative in simple, non-technical language (ie. no camera angles, transitions, etc.). Write in the active-voice in present tense. Tell the reader what they might expect to see and hear on the screen, from the beginning to the end of the narrative.
PARTICIPATION/INTERACTIVITY: ALL PROJECTS
User interaction:
Describe how the user participates in the narrative and/or interacts with and/or contributes to the narrative?
How does the user navigate through the narrative? Write a walk-through if the interaction is particularly complex (a walk-through evokes how the user will experience the narrative on the screen.
Write in the active-voice in present tense. Tell the reader what they will see and hear on the screen).
If you’re relying on users to contribute content to your project, be clear on how you will attract and collect this participatory content. Refer to literature and examples to explicate this.
AUDIOVISUAL
Visualisation: describe any key stylistic elements in filming, photography, animation, editing, SFX, music, narration, sound effects or audio composition. The visualisation described in this section should fit with the form you’re working with, and be demonstrated in your EPOC.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Competition: identify any media work that has already been produced on the same subject, or using the same participatory/interactive approach. If so, what is new, different, interesting, engaging about your approach?
RESEARCH
Summarise any research you have done about the subject matter.
MARKETING AND RELEASE PLAN
Describe the marketing strategies you will adopt to promote your narrative to your target audience. Outline how and when you will distribute or publish your work. The Screen Australia Marketing Guide is a good place to start for this research.
PRODUCTION PLAN
Production timeline, with appropriate milestones, including marketing/release dates:
Crew list: All crew you will need to complete this project
Proposed location list: Start scouting real locations and look at how you will secure these locations. This checklist helps you to consider some of the aspects of location scouting.
Proposed cast (optional): Look through online casting sites and pull some example images of potential cast members.
EPOC: Electronic Proof of Concept
The EPOC should be relevant to the type of project proposed.
For FICTION (including GAMING) choose one or more of the following:
For NONFICTION choose one or more of the following:
Steven Soderbergh’s new film allows you to follow different character’s perspectives. This presents a new take on interactive narrative.
http://www.indiewire.com/2017/08/mosaic-steven-soderbergh-plot-branching-narrative-hbo-1201868064/
This week we’re going to look a bit further into participatory practices and the history of participation in art, media and documentary. This site gives a bit of an overview of participation over the last century.
YOUR TASK
Flipped lecture: come to the tutorial with an example of a participatory project that you find interesting, successful, problematic or inspiring for your own project.
Please read at least one of the following – making notes of any interesting points or questions you have.
Strategies of Participation: Sandra Guadenzi
Documentary Ecosystems: Collaboration and Exploitation: Jon Dovey
Toward a Theory of Participatory New Media Documentary: Patricia Zimmermann
And for a manifesto on the importance of collaborative and participatory documentary practices, this list by Reece Auguiste, Helen De Michiel, Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, and Patricia R. Zimmermann outlines a number of considerations and questions about these practices and spaces.
Art that involves some kind of audience participation or collaboration is not a new phenomenon. In 1910 the Italian Futurists began holding art performances in which they confronted audiences with inflammatory political texts, poetry, music and visual art. At the Teatro Lirico in Milan one evening in February 1910, the author of the Futurist Manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, provoked the audience into throwing fruit at him by crying ‘Long live war, sole hygiene of the world!’.
Gerardo Dottori’s ink-sketch Futurist Serata in Perugia (1914)
The French Dadaists held similar events where they attempted to provoke audiences into hurling food at them. These artists sought to engage the working classes in artistic performances in order to break the aristocracy’s monopoly on culture. They also wanted to devalue the art object as a marketable commodity.
YARD (1961), Allan Kaprow
In the 1960s in Europe and the US artists held less overtly political performances that demanded audience participation, known as ‘Happenings’. These events were designed to challenge conventional views of art and everyday life. For instance, Allan Kaprow made YARD (1961) in the sculpture garden of the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. It consisted of hundreds of used tyres covering the ground in no particular order. Visitors were encouraged to walk on the tyres, and to throw them around as they pleased.
In the past two decades, collaborative art practices have both undergone significant development. Whilst participatory art practices traditionally occurred on the fringes of the art world, since the 1990s they have become a fully-fledged art genre. The art historian Claire Bishop writes that public participation in art projects is now a near global phenomenon, reaching from the Americas to Asia and Europe (2012).
Some recent examples of participatory art:
They shoot horses (2004), Phil Collins
Collins held a disco-dancing marathon for teenagers in Ramallah. “Collins paid nine teenagers to dance continuously for eight hours, on two consecutive days, in front of a garish pink wall to an unrelentingly cheesy compilation of pop hits from the past four decades. The teenagers are mesmerizing and irresistible as they move from exuberant partying to boredom and finally exhaustion.” (Bishop 2005)
References
Bishop, C. 2005. The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents. Artforum.
Bishop, C. 2012, Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, Verso Books, New York.
Dottori, G. 1914, Futurist Serata in Perugia
Kaprow, A. 1961, YARD (installation)
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Just as audience members have moved from observing to participating in art works, online users have moved from viewing web pages to actively generating web content. The term Web 2.0 describes those websites that:
The phenomenon of audience participation in web publishing has been described as the ‘network society’ (Castells 2000) and ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins 2009). This new culture encourages online participation by having:
Web 2.0 sites are designed to make publishing text, photos, videos or tags both easy and socially rewarding. Users socially reward others for publishing material by:
The Wisdom of Crowds
When a large group of people participate in an online activity, they are thought to form a collective intelligence that is superior, in terms of problem-solving and creativity, to the intelligence of any single group member. This concept is described as ‘the wisdom of crowds‘ (Surowiecki 2004), and the ‘hive mind’ (Kroski 2005). Crowdsourcing, which can be described as the request for ideas, content and labour from a large group of online participants, is thought to harness this superior collective intelligence and has become a commonplace feature of the web.
Crowdsourcing is frequently used to invite and enable the public to participate in art projects (Howe 2006) and is a strategy employed by a number of high-profile artists (Jenkins 2014). Online crowdsourced art has emerged as “a significant development across the entire artistic spectrum, from visual arts to music to creative writing” (Literat 2012).
A prominent example of a visual artwork that utilises crowdsourcing is The Johnny Cash Project (Milk 2010). The project website invites people to trace, by hand, a single frame of the film clip for the Johnny Cash song “Ain’t No Grave”. People rate the most popular frames and these are joined together to form an ever-evolving animation.
Using a similar approach the composer Eric Whitacre has crowdsourced several choral compositions as part of his Virtual Choir project (Whitacre 2009-2014). Utilising the video-sharing platform, Youtube, Whitacre sent out a call for participation in his composition Lux Aurumque. Participants filmed their own performances, uploaded them, and Whitacre edited them together. The finished composition comprised individual recordings by 185 singers from 12 countries.
The avant-garde artists who created participatory artworks in the previous century have strongly influenced those producing crowdsourced art. As Bishop explains, the authors of participatory artworks tend to have a common desire to subvert traditional relationships between the art object, the artist and the audience (2012). Crowdsourced artworks are also seen as a means of challenging traditional ideas about authorship and creativity (Literat 2012) and democratising art production (Stoddart 2009). Like offline participatory artworks, crowdsourced art works aim to build community through collaboration and sharing (Xiao 2009a) and to offer participants liberating vehicles for self-expression (Literat 2012).
Further research:
Examine audience engagement strategies in the following Idfa DOCLAB winners:
Serial (2014): http://serialpodcast.org/
Alma – the webdocumentary (2013): http://alma.arte.tv/en/webdoc/
Examine models of audience support examples in the following crowdfunding sites: Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/), Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/) – search for ‘documentary’, ‘webseries’ etc.
References
Bishop, C 2012, Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, Verso Books, New York.
Castells, M 2000, The Rise of The Network Society, Blackwell Publishing, Hoboken, N.J.
Howe, J 2006, ‘The rise of crowdsourcing’, Wired magazine, issue 14.06, pp.1-4.
Jenkins, H 2009, Confronting the challenges of participatory culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Jenkins, H 2014, ‘Rethinking “Rethinking Convergence/Culture”‘, Cultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 1–31
Kroski, E 2005, ‘The hive mind: Folksonomies and user-based tagging’, InfoTangle Blog, accessed April 2, 2014, from <http://web20bp.com/13z2a6019/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/The-Hive-Mind-Folksonomies-2005.pdf>
Literat, I 2012, ‘The work of art in the age of mediated participation: Crowdsourced art and collective creativity’, International Journal of Communication, vol. 6, p. 23.
Milk, C 2010, The Johnny Cash Project, accessed April 2, 2014, from <http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/>
OReilly, T 2005, ‘What Is Web 2.0’, O’Reilly Network, accessed April 29, 2014, from <http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html>
Whitacre, E 2009-2014, Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, accessed April 2, 2014, from <http://ericwhitacre.com/the-virtual-choir>
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Storytelling is no longer just about transmission, it is also about engagement. We are all competing for attention in an information saturated society. According to some reports you have less that eight seconds to engage someone online before they click away. Storytelling for the 21st century has to include a narrative that draws our attention and a strategy of community engagement.
Advertising, public relations, marketing and journalism are converging. Traditional advertising doesn’t work any more. The world is saturated with advertising images and the public are highly suspicious of any company making unsubstantiated claims about their products. Public relations and marketing are now about opening a conversation with consumers and connecting with them in a more honest, transparent and authentic manner. In this regard, marketers can learn a lot from storytellers and journalists.
On the other hand, storytellers and journalists now have to think more like businesses and seek new ways to get a return on their investment (ROI). In other words, they need to find new ways to capitalise on the time, energy and resources they expend creating their content. In finding, engaging their audience and profiting from their audience, they need to think more like marketers.
Different levels and types of participation
Elan Lee, of 42 Entertainment and Fourth Wall Studios, was one of the earliest designers of alternate reality games (ARGs). An ARG is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, and often involves multiple types of media and game elements. In 2004 he created I Love Bees, an ARG designed to promote the Xbox game Halo 2 (2004). I Love Bees was modelled on Orson Welles 1938 radio play, War of the Worlds. It was a six-hour radio drama broadcast over thousands of payphones around the world. Every time a phone was answered, that portion of the audio was then unlocked on the I Love Bees website.
Lee groups users into three categories: Casual, Active and Enthusiastic. The group at the bottom of the pyramid (Enthusiastic) are the ones who participate wholeheartedly in Lee’s alternate reality games. The Casual and Active groups watch from the sidelines and are occasionally inspired to join the Enthusiastic group. As Lee puts it: “Cause they’re watching, like ‘Oh my god, these guys are going out in hurricanes and answering payphones!’ And you have all that insanity. And what happens is that triangle grows, because people from the top, every once in a while they trickle down to the middle. And people at the middle level start to trickle down to the bottom level. And that bottom level grows when there’s more core players doing more and more and more, the whole triangle grows because now there’s more to be entertained by.”
Here is a chart of different types of online participators, put together by Forrester Research (2008):
Forrester’s Social Technographics data classifies consumers by country, gender and age via this social technology profile tool.
Videogame players
The game designer Tracy Fullerton identifies the following types of player:
As Fullerton points out, there are many other types of player not mentioned in this list, some of whom are not well served by today’s video games.
Not every player likes the same challenges or experiences. People have a variety of needs and interests and it is important to consider the type of person you are designing for. For instance, what types of interactivity might you design for your user? Here are some characteristics of interactive activities that you could experiment with:
Profiling your ideal audience
Can you characterise the ideal viewer/user of your digital narrative? Here are some (but by no means all) user/viewer characteristics that may be relevant to your audience:
References
Fullerton, T 2008, Game Design Workshop, Second Edition: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games (Gama Network Series), Morgan Kaufmann, Massachusetts.
Forrester Research 2008, Forrester’s North American Media & Marketing Online Survey, http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2007-06-10/chart-who-participates-and-what-people-are-doing-online
Ipsos MediaCT 2015, 2015 Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry, Entertainment Software Association. Available: http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ESA-Essential-Facts-2015.pdf
Phoebe 2010, Elan Lee wants you to convert part of your life into the storytelling experience, http://workbookproject.com/culturehacker/2010/07/27/elan-lee-the-rolling-stone-interview-part-ii/
Further reading:
Morse T 2014, ‘All Together Now: Artists and Crowdsourcing’, ARTNEWS, http://www.artnews.com/2014/09/02/artists-and-crowdsourcing/
Situationist International: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SvdWk8zRrI
Lots coming out of the theatre tradition, Jason Mailing et al: http://www.jasonmaling.com/#
Live art: http://www.triageliveartcollective.com/
Festival of Live art: http://fola.com.au/
http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about/what-is-live-art/
Hi all,
Good to meet everyone today! A few of the off-the shelf programs you might want to explore that are relatively easy to use are: Shorthand, Verse, Klynt and Korsakow. They are all quite different so it’s good to look at the gallery and example projects. As I mentioned, I’ll be doing some workshops in weeks 5 & 7.
Another short reading about getting ideas for documentary if that’s what you want to pursue is this one: The Answer is Within.
Good luck with your idea development and see you in week 5!
In week 2, we will discuss expanded documentary forms.
Expanded Documentary: An Overview
Technological advancements have often been connected to how documentary practices have evolved to allow new ways to tell stories and share experiences. Technology, and what we can do with it, can challenge traditional ways of thinking about documentary participation, representation, ethics and power. These concepts are the cornerstone of documentary making.
In the 1960s, lightweight cameras and portable sound recording devices made it possible for people to take to the streets and follow documentary participants to record them. This began the Direct Cinema movement in the USA and Cinema Verité in France. It was thought that these styles of filmmaking allowed a more “truthful” version of reality for different reasons.
In the 1980s, camcorders allowed people to start filming themselves and their private and personal lives. This access to affordable equipment enabled stories to be told that previously had not been heard. These were often voices of minorities and the disenfranchised who were able to tell their own stories without being reliant on an outsider always coming in to document their lives. This challenged the dominant paradigm of documentary making and opened up more spaces for alternative forms and approaches.
Digital equipment, iPhones and easy-to-use editing software has further increased the ability for people to make media, share experiences and tell stories. Web 2.0 allowed for more projects that included sharing of material, User Generated Content, participatory practices and interactive and immersive spaces.
As the field of documentary has come to include so many different platforms, the term expanded documentary can be thought of as anything that goes beyond the traditional linear form of documentary. It may make use of affordances of the online space in allowing participation and interaction. It may be a site-specific installation or use locative (GPS) technology. It might be Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality.
Another term for emergent documentary forms and practices is ‘Open Space Documentary’. De Michiel and Zimmermann present these forms of documentary as ways of challenging systems of power and re-engaging in community and collaborative practices as a way to address urgent social and environmental issues.
These emerging documentary forms are developing beyond the status quo of long-form feature-length documentary – with their characters, narrative arcs and resolutions – designed for festivals and public television. These open space documentary projects move in more mobile, flexible, public spaces characterised by indeterminancy, community and risk. New possibilities for combinatory story-telling are proliferating in spaces now enabled by disruptive broadband, new media and mobile technologies. Community needs to map specific histories and stories into spaces colonised by the state; corporate interests or environmental destruction also propel these new forms of documentary.
(Helen de Michiel & Patricia Zimmermann 2013, 355)
What to do:
Have a look at at least two of the following readings to discuss in class and browse the other links for examples of interactive documentaries. We will also look at and analyse examples in class on Wednesday.
Webdoc collections:
The 6 Most Innovative Interactive Web Documentaries
Top 5: Interactive Documentaries at RIDM and IDFA DocLab
References
Aston, J., & Gaudenzi, S. 2012, Interactive documentary: setting the field, Studies in Documentary Film, 6(2), 125–139. http://doi.org/10.1386/sdf.6.2.125_1
De Michiel, Helen, and Patricia Zimmerman.“Documentary as an Open Space”. The Documentary Film Book. Ed. Winston, Brian. British Film Institute, 2013. Palgrave Macmillan (2013): 356-65.
Nash, K. 2012, Modes of interactivity: Nash Nash , Media, Culture & Society, 34(2), 195–210. http://doi.org/10.1177/0163443711430758