We were ambitious at first – there were ideas of installation spaces, many video channels, mirrors, crystal balls, ipads and desktop computers. We tried things that worked and others that didn’t. We developed various aesthetics informed by the world wide web and pushed ourselves creatively, much further than we expected. And today our work was delivered in front of an audience of one, DB.

Project e-Volution has had a hell of an evolution, it grew from the simple suggestion that maybe we three had a teeny tiny idea that could blossom into a fleshed out exciting project. As Alex put it today in our post-presentation discussion with DB ‘this project started out as a mutual interest in certain platforms and abstract concepts,’ we wanted to experiment with so many different elements. I have learned so much from this project. We had big ideas, big convictions and not everything worked out because not everything ever does. I am really happy with the work we have made – it pays homage to a certain online style and yet it is reflective of each of us as creatives.

From my point of view as a creative, I learnt about what kind of work I want to make and developed myself as a video artist. I enjoyed working with two very different aesthetes and developing a group look that I hope we all enjoyed doing. Earlier this semester I had framed myself as a video artist, often void of linear narrative, which proved to be a struggle throughout this semester. Trying to utilise all the exciting platforms and abstract concepts and integrate them into a narrative that was digestible was challenging. This led to us having to streamline and make a lot of executive choices throughout the project which wasn’t always easy. Just before the presentation we were all joking about transmedia in general – ‘just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should.’ And that might be one of the more important lessons for me – get excited but know when you to kill your darlings. Sometimes a piece of video content you’ve been dreaming of doesn’t turn out well or a real world element is slightly superfluous. Hone your craft, find what works for you personally and continue to make it better.

Minor constructive criticism for the studio in general is that I am disappointed that there was no audience for our story, typically doing a class like this suggests that there is an inbuilt audience. I also think it’s a disappointment that theory dropped completely from the class half way through. I think one of the two weekly sessions should be used for class discussion for watching or reading or sharing to move our projects forward. It feels like I’ve been in a class with two other people for the past five weeks and I am curious about the work that others are doing, no matter how divergent it is from what I am doing! To me, it’s very important to share the work and see where everyone else took it.
That said, I am very appreciative for this studio because it has given me the room and space to develop creatively and I’ve really enjoyed working with Alex and Sandy. This semester, I’ve had the opportunity to make a number of things that I have been proud of and that is a rare and fabulous occurrence. Thanks for a very fun and enjoyable semester!!

This weekend we all spent finalising the elements and tomorrow Alex and Sandy are meeting up to go through the powerpoint, I’m jealous I can’t be there because I got a job over that sadly my bank account says I can’t turn down! We are going to meet up on Wednesday morning and go through the final details before presenting to DB on Wednesday which seems absolutely wild (I remember when we were talking about this as if it was a trillion weeks away and now we’re here!) I am looking forward to seeing what we’ve made, we’ve made all these strange little elements and finally seeing them all inputted in the powerpoint and all the other bits in the room on Wed will feel really rewarding. It’s strange making a story like this because it’s not like a film where once it’s edited and graded and sound mixed we have a final finished product, we will with this as well but it feels like a project that could also never end, forever be edited or contributed to which I really like. All the different elements that I have contributed to thus far have really developed my skills as a creative – not only programs but the different aesthetics that we have paid homage to and that have influenced our week (in fact my mates liked my tarot cards so much the other day that I am going to design a poster for their band which I’m so excited about!)

I can’t believe it’s next week! And assessment period if smothering us all! There are a lot more little bits left to do, there are so many pieces to this puzzle, so many different bits of text, video, and audio, real world elements, drawings, printed out bits, lots and lots of layers. Today was our last real class and over the next week, we will meet one more time to take all the content we have made as individuals and merge it together in the powerpoint. Alex is so bloody good at writing content off the cuff and Sandy has seriously become a total powerpoint whiz! I think we are a good little trio.

Every week I feel like our project has grown or shifted or streamlined or changed. I must admit I love it, I love having to shift gears and work to understanding how this project is going to work totally. The mind space when you’re head deep in your laptop and making a really particular bit of video content for the project is very different to the one we’ve all had to be in when we discuss the project as a whole. It’s such a recalibration of thinking and I’m really interested in expanding my brain creatively in that way, but I’ve definitely come away from our meetings, after looking at our story maps with a headache! (But it became the back of our tarot cards so looking for a creative solution around every corner haha)

We decided to throw another element into the mix and make cards to truly integrate the real world elements with the digital. So above are the tarot cards I made over the weekend for this project. I love tarot cards in general, I think they are a really interesting way of gaining insight (IN-SITE LOL) to externalise questions and ideas. The most fascinating element is when someone explains the meaning of the cards and your mind latches onto all these different possibilities of what they might signify.
For me personally as a creative, this semester and this studio have allowed me to develop such an interesting aesthetic and push myself (which lazily sometimes I forget to do!) I am really proud of these cards and hope to make more things like them in the future – integrating my love of tech with my love of witchy tarot astrology elements too.

Today we further negotiated our story elements and looked at our timeline and some of the more superfluous elements will be cut, which I think is good. We now see a more streamlined narrative as our aim rather than just sections that are meant to contribute to our users’ feeling of agency. As Ben outlined to us – it’s all about giving the illusion of agency, I feel this is true and it’s important while still retaining a central control over your player, to make them feel as though they are in control but really you are (how very cult-ish!)

I’m really grateful that two of our initial goals in our group contract were about negotiating all story element as a three and working collaboratively as a three and I am really impressed with us at this stage – three’s company?? But it can be a challenge and I am worried that in a three it is easy to miss when two agree and one doesn’t, hopefully so far we all feel as though we have been heard. Group work is always an exercise in negotiation, compromise and collaboration and sometimes it’s hard, but everything we will work on in the future in this industry will require this ability. I think we’re doing an awesome job of communicating at this stage! Hopefully no wars to come in the future!

Today we really started to nut out our timeline, we’ve made a few things (bits of writing in our master doc and bits of video content too it’s a lot but things are coming together!) and Sandy has started the powerpoint so we are well on our way. Again, it’s more than we expected and once upon a time the deadline seemed like an eternity away and now we are heading straight for it – it’s under a month away at 02/06 and I can feel that time will fall upon us much sooner than we think. Time management is such an important thing to learn and continue working at, no matter what year of your life you’re in. I think this will be our greatest challenge particularly coming up to assignment time in the next few weeks this semester.
I’ve also had the opportunity to play in a few different applications at this stage and am really into developing my skill set and techniques on Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Blender – which is a 3D modelling application I’ve been using to make the trance videos. It is hard to use but feels good to learn a new program and start to get my head around a different SPHERE (excuse the pun!!!)

Feedback from the pitch was very valuable, we got a mark we were proud of and the discussion that ensued pushed our project further than we anticipated. We feel more prepared to move forward with our project now because we have had some concrete feedback that suggests we are on the right path. We all want to still have elements of religious language in our work, though, because we believe that using that will make our cultish voice more authentic, but great to have a number of conversations about this. We are really honing in on the voices and the aesthetics. We have come to realise this is a larger amount of work than we had originally perceived and the timeline is getting shorter and shorter. Today we started an asset list which is a master document inclusive of all the content we need to create and who will do what by when. It’s hard to negotiate our time well into the future but we are making decent headway towards our goals. I definitely don’t think this will look like the project we all originally had in mind but when does any project? And what an excellent opportunity to collaborate creatively with these other two in a safe space that makes us all feel comfortable to put our ideas into the hat. I am super excited to see what we end up making in the next few weeks and how things will come together!!

Getting ready for our pitch has been a good process that brought us together as a group as we realised our vision further. We have started putting a story structure and collating together a list of future creative elements we will need. It feels like a big project but we have plenty of time (not due until week 13 which feels a million miles away) I think there is a lot of work to be done but so far I have really enjoyed working with Alex and Sandy, I think we make a good team who can face the mounds of creative elements that we are about to embark on. It’s funny to think originally we started with lots of ideas – mirrors, projectors, installation space, and already we are honing in on our narrative and negotiating what is crucial and what is not and I am sure we will continue to do so throughout the coming weeks. Tomorrow we are presenting in front of the panel and I am both nervous and excited, I think we have a great project on our hands and I am really looking forward to the feedback we will receive from people like Ben McKenzie who has done this kind of huge project before. Sandy has put together a sick powerpoint that totally represents the look we are going for and I’m really proud of the trailer at this stage (very lucky my best mates’ mum is a voice over artist!)

Ben McKenzie was our guest lecturer this week, sadly not Ryan from The O.C. However he was a charismatic man with a great logo I was jealous of. He was one of the originators of Pop Up Playground. I guess a games/production company specialising in live games – anything from roleplaying to schoolyard games to something more akin to Sleep No More. He was very well versed in the kind of storytelling we are developing now – layered, transmedia content with a lot of audience agency. I’m jealous because I know a lot of good storytellers, much like him, who come from a world of Dungeons and Dragons and that really informs their ability to give their audience power within the story, something I find challenging. Building a world is a hard basket task.

McKenzie also spoke about emergent stories, the ones that unexpectedly come out of the story, that aren’t originally built into it by the creators. How to leave room for that in a narrative seems far from my grasp right now but it’s also incredibly exciting and I would like to learn better how to be inclusive of these possibilities. On the other hand, sometimes I find games like some that he spoke of quite trite, for example, a bunch of school kids walking around the city wearing monster tails. To be quite honest that image makes me cringe a little. I did learn what a “ludic marker” was though – something that shows you’re playing a game, people feel special and the people around them know they are in a game. Still much more to learn but felt curious about a new and innovative company like McKenzies’.

Today we discussed our major projects for the rest of the semester. DB set up a little pitching market for all the groups that had come up with an idea and we rotated around to hear about the diverse projects and then gave DB a ballot slip with who we wanted to work with. They were all fascinating and fabulous but none particularly resonated with me and on return to my table with Sandy and Alex we concluded we wanted to come up with something completely different. The word ‘cult’ was the first thing that tumbled out and we all got excited about that keyword. From that we suggested possible screen content, how the narrative may unfold, but I’ve come home and now I’m geed up for the rest of the semester!

What direction might this project go! I think we’re all highly ambitious content creators with a variety of skills and interests and this will be a total recipe for an interesting collaborative project. I’m really excited to be working with Sandy and Alex to create a deeply bizarre choose your own adventure type project with PowerPoint and iPads and crystal balls and mirrors. Below is a prime example of the kind of early 2000’s occult/astrological vibes.