Development Post 4 (PB4)

We have commenced production and in doing so have made a few changes to the project. The most predominant change we made was that we decided to have four different landscapes from the one location rather than four different locations. The reason we decided to make this change was partially because of time constraints but also because we believe this change will make the work more of a cohesive project and more visually connected.

In terms of the process of shooting the media fragments for this project I found the process to be completely different. In creating the last project Spaces, we focussed a lot more on how people interact with spaces. We thought more about what normal interactions people had with specific spaces. In spite of this, due to the cinematography the actions looked bizarre regardless. Expanding on from this in this project, rather than thinking about what was a normal interaction with a space we just thought about what could be visually appealing. Once again the outcome was quite strange, we created almost jarringly weird visual shots of hands interacting with places. It kind of reminded me of distorted body art, just in the way that it was so weird but kind of beautiful.

We presented some of our fragments in class on Thursday, and in my opinion they were received with a mixed response. Some people completely understood what we were trying to achieve whereas I got the sense that some people found the videos weird and did not understand the point of them. However the experience of sharing the fragments was helpful in giving a bit more understanding of how audiences could receive our work. This is a unique situation as we were able to explain our intentions behind the work though, which you do not really get the opportunity to do in the real world.

Thinking more about audience reception and what our work could do for the audience, Hannah suggested in class that we could include a question in the project to guide the audience’s thinking. We discussed this and decided that we would include a few questions at the end of the work, more as something the audience can reflect on rather than dictate the audience’s initial reception of the work. The questions we have decided to include are:

1. What did you notice about movement?
2. Did you see any patterns?
3. How does this project make you feel?

In terms of the effect our project has on the audience, we definitely want the work to evoke a certain feeling or emotion in the audience. We do not want to simplify the work’s potential or audiences as a whole by intending for the work to generate a single emotion or response. This caused me to think about audience theory, such as the hypodermic needle theory. I definitely do not view audiences as passive, rather I believe that both audiences and creators have autonomy in creating meaning from media. In Interactive documentary setting the field Aston and Gaudenzi (2012) describe ‘consumers of media content’ as ‘gradually becoming more active participants in the creation and interpretation of content’. Therefore, I believe that it is relevant to discuss the potential of the work and what emotions or responses it could evoke in an audience, rather than be guided by a singular perceived outcome. We explored what emotions we believe our work could evoke as a group and decided some possibilities were:

• relaxation
• confusion
• curiosity
• awkwardness
• distaste
• pleasure

Our work has the very real possibility of making the audience feel uncomfortable, or it could be understood as what we perceive it to be- an audio visual exploration of places, patterns and movements. Like ASMR, it has the possibility of generating many emotional outcomes. This article explores how some find ASMR creepy and others find it comforting, some find it intriguing. Our work could have a similar result.