Fiction and Non-fiction Projects Discussion

 

Non-fiction Project: (from Docubase)

 

Life in a Day paints a picture of the global community on June 24, 2010.

 

The film received more than 80,000 videos from 192 countries around the world, all filmed on June 24 and to create the finished documentary from footage submitted to YouTube. As what we experienced, online media became one of the main methods for the director to obtain materials. He asked people around the world to film their lives and answer a few simple questions and combine all materials together to finished the project.

The materials in the film are recorded at random, it can be said that it recorded everything happened in the world on the same day. It can be considered as a non-fiction project because there is no connection between each clip, interview and video and everything were shot in an open space, without any length and content requirement. Moreover, every single part can be seen as an individual part, no one will know what will happen in the next second, it is the feature it attracts the viewers.

The documentary is not only devoted to recording the lives of humans, but also to nature, including animals, sky, sounds by nature and even more.

 

Fiction Project: (From THE INTERACTIVE FICTION COMPETITION)

 

 

I chose to look at the fictional work from The Interactive Fiction Competition – ’10 PM’ by litrouke.

’10 PM’ is the game without sounds. In the game, you are a bird that lives with a boy, and all of your interactions through the game are by selecting the broad meaning of your hand signs.

It can be seen that fiction basically is a made up story that associated with scripts and setups and might not in reality. Take ’10 pm’ as an example, the interesting thing is the audience pretended to be the bird, the bird could think and has the ability to make choices in the story.

You choose what to say by dragging pictograms into a speech bubble; sometimes you can combine different pictograms, and sometimes you have to pick a full set to go together, and when you mix and match it’s not always entirely clear what exactly the combined meaning is.

Moreover, from the fiction project, I noticed that our understanding always constrained under certain background conditions, which means the background of the storyline has been set for us. For example, in the project of ’10 PM’, the game producer gives us some choice, and we only can choose one from that.

 

 

Fiction vs Non-fiction Comparison

To think about the difference between interactive fiction and nonfiction by the example I experienced, I have found some dissimilarities after looked into both kinds of those projects.

In general, I thought that fiction basically is a made up story that associated with scripts and setups while non-fiction is more like showing a reality by recording a reality. Take the projects I experienced as examples, ’10 pm’ has a set of the storyline, but ‘Life in a Day’ does not. Based on the further research, it can say that fiction is scripted and made up from imagination, but for the nonfiction project,  the producer does not script or set up the scene, they just organise the structure of the contents. In general, the fiction story might not happen in reality while the non-fiction story encourages the audience to think about their reality.