TIMELINE:

• 8th May – Research Meeting

Meeting up to do research – Each of us finds one academic article on online screen production and one online screen production work might be useful and discuss each of the sources.

Book equipment for the shooting preparation.

• 11st May – Shooting Meeting

Shooting the thumbnails and videos of the river, St Kilda, St Kilda shops.

• 12nd May – Shooting Meetings

Shooting the thumbnails and videos in the Botanic Gardens.

• 15th May – Editing Meeting

Editing the media – Put into Korsakow and design interface.

INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH:

For scholar research:

• Insook, C 2009, ‘Interactive Documentary: A Production Model for Nonfiction Multimedia Narratives’, in A Nijholt, D, Reidsma and H, Hondorp (eds.), Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment, pp. 44-55.

This article presents an interactive production model for nonfiction multimedia, referred to as interactive documentary. It proposes a production model of documentary with respect to the emerging practices with interactive technologies and adopts the simplest task definition of traditional documentary, that of Vertov: “to capture fragments of reality and combine them meaningfully”. For example, the first cluster will be still images of four landscapes with ambient sound; the second cluster is videos of hands moving and existing within the landscape, the fragments from this cluster will have no sound; the final cluster consists of videos of only hands recreating movements from the landscapes with ASMR inspired sound from the landscape.

In addition, as the article argued, ‘media content is often created as a convergence of diverse media types deployed on diverse devices.’ We used the multimedia tools to create the project, such as the videos, the still images for thumbnails and audios. The combination of multimedia tools will create the finished project.

For a creative project:

ASMR Hand Movements – ASMRSurge (2017)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55TmHhKpb4s

ASMR is the inspiration to support my research on the movements of hands. I think this project is so close to ours because the similarities are they are all focus on ‘hands’ and using the element of audio, which is the element that we used in the project for the first time.

The project is the non-linear work that makes full sense of visualizes and matters an audience to achieve the interactivity. It focuses on the movements of hands and combines the audio to give the audiences enough space to have their imagination. It is more like an experimental project because it devoted to inviting the viewers to join the project by experiencing the audio and watching the movements of hands.

I consider this project would be useful for our project, such as considering the speed of movements, what the patterns we will achieve, and what audios we will record to make connections with the videos.

DISCUSSION SUMMARY:

In week 10, we outlined our own research that has done and the following is what I concluded.

Mia’s finding called ‘Fluxus’, a strange word to me even I did not make sense what does it mean at first. However, through Mia’s description, I briefly understood it. The article is more focus on the concept of movement and makes multiple categories to clarify. ‘Fluxus’ involved in a wide range of mixed-media events including concerts, performances, exhibitions and other gatherings. This is consistent with our project because using multiple media tools are one of the most important requirements of the project and how to make connects among these media tools to make sense is what we need to consider so far, such as performance for hands movements, the scenes for landscapes and sounds for backgrounds. By contrast, the rest of us all researched the academic articles about ‘interactive documentary’ because we thought the concept of interactive is the fundamental principle of the project and meanwhile, it is an essential characteristic that we want to achieve. I think Taras’ research is especially helpful for us to review the use of Korsakow because the author uses Korsakow as the case study to explore the relationship between the video clips that are the basis of the interactive documentaries and also about the programmatic and computational conditions of an individual software system. As what we experienced, Korsakow allows and is premised upon, the creation of multiple, simultaneous links, that is relations, between the individual video clips that make up a K-film, and it is the simultaneous multiplicity of these relations that is Korsakow’s most significant quality in the context of interactive documentary more broadly. For more importantly, in Korsakow, interactive is a consequence of the density of relations that it affords. As what I noticed in the article, ‘In a Korsakow film, a mechanism is required to find your way amongst these relations. This is different to many multilinear and interactive systems where links are often manually made between the parts and so interactivity becomes synonymous with multilinear navigation.’ (Miles 2004) In addition, in Nagini’s research, it is revealed that ‘Interactivity can occur in multiple ways: in the interactivity of a well-designed interface, as a cycle of engagement between media creators and audiences who can become participants generating content, or in communities supporting social change and production financing.’ Taking our project as an example, we tend to achieve the interactive by the first way because we encourage audiences to enjoy the project by having their own experience through listening to the sounds and watching the videos and images.

Taras and I both explored the movement of hands as the keywords to do the research of online screen production works. For my research, the video is ASMR which is focused on how sounds of visual affect people’s thoughts, for example, if the person uses the hands to mimic the action of the waves with the sound of waves, the audience might have the image of wave or the sea in the mind. It is more focused on how audios work. Tara’s example is more focused on the movement of hands, such as the changes in the patterns and movements of hands would give the audience the different feelings. It would be helpful when we consider the three clusters, which are about the movements and patterns of hands and with or without ambient sounds. Nagini’s research seems like not too related to our project, but actually, it does. ‘The Most North Place’ is online scree production work that encourages to discover landscapes. I think it would be useful for us to think about what landscapes we are going to do when the start of the project. The investigation of Mia is more inclined to the illusory aspect, which exists in our brain. Mia’s founding is about the virtual reality film, it seems not related to our project, but if we think about it further, it might be a useful research. As what the research points out,  the moment when the viewer experiences a new sensation for the first time, it gets seared into memory. In our project, we try to use our hands to imitate scenes that exist in reality to make sense of the audience. In another word, we pretend to get the connection between visual sense and real life.

In addition, based on our initial idea of the project, we devoted to discovering the movements and patterns created by the landscapes and the human body, and the characteristics what we are related to are ‘Interactivity, Variability, Modularity, Non-Linearity/Multilinearity’. Our project is a non-linear project because there are no logical or narrative stories as the background, every media materials are displayed at random. Moreover, as what I mentioned above, ‘interactivity’ is the basic characteristic of our project because we are trying to develop it as an experimental documentary project to invite the participant to experience a ‘hybrid space’ where the distinction between the auditory and the visual. It brings users into physical space and creates an experience that challenges their sense and their enacted perception of the world. The characteristic of variability is another one. The multiple landscapes form the different fragments and customization of content in each landscape are distinct. The participants have their own choice by clicking different videos they interested in, so there are different versions for different people. Finally, for the point of modularity,  it allows for several pieces of online media to function together efficiently yet separate as well, for example, the videos that shot in each landscape can be seen as the whole project but it can be seen as the individual one as well.

PITCH:

We will be expanding on our last project to focus on movement and patterns created by landscapes and the human body. We are responding to the characteristics; Interactivity, Variability, Modularity, Non-Linearity/Multilinearity. We are researching academic articles and examples of artistic practices and works such as Fluxus, interactive documentary and the production of non-fiction multimedia narratives. We have also looked into examples of online screen production works such as The Most North Place by Anrick Bregman which also explores landscapes and is therefore relevant to our work. We will be using Korsakow to arrange our media fragments. The project will consist of three major clusters and two tags; hands and landscapes. The first cluster will be still images of four landscapes (The Botanical Gardens, the river, St Kilda beach and St Kilda shops) with ambient sound. The second cluster is videos of hands moving and existing within the landscape, the fragments from this cluster will have no sound. The final cluster consists of videos of only hands recreating movements from the landscapes with ASMR inspired sound from the landscape. Each fragment will be in black and white to accentuate the shape, textures, and movements. For this project, the contents are more complex however the interface will be simpler than our last.