InstaStories has always intrigued me. It may not be the first of its kind, but I have only been using Instagram and Facebook as far as my social media apps are concern. And the cuts between stories always seemed like an actual cut in a well edited film, whether it was employed intentionally or unintentionally by the user. Hence I thought of the idea of using the cut as an editing tool to cut between shots in an Instastory.

During our brainstorming session on Monday’s class, our table raised the topic of how do we use Instagram for more than just posting beautiful pictures, moments, and advertisements. Therefore my partner for this assignment 1, Liam, and I thought of exploring the formal quality of the amount of interaction within Instagram. We know it allows people to comment, converse, tags, sharing locations, and more. But we were wondering if we could break the barrier of only just having mediocre comments like, “Oh! That looks awesome! Wish we could be there!” or, “Congratulations! All the best for your marriage!” and more.

As far as Instagram goes, there is very little linking across different social media platforms other than sharing your pictures on other social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and/or, Tumblr. And for Instastories, you can’t share it on other platforms such as Snapchat, Facebook Stories, and more. However, you could download or save the video you’ve recorded, and then maybe upload it via the other social media apps as you wish. Other than that, Instagram seems to be lacking in the cross-platform-sharing space. If I wanted to share a post or picture I’ve seen on my Instagram newsfeed, I would have to take a snapshot of my phone screen and then share it as a picture on whatever platform I’m using. (ie. WhatsApp, Facebook, an email, or even as another Instagram post).

Hence, Liam and I decided to use Instastory as a means to put out a distressed signal or an SOS call, if you like, to see if anyone really treats such stories seriously. It may be like a boy who cried wolf situation, and you might say we’re doing something similar to the World of the Worlds radio broadcast which brought a whole stir of events to the people who actually thought they were being invaded by real aliens. Of course, we’re not hoping to achieve the same outcome, but just to test the water to see if anyone’s going to respond to our cry for help.

The actual plot or storyline is still undergoing works and changes, as we have to take into consideration the limitations of using Instastories as our platform, each cut has to be a maximum of 10 seconds before we need to make another story. And how are we going to present the whole story, whether in a first person, or as a commentary, or a mix of both. I foresee we definitely would need to do several trial and errors, which is good that Instastories allows people to delete their post if they’re not happy with what goes up on the internet.

Another thing to consider is how are we going to document all of these down. As mentioned above, Instagram allows us to save our stories, so that’s that, however, I might shoot some stills to cover some “behind the scenes” shots. We’ll be meeting again on Thursday’s class and probably shoot our story then. Looking forward to that.