Link to Korsakow project work can be accessed here.

As mentioned in my previous posts, our project work revolves around the theme and idea of feeling isolation. We tried exploring creative ways and experimental means we could portray the feeling and mood of being isolation.

Before I start diving into how our project work went, I’d like to touch on how the workload was distributed based on the graphs we drew in week #5. We decided to split the group into half, 2 of us responsible for the production side of the project. Ie. Shooting, directing, editing, as well as ensuring the media formats compatible to what Korsakow is capable of ingesting and working with, and not forgetting supporting any forms of media required to make/edit before it reaches Korsakow. I understand that Korsakow is only able to work with media fragments that are already trimmed, graded, whatever treatment has to be done on Premiere, Photoshop, Lightroom… This task would be left in the hands of me and Samantha. While Arfi and Meita would be working in Korsakow to develop the actual interface, and creating the various SNUs for the user to interact with.

Since we’re exploring the use of different media elements, we decided to go beyond producing stop motion, hence we settled for making 4 stop motion/slow motion clips, 4 time lapses, and 4 short video clips. At a bigger picture, I know, at the end it’s still 12 videos exported in .mp4 format, but it’s the making of these fragments that employs different media forms like photography to shoot stills for the stop motion and time lapses.

In post-production, I decided to take a step further in terms of using simple visual effects to achieve a “film” look, since we can’t get an actual film camera to shoot our videos. However, apart from making the videos look like it was shot on film, I find there was not much meaning to it, it was easy as copy and pasting the effect across to the various clips. Hence, I explored different effects that could be applied to the clip, that could enhance the feeling of isolation. Example, in the “Phone Call” clip, I tried playing around with “glitching” by separating the RGB channels, like how we used to get during the VHS era. And in the “Revolving Doors” clip, we had an initial idea of having Meita walking out of frame, and then coming back in frame from a different location. But due to the different lighting conditions, it was very obvious that we made a cut in the take, hence I merged a few takes together and messed with the blending mode to achieve the “ghosting” effect of several Meitas walking round in circles in the revolving door.

In Korsakow, Arfi had a hard time troubleshooting the audio, which I had no idea how she managed to find a remedy, but I’m glad she managed to solve the issue. We had a few discussion on how the interface should look like, on when the audio should be played, if there was going to be any audio at all, and so on. Korsakow gives us the freedom of how many times a clip can be replayed or it could only be played once and wouldn’t appear as a thumbnail again. Also, we came up with an opening SNU to introduce the project to the user, as we feel like it could be a little misleading or disorientating launching straight into the middle of the project.

Overall, I think we did well, considering it’s the first time for most, if not all, of us working on developing an interactive film, which I will express more in the upcoming reflection post.