This whole assignment has been an eye opener. We have covered different means of documentary making as mentioned in Week #5’s reading, “We’re happy and we know it: Documentary, data, montage”, we can start thinking of how we can represent a theme, an idea, or information in a non-linear curve where it doesn’t always have to have a beginning, middle, and an end. The various projects on the Korsakow website are prime examples of expository storytelling taking a backseat, while a unique user-experience becomes more central.

As articulated in Week #6.1’s post, our project work is inherently modular just from the nature that it does not deliver a linear narrative. Each user experience is unique depending on the thumbnails they click, prompting other thumbnails that might carry a similar in/out keyword. Though we incorporated the use of an opening SNU, I believe it does not reveal too much of what the project is about, but more of setting the mood and tone for the rest of the SNUs to reveal more of the project, and hopefully the user gets the idea of what we, as the filmmakers are trying to portray. To quote Adrian Miles, “all parts remain as parts online”.

Since our project work employs the branching type interactivity, as described by Manovich in “The Language of New Media”, our interface allows the user to embark on their own course base on their decision of which thumbnail to click on and subsequent thumbnails they would encounter. The project work also employs several interfaces to present different SNUs depending on which thumbnail the user has clicked on, this provides a different visual space and environment to the user apart from the same interface throughout the entire project which might turn mundane or stagnant after a while. We believe these factors encompasses some of Manovich’s definition of variability in new media, and how it makes itself stand out from traditional screen media.

Reflecting back on the entire process from pre-conceptual days, to pre-production, actual production, and post production, I strongly feel that we might have covered all 5 principles specified by Manovich in “The Language of New Media”. Numerical representation is in the binary coding of 1s and 0s for the computer to interpret data that could be translated into a pixel being on or off to form a bigger picture, a photo, a picture in motion, a video… Modularity, as I have already covered in the above paragraph. Automation, where I used filters, adjustment layers, LUTs, keyframes in Premiere to achieve different effects for the videos. Variability, also as described in the above paragraphs. And lastly, transcoding, where we are dealing with different formats from the beginning, shooting on DSLR naturally have an .mov format as most Canon DSLRs would record on, and stills were shot in RAW format, which Canon’s proprietary file extension, .cr2. When importing everything into Premiere, to enhance workflow and ensure Premiere doesn’t crash while rendering heavy files, I had to convert and standardised all video files to mov and jpeg, and then export everything to .mp4 so that they could be recognised in Korsakow. I feel that we can’t escape from any of the 5 principles even if we wanted to, if we wanted to produce a fully functioning project that may or may not even be polished or ready for commercial release.

Questions raised during the presentation, as well as after thinking on how can we progress further would be how do we make our project perhaps more engaging, we could consider what prompts or what could motivate the user to click on a SNU, perhaps something rewarding or something to ignite curiosity within the user. Right now, it is just based on the thumbnail that might appear interesting to the user, hence wanting to click on it to find out more. We didn’t get the chance to explore much on the audio aspect of representing isolation, hence I foresee doing something more audio related and chucking it as a SNU and see how Korsakow treats it. Maybe even do an entire project just based on audio. Also, it might be worth exploring how we can take this project outside Korsakow onto different platforms, which brings more opportunities, and also limitations to making and thinking in fragments.