The group wasted no time discussing about our next assignment and project work. Coming out of the presentation from week #8, we took the feedback given by the panel and see how we could incorporate it into our next project work. We decided to stick to our theme of ‘Isolation’, but perhaps explore ways on how to improve the user experience from our previous project work.

One of the comments by the panel was how we could incorporate sound, and not just a generic audio track playing at the back (like what we did in the last project work), perhaps constructing a soundscape or recording of what our subject is hearing and experiencing. Also, after having reflected on the entire thought process, and the making of the last project work, I feel that it is worth considering how do we make the user motivated to click on the next SNU, how do we make the experience more engaging, perhaps maybe something more cohesive. As I reflect on the last project work, I felt that we were just shooting various media fragments and plonking it on to Korsakow with minimal thought given to designing the entire narrative arc, or the lack of it. Maybe it’s worth thinking of the entire flow from start to finish what do we want out of the experience, now that we have a better understanding of how making media for online screen production works, and not forgetting, how to use Korsakow.

In the readings for weeks #9-10,  “Interactive documentary: setting the field”, by Judith Aston & Sandra Daudenzi, talks about 4 distinct modes of interactive documentary, particularly in online spaces. What interests me the most among the 4 is “The Experiential” mode. Aston and Gaudenzi elaborates that this mode of interactive documentary as, “play on our enacted perception while moving in space.”. This is very much inline to my previous blog posts on VR technology and how VR has opened up opportunities for documentarians to exhibit their work to people across platforms, to transport people to a re-constructed environment of the actual time and place as closely as possible without physically being there. But before we get a little aheads of ourselves by suggesting that we should incorporate VR into our next assignment, I think it is really worth having a deeper look into the experience we want out of our viewers or users who have interacted with our project work. Their emotions they feel while going through each individual fragment, as well as the entire project.

We have yet to decide whether we will still be using Korsakow for the next assignment, as we did mention in our presentation that it might be worth exploring having our project work on multiple platforms to reach out to a wider audience, having said that, consequentially, this might alter the end experience to the user as well. Something we should take into consideration in our future discussions.