There have been several discussions going on regarding our project work, and insofar, we have decided to narrow down to the feeling of isolation. What are the different media fragments that we can create using audio-visual techniques to cue the feeling, mood, and emotion relating to isolation. And since we’re exploring the ways of making our project modular, we are planning to make use of different media elements such as photography, video, and audio to represent different meanings to isolation.

Week #7’s reading titled “Making (with) the Korsakow System”, talks about having small-scaled films and emphasising on delivering information, and a slightly more secondary mode of providing an experience for the user. Korsakow works like an editing software, piecing media fragments together into one interface, however not linking them together onto one timeline. That is where Korsakow differs from being another editing software, as it only links media fragments based on key-words, and not having them coherently side by side. This means you can have a clip with different in/out key-words hence, prompting different thumbnails to other clips to appear next based on what the user has selected previously. This can be easily confusing to some due to the amount of in/out key-words used and which clips you would want to appear more often, or which clip you would want to appear specifically after a certain clip. I foresee lots of planning and, trial and error before we can get something going for our group in terms of working on Korsakow.

Since we have to design an interface on Korsakow, and the “experience” we want our users to go through, we have to think of they kind of keywords used in our project. Also better understand how we can have multi-linear narrative. The reading mentions about Algorithmic Editing, where Korsakow allocates keywords to different clips by tagging, or applying a set of “rules” for the thumbnail to the clip to appear. Hence, there is really no fixed paths a user can go on, every experience is different. From a video editing point of view, there is basically no start or end to a clip, hence filmmakers or documentarians are able to include more information, or media texts in a video clip without worrying of having time constraints. Unlike traditional screens where every shot, every cut, every scene has to be precisely edited in order to maintain a fast or slow pace depending on the emotional agenda of the film. In other words, Korsakow does not promote spatial and temporal editing, but quite almost the opposite. The freedom for filmmakers to explore a non-linear narrative, but a multi-linear assemblage of parts that are singular yet connected.

Tying all these back to our project work, I guess it works well with our “simple theme and sticking to it” idea that Hannah mentioned, as it forces us to see what sort of media fragments can be made, produced, edited, synthesised, to achieve the feeling of isolation. I realised it is so easy to go off on a tangent once we talk about other emotions or ideas, hence narrowing down and sticking to a single theme helped us remain focused.

Our consultation with Hannah during the second half of the week went well and helped clear some uncertainties that we had with our project. Initially, we thought the clips did not portray a strong enough representation of isolation, or maybe they were not coherent enough for the user to build onto the theme of isolation, but knowing that we didn’t have to hold on so tightly to delivering the experience, rather than to just let go and let the user experience everything on their own, helped us breathe a little easier. At the end of the day, we might have focused a little too much on how we want to tell the story, when just showing the story was already more than enough.