Before I start off with what I intended to write for this post, I’d like to share an article I found online on The Conversation (this has become a running theme on my blog apparently), regarding VR. The article, titled, “Why virtual reality cannot match the real thing“, caught my attention as soon as I read the headlines, as I found it really relevant, not only to this studio, but in today’s day and age. VR is used to bring someone closer to experiencing something they might desire, without having put in the same circumstances, be it, financially low on budget, safety risks, or health conditions, and more. There have been so much written about the wonders of VR, being able to be “two places” at once. (Two places in inverted commas, because technically, you’re physically still in one). How suspension of disbelief is taken to the extreme where one loses their sense of the surrounding, and is immersed into a whole different world. However, the article is one of the few, if not only, articles that I’ve read so far that disregards the whole fascination over VR. Like being a wet blanket, if you will, spoiling everyone’s fun. One of the key arguments is having “Cheap Emotions”, where one does not get the full emotional experience of being at Niagara Falls, hence the experience is cheapened, like having a game on cheat mode and your avatar can’t die. It takes the fun away from the  whole experience. I guess it’s always good to view all sides of the story, “the good, the bad, the ugly”, and see what comes out of it, how do we benefit from these views, comments, issues, feedback, and perhaps work around it or even improve on it.

Anyway, diving into the point for this post. Having taken a closer look at the VR project done on the Indigenous people of Australia, titled Carriberrie, mentioned in my previous blog post, unfortunately I could not find any access to the actual film, but only the teaser, and I don’t own any VR equipment capable of projecting the visuals. However, even just from the teaser alone, we can get a rough idea of how it’s like to be living in the jungle or desert with the various Indigenous tribes of people and learn their culture. The only thing I found a bit restrictive was the timing between cuts from one shot to another. Although it was shot on a 360 camera or made to look like it was, the viewer is still given a limited amount of time to wander before it changes to another location or shot. In terms of modularity, or interactivity, though it engages the viewer, other than panning our heads left and right, up and down, we don’t have much control of the scenery or what comes next and after.

In terms of variability, I guess you can argue how the project takes on various forms of media, photography, videos, audio (both music and atmospheric sounds) into it’s project. And all these fragments rolled into one delivers the user an immersive experience of as if they were there. Personally, I think the only thing differs this project from traditional documentary filmmaking is the fact that it is done on VR with very high-end sophisticated equipment. But then again, I’ve yet to experience the full immersive VR experience of the film to make any judgement. What I’m trying to say is, the content could be anything under the Sun, it’s the mode of delivery that matters when it comes to telling your story. Something which should be discussed with the group in the coming weeks for our Assignment 3. What are we going to present isn’t important, but how are we going to present it with the use of Korsakow.

An article on the conversation given to us as class reading for week #5A talks about Interactivity, particularly in video games, where the users, or gamers rather, interact with the computer programme to create an experience unique to one’s chain of decisions made with regards to the game.

The article explores how this mode of delivering a unique experience can be a mode of storytelling, when taken into greater lengths, another method of screen production or documentary making. Which is what Jon Dovey & Mandy Rose wrote about in the “We’re happy and we know it: Documentary, data, montage”, for week #5B’s reading.  The article explains the use of different interactive elements in documentary making, and exploring different media elements to be used in an online project. With still images, videos, audio, and texts, at the disposal of the filmmaker, they are now not limited or bounded to the limitations of traditional screen media in terms of formats, and method of distribution and delivery. This enables filmmakers and documentarians to reach out to a wider audience, on multiple platforms.

It is worth thinking how it could be reshaping the way we deliver information from an educational point of view. In another article on The Conversation, “How the internet is reshaping World Heritage and our experience of it”, people are more aware of historical events, landmarks, and occasion through the means of delivering them on the Internet, or Web 2.0 to be specific. This not only boosts people’s awareness of history, but enables content producers to think of innovative ways to present ideas, concepts, information outside of traditional media. I guess the key word from all of these readings is, “Interaction”, and with that comes with an experience to the user. People don’t want to just watch something and go home to have a cup of tea, they want to be immersed, to feel, to ignite their 5 sense, and I think what these readings have in common is that their end-users get to take home not only a virtual souvenir, but an experience unique to their own.

Looking into our next assignment, we will be exploring how we will be making or designing a project based on having modularity and variability properties, as defined in Manovich’s “The Language of New Media”. A good starting, I guess, would be sourcing for current documentaries that has been made purposely for online screen media. And the first that comes to mind would be the VR project I’ve blogged about in week #4, regarding the Indigenous culture and people. How does it differ from traditional documentaries? What makes it modular? How is it variable?

Interactivity has been put in the forefront when it comes to online screen making (as seen in the online projects presented in class). It’s engaging, it gives the audience freedom to roam on their own, and also allows media makers to exhibit more in their work.

Our project allows people to click on specific items they wish to find out more with regards to the person, like how online retailers let shoppers click and navigate through their website to purchase an item right from their bedroom. And since it’s hyperlink driven, it spread across multiple platforms from Facebook, to Instagram, to Youtube and more.

However, since we are not IT students with much knowledge on how to create our own website, we are not sure if it’ll be practical and it could be applied into the real world. Which brings me to the next point, unfortunately, our idea of using Youtube to embed links to our Resume, social media profiles, into the video has been disabled unless you are part of the Youtube Partner Programme.  I guess this serves as a safety feature by Youtube to protect against people embedding sensitive, explicit, or just straight out illegal websites onto their youtube videos. As far as I know we are only able to embed links to subscribing, other exisiting Youtube videos, and other Youtube channels (talk about network literacy). I have, however, uploaded the different elements of the mock video to the shared folder in Google Drive, if anyone is actually interested.

I guess the only limitation I encountered was myself, actually. Like how Manovich describes “To understand new media, we need to turn to computer science.” And I have almost close to zero knowledge on computer science or software theory, other than how to operate a computer. The computer language part of new media is still an abyss I’ve not set foot on, and I do not think I might anytime soon. However, I think it’s worth noting that these two ideas of what Manovich calls, “human-computer interface and the interfaces of software applications used to author and access new media objects” definitely go hand-in-hand, ever evolving parallel to one another. Maybe if I had some skills on writing my own application or website, the result might be something different where I could work and improve on the interface and see how much more, or less, interactive we want the platform to be. I think it is also worth pointing out that some people might feel uncomfortable exposing themselves so much on the Internet, as the saying goes, what goes up in the Internet, stays in the Internet. And I actually sit in that camp of being more conservative on leaving my virtual footprint, or leaving my information out in the world wide web.

This might bring me to my next formal quality worth exploring, is the freedom that people have on the Internet compromises our privacy and personal information compromised when we upload stuff onto the Internet? And how do we protect ourselves from people attempting to steal these information? We might say it has lesser censorship rules, no form of fact checking, and controversial. But is there some way we can govern the Internet, like how a democratic society votes for a ruling party to govern the country? Can the Internet by regulated?

Our project work is to explore the interactive side of making media for online screen, as well as hyperlink driven, which ties in to Manovich’s article on hypermedia.

But first…

Before I dive into describing the concept of our project work, I’d like to point out how old school I find myself annotating and highlighting readings not just from this studio, but in the other electives I’m taking too. Makes me think that no matter how technology evolves, some people might retain some deeply rooted old habits, and I’m no exception.

The Concept…

An online e-portfolio that allows viewers, potential employers, or even friends to view your profile. It’ll operate as a website based style, like how some of the projects we’ve seen during the week where they have customised web designs and multimedia. The portfolio will start with a brief opening introduction of the person, and then several hyperlinks will appear at the end for viewers to click on if they would like to find out more about the person. Links to their resumé, showreel or past work related achievements/projects, social media profiles, and other interests such as, hobbies, family, pets, etc…

Manovich refers to this as, “branching-type interactivity”, by having several branches to various platforms across the web to access different media texts and documents. It could be a family portrait on your Instagram account, or a vlog of your last getaway trip overseas. We thought of establishing a media platform that enables users to tie in all their social media platforms together with their credentials that they may have gathered throughout their professional career.

The Video…

Since we have no knowledge of web design or writing java scripts, we did a mock up of the platform with the use of Youtube’s function on embedding hyperlinks into the video.

The mock up video can be viewed below…

One Step Further…

I know this isn’t part of making media for online screens, but I attempted to do some compositing using Premiere Pro’s compound blur effect to touch up the face of yours truly. I mean, there is no better specimen than yourself right? Going back to my internship last summer,  I was exposed to a full post-production house facility with a whole team of CG artists, compositors, colourists, online artists, and offline editors. I was shadowing one of the online artists for a week and witnessed him working on several TV commercials for a laundry detergents, beauty products, and more. The programme his used was Flame, developed by Autodesk, and I was really blown away by the capabilities that software is able to do. Currently, I’m still exploring the greater depths of what Premiere Pro can do, and I thought of touching up my face that puberty has done  such a fabulous job on leaving its mark. And I must admit, it’s a long process, keying out frame by frame to mask the compound blur effect. I’m not sure if there’s a faster way of doing it, as Premiere does have a tracking function, however it isn’t as complex as Flame’s for that matter. I am currently still in the midst of everything, as you can tell from the mock up video, there are still some parts that are glitchy. Maybe I’ll put up a before & after video just to compare and see if it’s convincing or it looks too artificial…

*This segment of the post has been added on to the original post on 30/03/2018.

The verdict…

So as mentioned above, I took a bit more time to polish up a bit of the video we shot.

The video below would demonstrate what I’ve been messing around with on Premiere. I am very much aware that these can be done in other programmes in a much more efficient, and probably, more professional way, such as After Effects, Flame Assist, or Da Vinci Resolve, however, fortunately, or unfortunately, I am only limited to using Premiere Pro at the moment.

So our little experiment went pretty well. As mentioned in my previous blog post, Liam and I were targeting the Interactive aspect of Instagram and to see what depths we can achieve beyond the very common comments that are usually related to the very picture being uploaded to the Instagram account. We wanted to see if Instagram could be pushed to something more serious, for our case, an SOS call for help.

The tools for a help call are on Instagram stories in times of crisis, there is the polling function to ask for opinions from your friends, there is obviously a comment section where people can reply do your stories, and tagging function where you can tag your location so that people know where you are so that they can locate you or provide some form of assistance. So why not try using them in a different way from how ordinary users would.

Through the means of conducting this test, we found out that due to the limited amount of duration that could be uploaded as a story, we had to keep things tight and concise. No time for fooling around or spending too much time on the backstory. Since we wanted everything to be spontaneous, hence we took on the “vlogging” approach where our subject will be taking “selfie-like” videos and commentating over the series of events that unfolds. We did consider other approach such as the POV, and third-person, but in order to keep this realistic, we stuck with the selfie in most of the shots.

Another limitation we’ve encountered along the way was that we had to keep our aspect ration to 9:16, instead of the usual 16:9 like us, MEdia practitioners, are so used to. Hence, this sort of affected the way we had to frame certain shots, which in turn should help us keep to the theme of being real. I guess one thing to note is that online content is usually produced in a 9:16 format or possibly even a 1:1 format especially if that content is going to be posted on a Facebook or Instagram newsfeed. During my internship last semester in a post-production house, back home in Singapore, we had a couple of jobs that involved producing a Facebook advertisement, and it gave us a hard time figuring out how to conform and manage the media in 9:16 aspect ratio for our timeline settings, as the commercial was shot in a 16:9 format with the camera flipped 90 degrees. Don’t intend to get too in depth with the technicalities, but there are definitely some technical aspects that should be considered before producing anything for online platforms.

In terms of the respond we manage to get from the followers, well, we found out that it is subject to the amount of followers the user has (obviously), but also how active the user is on Instagram. If it’s a passive account, example, someone who just uses his account to view other people’s posts and pictures rather than posting his own content, might have fewer responders to his cry for help as compared to someone who might be posting regularly.

I think I would like to expand a little more research on the interaction part of social media, not just through Instagram, but maybe on Facebook, or even Youtube. Particularly with the use of a Live stream. I find that initially this “LIVE” word is usually related to someone who is a star or holds some sort of a celebrity status, but now anyone can go Live, it’s really intriguing. However in order to go Live, I should have something to present Live, and that’s where I might need a little more thinking and considering before I dive into the next assignment, where content is being focused on, rather than what platform the content is on. And what differentiates good content from bad content, as well as, is the Internet bias towards certain content or vice versa?

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.