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.

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.

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.

I’ve always been intrigued with film photography. From the process of shooting and not being able to look back at what you’ve taken, to the process of developing the film stock, everything could be based on trial and error. A missed opportunity of a sunset could be or a child’s first steps could be destroyed if the exposure settings were wrong, film stock was left too long in the developer solution, the solution was contaminated…and it goes on. It is the idea of these hits and misses that, in my opinion, makes film photography so interesting, and the results have a certain character, a mood, and sense of nostalgia. No, it may not have 24 megapixels or crisp colour representation or insanely fast shutter speed, and more importantly the option to bring it into Lightroom or Photoshop to enhanced, create, curate, or even produce an entire new image digitally. (Linking back to having automation, a computer and instantly “beautify” an image with a click of a button by using filters and adjustment layers.) But I feel the digital mode, or this high definition space age we live in takes out a lot of character, soul, or meaning, from our work. The hits and misses are eliminated, leaving us this canvas that we are allowed to exploit and when we’ve done something not to our liking “cmd+z”. Imagine life with an actual “cmd+z” function, I fear I wouldn’t be able to get by an entire day.

Having formed groups for our next assignment based on a graph we plotted during class ranking our capabilities, skill sets, and technical-know-how. We got down into business to discuss some themes and constraints worth exploring for Assignment 3.

Several themes that came up was the play with emotion, and colour, or maybe how colour could be a representation of different emotions and vice versa. And our constraints would be having to shoot on film, with a 35mm camera in landscape mode. Since non of us has access to any film video cameras, we decided to do several media fragments by using still images to make a stop motion. Steph also gave us some recommendation to view some of the films made by Stan Brakhage, an experimental filmmaker, particularly Mothlight where it was done on film.

After having consulted Hannah, we understand that our project is inherently modular just by the nature of how non-linear as far as our project’s narrative goes. We might draw some inspiration from visual diaries, documentaries, and the “all-so-famous” Are You Happy? project that was showed to us during class. I guess the key thing for us to focus on right now is to find a strong and simple theme, and really just honing down on it, sticking to it, and see what sort of media fragments can be made from that particular idea or concept. Right now with emotions and colour can be viewed as a little brought as there are so many kinds of emotions represented with so many different kinds of colours, it can be intimidating.

We’ve also been introduce to Korsakow, a software for us to enable our projects to be interactive, where the user dictates their own story and narrative arc. This opens up opportunities for us to discuss on the interface, how the user interacts with, not only the project, but with individual fragments. Do we use audio to cue certain emotions? Maybe a special way of editing the videos, since we’re throwing out the expectations of having everything to be polished like in cinema? Or maybe through camera techniques, movement, cinematography that is worth exploring for online screen production, that filmmakers in tradition screen media might think is a big no no.

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?