Alas, the end is here. Another semester down, and this is actually my final semester of uni. What a journey it’s been.  

I think I can safely speak for most of us from Thinking in Fragments that we have come a long way from week #1 when Hannah asked us to find an online screen production, and majority of us just came up with Youtubers, or people famous on social media. Little did we know how vast and diverse online screen production covers, and beyond.

Project: Time Out

At this stage, I think we have made it clear what our project work is about and what it aims to do, so I won’t dwell on that. I’d like to point out, however, we approached making this project in a relatively experimental way. I feel like the uses of “glitch” in our project has become like a recurring theme even in our Assignment 3. There was no intention of using the glitch from during our pre-production discussions, however, it was only during the post-process that led me to experimenting with such effects to enhance our theme of isolation, hence delivering and cueing the mood and emotion.

I’ve been asked by my fellow peers on how I went about doing the glitch effects on Premiere, as well as changing the screens of the classroom to our own clips for our “Classroom Scenario”, “2nd Perspective”, where the screens glitched out and started playing fragments of our subject’s memory. Therefore, I’ll leave the Youtube tutorials at the end of this post for anyone who might be interested in using them for their future projects. Premiere has proven many times to be a very powerful editing software, and there are certain cheats/tricks you can get away with, without bringing it into After Effects where it may get a little more crazy/complicated.

Taking it one step further, in order to align our poster with our “glitching” theme, I decided to employ a glitching exercise I did for another elective. The process is fairly simple, first opening a jpeg file in TextEdit, and a whole bunch of codes would appear in the TextEdit. This, as specified by Manovich, is the computer language for it to interpret and then translate into pixels that form the actual image that we open in Preview or whatever application (ie. Lightroom, Photoshop…). By deleting, copying, pasting, and more deleting, it slowly creates, adds, subtracts artefacts on the image, hence a glitch. This process might be a little time consuming and aimless, but after a few tries, you slowly get a hang of what you’re deleting and which part of the image are you actually going to glitch.

Media Event

Our media exhibition went well. Though, not quite how a lot of us expected it to be. Personally, I felt that it was a little disorganised, as most of the people started leaving the moment they’ve already experience the first group’s presentation. They would not come back for the next few groups’ presentation, thus not experiencing their project work. That said, I realised that most of the people who do come into our space asked more general questions relating to our studio as a course, rather than our specific project work. Having to think on our feet, we tried answering them with the aid of our project work, but not to the extent of them experiencing the entire intended duration of our project. We did manage to gather a few feedback from those who actually clicked and interacted with our online screen media. I guess we could have done more on our part on planning what we can do during our time slot with the space. And this really made me realise that not everyone has the same attention span, nor do they have the same interests/ideology, or in other words, everyone is different and have their own opinion. This is, after all, our first time exhibiting our project to an opened audience where they could literally just pause, get up, and go, instead of being in a classroom environment. So the one thing I can take away from this is that the content, and  the delivery is still what sells to viewers.

The Course

Thinking in Fragments has really opened my mind to new media, particularly new media and screen production. As I mentioned earlier, my understanding goes as far as opening a Youtube account, and uploading content online. But now I start to breakdown every media text I consume, where it’s embedded, who’s hosting it, what’s the source, what’s the aim of putting it online, and so much more. We also looked into having multiple-narratives, and non-linear narratives. This can be applied to film studies as well, whenever I watch a film and I get bored, I’ll start wondering that maybe the film is not about having a narrative, start, middle, and end, maybe it’s about evoking or prompting something, maybe I’m meant to feel like that by the film. And it goes on to other art forms as well, music, painting, photography, why an artist creates this work, not just to please record labels, or exhibit at art galleries, maybe they’re just trying to express or emote something through their art.

Questions

Some questions posed to us by Hannah on the last lesson in Week #12 that I’d like to address, and maybe leave behind.

–Limitation of online media making?

We definitely struggled with this as a group at the beginning of Assignment 3. We were worried that people would not get what our project is about. And that’s the thing, one of the limitation is, we can’t control what people think, feel, or do. They are very much entitled to their own opinion, mood, and feelings. A keyboard warrior can go on ranting about how much he dislikes the latest Avengers film, doesn’t mean that he is going to be heard, or his opinion would influence the next Marvel film. What we can control is the content we put out, and how we present it to people. Whether it’s boring content, if done in a fun way, can be entertaining. OR vice versa. The real limitation here is ourselves, doubting our capabilities as media practitioners or content producers. What’s really holding us back, be it technical competency or just lack of knowledge. If that’s the case, it’s time we brought ourselves into this new world, maybe branding it, “New People” 2.0

-How do we make engaging online content? 

To me, content is always going to be there, someone somewhere has probably thought of it before, and it might have been done a thousand times by many different people across the world. It’s how we package it together, and delivering it to the user that makes the difference. With technology advancing, Live streaming, VR, AR, 360 cameras, and more, there’s really no limit to what content producers can do with the tools we have.

Youtube Tutorials

ENJOY!

Access to our project work can be found here!

Our project work is slowly coming together. Unlike our last assignment where we basically just dumped everything in Korsakow, we gave a little more thought into designing the interface and also how the different SNUs transit from one another.

We decided to keep the production side of things simple, a GoPro for our first perspective, a Canon EOS 70D for our second and third perspective, and a Zoom H4N sound record to record any ambient sounds for our second and third perspective. Except for the second perspective for our Home scenario, the rest were shot with the environment lighting. (Ie. Classroom/Alley lighting)

As for the second perspective, at home, I was trying to reconstruct a shot I thought looked really cool from a Paramore music video for one of their songs, “Told You So”. Hence, the need to hire an extra LED lite panel, and since it was shot at my place, we had full control of the lighting conditions, movement of objects, and basically trying to reconstruct the scene. Of course we were unable to remake the shot to 100%, but I think we did a fairly good job considering non of us had very little lighting knowledge, it was done by trial and error. 

Below is a test shoot before our actual shoot, where I spent most of the time playing around with the position of the light, as well as trying to get the “water effect” shone on the water/our subject’s face. All these were done prior to the actual shoot to save everybody’s time, instead of figuring out where to put the lights, we could spend more time trying different shots, camera angles or doing different takes.

I’ve been told many times by different people that the best way of learning is through teaching, or in the simplest of terms, speaking. You solidify an idea, a concept, or theory that’s been floating in your head by reiterating it to people, slowly concreting the points and piling bricks one on top of the other. That’s how I felt when I was delivering our group’s idea and concept for our final assignment to the other groups in class. By the end of the consultation session, I’ve managed to string up a bunch of words (that I can’t even recall now) that could sum up all our pointers into a couple of sentences.

Before all that was happening, the group struggled to define if our project work was fiction or non-fiction. We are dealing with a non-fiction topic, but with a fictional character. However, we had a hard time deciding whether we should call our project a fictional story or not. But by the end of class, we managed to come up with a definition that encompasses both words ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’, which unfortunately has escaped me at this point. Bottomline, we are progressing with our project work on exploring ways we can portray the mood and feeling of isolation without having explicit telling the user.

We gathered some much useful feedback from our classmates from the other groups. Olivia from the CrashCourse group gave us a really good tip on having a little narrative structure, but not so much that is curated, just a certain flow and a general direction for the user to keep them engaged and motivate them to move on to the next scenes. Coincidentally, the 3 scenarios could be linked together as if our subject starts off from class, and then makes her way back home in the alley, and ends up in the lounge room of her house. Previously, we didn’t really consider having such a structure to follow, but it would amount to having something a little disorganised or random. We’ve moved from being something non-linear (ie. our last project work) to something multi-linear, where we have the same Start and End, but the journey taken by the user is entirely up to the person’s decision.

Another feedback we got was the choice of using VR or a 360 camera for our first perspective (the POV shot). Although it did come up during our group discussion, we thought given the amount of time for this assignment, we can’t dwell on the technicalities and how-to-dos right now since non of us have any background on operating and producing a VR/360 video media object. Having said that, it would give the user that extra bit of interactivity and immersive experience. I don’t think I need to expressed my interest in the use of VR as a tool to capture and exhibit documentary as I have already made it very clear in my previous blog posts.

A carpenter slowly chisels away excess wood he doesn’t need to carve out a piece of ornament, furniture, or art.

I feel like for this final assignment, we are slowly chiselling away the excess material we have from our previous project work and slowly shaping, moulding, and rendering our ideas together. We pretty much set up a whole block of wood with our last project work for ourselves, and now we’re just picking moments we thought that worked well with our concept of isolation. This by no means indicate that we are doing less work for this assignment, but have a more defined direction that we would like to take. Hence, the group has taken on a more linear approach to creating our multi-linear narrative, by incorporating 3 different perspectives to a specific scenario, and experimenting this approach on 3 different scenarios. In simpler terms, 3 shots of the same person, in the same scenario, and we’re planning to shoot 3 different scenarios, which amounts to 9 media fragments in total. Also, we’ll be employing the use of audio recording, as well as certain sound effects that might contribute to the different perspectives and scenarios.

For the first perspective, we decided to go with a point-of-view shot, hence probably a GoPro would come in handy for this. The second perspective would be what our subject thinks of reality, basically letting the viewer see/hear what’s going on in her head. And the third, what is the actual reality, like a CCTV surveillance camera. The second perspective would give us an opportunity to really try out and experiment with different approaches of filmmaking, and post production in portraying the inner psyche of our subject.

We have a rough idea of where these 3 scenarios will take place. We realised we spent too much time thinking of places to shoot that could reiterate our theme of isolation with our last project work, but with a clearer concept in mind, we stuck with simple locales that could be easily identifiable with people. These 3 places are being at home, in class, and walking along an alley.

I’m going off on a tangent with this next paragraph, but I found an interesting article online regarding the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and how they are trying to engage to a wider audience with the means of using digital platforms.

The above excerpt was taken from the article. And I think it is a very good summary of how new media spaces function both virtually and in physical space. The attention span or as advertisers and media agencies call, the “grab”, is the first few seconds that the audience invest their time in a particular media artefact, are the most crucial in determining whether they’ll carry on viewing the exhibit. Hence, every exhibit has to have an engaging experience from start to end, as defined by the article as having a ‘story’. Something the audience can take home, something they can talk about with their friends, or family on the way home, or a memory they can recall upon, or as specified in the excerpt, ‘a social object’.

This can be applied to multiple levels of online screen production, from our very own project work, to the entire media event held at the end of the semester. The experience is crucial, and so are the people involved in it.

Since we’re exploring the use of sound in our next assignment, there’s no better place to start than the people behind podcasts. Specifically, the men behind the scenes of producing Radiolab. The video below shows how the idea of Radiolab came about and a brief background of the company, and what they do.

And in another online project that was brought to my attention by another course that I’m taking, Histories of Film Theory, called, This American Life, uses podcasts to raise awareness about current affairs in America, with a slightly more serious, and to some extent , an experimental approach. Both of these sites employ the use of sound effects heavily. Since there isn’t any visuals to go along with the sound, they are left with an black canvas to paint an entire picture for the listener to imagine or picture what they are trying to portray, be it a conspiracy theory, or just an informative 101 sound bite on how to make a pancakes (for example, I don’t actually think they made a podcast solely on how to make pancakes, but who knows). The thing is, sound can really play a very big role in storytelling, something that a lot of us disregard. The use of volume, panning, reverb, and more can help drive a simple emotion. I guess these are some of the things that are worth exploring in our upcoming project work.

In Thursday’s class, Hannah gave us an interesting article worth looking up called, “Theorizing Documentaries”, by Michael Renov. I shared with her how I thought the “Interactive documentary: setting the field” reading reminded me of Bill Nichol’s 6 Mode of Documentary , where every documentary film embodies either 1 or more of the modes that Nichols has defined. However, in “Theorizing Documentaries”, where Renov explains the fundamental tendencies of documentary, focuses more on why the documentary is made. The implication it carries, the very motivation of why the documentarian chose to do what he is doing. Contrary to Aston and Gaudenzi, or Nichols, where they analyse and define more on how the documentary is being made and presented, instead of why. This really shot an arrow into a new direction for the group to focus on why are we doing this project, and what sort of outcome we want out from it, perhaps to provoke, prompt, emote, or cue, the list goes on. The outcome from making the project, is just as important as the outcome we want the users to react or feel. Something which I think, we might have overlooked in our previous assignment.

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.