During class, some students had to get up in front of the class and share their fiction or non-fiction project that they found and that involved some sort of interactive capacity. Firstly, Darcy got up and showed us an interactive fictional documentary; I think it was, where you switched between two videos by clicking the mouse. These two videos played simultaneously and it was up to you when you wanted to switch and see what the other visual was showing. I thought it was kind of weird and the interactive part didn’t really capture me at all, because their isn’t any reason why you are actually switch the visual. Its only for your own enjoyment and for you to create your own meanings and create some sort of metaphorical value. Next was ‘Seven Deadly Digital Sins’ which was more of an interesting way to tell a story or inform/educate viewers about the information. Seven Digital Deadly Sins was created in 2014 as a web documentary, produced by the National Film Board of Canada and The Guardian, which explores online behaviour according to the traditional seven deadly sins such as pride, lust, greed, gluttony, envy, wrath and sloth. It acted by using the viewer to choose for themselves which category they wanted to look into, which opens up to a larger area where you can pick a video or some quotes and statements that then leads you to choose and answer and then results in a statistic informing you of what the rest of the population thought of your answer. I haven’t seen a platform like this before, and I like it! Although its quite categorical and doesn’t leave much room for a linear development. I feel as though after you watched one or two of the sections the audience would get bored.
My project that I looked into was the Netwars project, which is an interactive documentary that presents research and expert opinions about how cyber warfare is used. It incorporates a quite serious narration tone that is intercut between quizzes, quotes from experts that the viewers hovers their mouse over to listen, whilst watching short videos and the social engineering aspect of hacking by letting you experience it directly. It guides you through the different weapons used in the online wars and along the way reveals some slightly unnerving information about you and your computer. Which shows how easy it is to get information and to be honest, actually surprised me and made me feel a little weird. This is something I’d be keen to explore for my final assessment. But for this assessment the idea of having a narrator talking straight to you, speaking in a serious forceful tone actually makes it quite jarring and makes you keen to hear what else he say to say. I’m interested to use the same thing for the murder mystery story, cut into sections.
