Since we had decided A Day In Melbourne to be the theme of this interactive project, which aims to show newcomers and foreigners the daily life of Melbourne citizens in specific times of a day, in both the city area and suburb area, therefore I had researched on two web-based documentary projects that related to the residents of different cities and their everyday life, the Life Underground and Hollow.
Life Underground by Laurence Milon, had collected footages of ordinary people travelling by railway/underground in several cities, from Tokyo, Hong Kong to Los Angeles, which the montage of each city could link to interviews videos of local metro users. Meanwhile, this project has an interactive function that letting viewers to create their itineraries of cities exploring in random, by their own or through assigned routes in different themes (e.g. Youth, Love, Dream).
In terms of modularity, this project is formed by independent clips filmed in different places, which each of them has its own meaning (introducing the everyday routine of railway users), while everyone of them contain a clickable interview that convey messages, which it could also be seen as an individual piece. Furthermore, these video blocks are all in the same theme (railway) with a similar structure, as well as, each user would have a distinct watching experience depends on how deep they had engaged with those videos and their personal impression regarding those cities displayed, that had formed its variability.
Hollow by Elaine McMillion had presented the stories of McDowell County’s residents, a city in the U.S. Which had lost a significant amount (80+%) of population in the past 60 years. It was made up of five sections along with multiple type of media (such as info card and videos), with included collage-like transitions and infographics to enhance its interactivity. Moreover, this project was composed of various kinds of modules, animated images, sound pieces and of course videos. Although each of them had connections between the others, these individual pieces could still make sense of its own, for instance, a number decreasing animation that demonstrating the noteworthy decline in population of that city. On the other hand, the sectional structure gave viewers freedom to decide the watching order of the story by its navigation feature, even though the creator suggested them to watch in a linear sequence by placing buttons at the end of each part.
To sum up, the above examples gave me the ideas on the possible way of creating a multi-layer documentary, and how to present a linear story interactively through breaking it into smaller pieces, that could be applied on our promotional project which shown times of a day in chronological order.