In week 4, we had explored a lot in Manovich’s The Language of New Media, that modularity means a piece of new media work could be divided into numerous modules, where each module would make sense on its own, but also related to the rest elements of the work; while variability refers to a work would have infinite versions, that each version are customised for each user through the different decisions they had made while experiencing it. Meanwhile, week 7’s reading also gave us the similar idea that, viewers are involved in the editing of each Korsakow project, which their choices of previews selecting would create a unique viewing experience for each of them.
In the project we have made, modularity could be found in each of its 36 fragments, that they are all showing different individual’s Friday life at different points of time, in the form of an independent clip even though it doesn’t contain a lot meaning when seeing as a single component. However, after these clips had been linked together, viewers would have a perception of how different a day life is between the city and suburb area of Melbourne, through the huge contrast between them. For variability, alike other Korsakow films, viewers would create their own version of the film every time based on the selection of SNUs through watching, yet the message that each viewers received might be various depend on their impression of the Melbourne city and their personal experience as a resident/tourist.
However, a small-scale documentary would still have its limit. For our project, it contains four timelines, that each of them was made up of nine videos, hence, there was not much options for viewers to choose, all the interactions that they could have are to switch between clips at the same point of time, and to move beyond the timeline of the each specific person. In the other word, this documentary expected that viewers would only watch it for several times, as long as they had viewed all the clips, unlike those well-known documentaries that contains massive amount of fragments and could intensely engage with its viewers. Although it could be said that since the objective of small-scale documentaries are relatively simple, its experience seems still cannot be as fascinating as those larger projects.
Due to the linear structure of timelines (from 8am to midnight), the project has a straightforward purpose and does not require viewers to understand the whole picture after assembling all the fragments, that we have to put more efforts on making the project interesting to arouse viewer’s interest on watching it. After discussion, we decided to compose an opening video by speeding up our clips and sound effects, together with making sets of creative thumbnails for each individual in the film. As aforementioned in Development 3.3, it could directly stimulate viewers various senses, and cause them to pay attention to the rest of its contents.
Through working on the Korsakow project, I was wondering could the program offer us a possibility to create multiple versions of the same component, that they could have a different preview text, thumbnail and even set of keywords, which had been my main obstacle of implementing the idea of timeline showcasing. Also, I am cursing that could we produce a similar kind interactive documentary through social platforms like Facebook or YouTube that could have a higher accessibility but still keeping those interactive features.