Non-fiction: One Day on Earth
“I can’t explain how much hope comes through… It’s a beautiful thing.”
Kyle Ruddick, Director
How beautiful this ‘thing’ is, a project that documenting a single day life of people from different places on Earth? Since 2010, One Day on Earth had produced a crowdsourced film every year that the data was collected from contributors around the globe, meanwhile, all the videos uploaded by users are geo-tagged, that allow visitors to explore it by their own interest, and for academics and filmmakers to further investigate them.
According to Moments of innovation, this project was inspired by the emerge and the successful of YouTube, where an enormous amount of users had recorded and shared their daily life on YouTube, that had brought out the idea of collaborative documentary, a kind of documentary that made by a huge group of creators together.
As mentioned above, the project had connected people together, in a global scale, which had introduced a predominant characteristic of online media production, that it had enhanced the interactivity between peoples, user who joined the programme and uploaded videos were also a viewer at the same time. Through this platform, participants and the public could be conscious of people from different countries, who has a different cultural background, by watching their one day life video, meanwhile, viewers and producers could have direct communication by the comment function under the video player, while this kind of communication would take much more time if online media doesn’t exist.
Second, the threshold, the technical and the theoretical requirement of producing online screen work was much lower than the traditional media making process, that for an online video, the message presented was more important than the visual elements of it. In other words, viewers would judge less about the production quality of the videos they have watched online and focus more on the information they could receive from it, since we already had a mindset that online videos was low-budgeted and produced by amateur through years of watching experience.
Fiction: jointhequest.io
jointhequest.io (now had became Grail Diary) is a promotional project of the upcoming film Read Play One, which was a mystery game a month ago that players have to find the password through videos and ‘journal’ that the official website had been released in order to assess this website. Clues include a QR code flashed in the trailer and a post on forum reddit, which led to a journal and an image that contains a bunch of binary codes respectively. After entering the correct password, a 15-second video about the milestone of video gaming (from 2D to VR) would appear, with contains another hidden message ‘ What is the Quest’.
Interactivity would be said as the main feature of this campaign, where players have to work together with their friends and other netizens to find out the correct answer, that eventually helped increase the popularity of this film by exposing it among people around them. Simultaneously, individuals who involved in the game could be mentally interacted like playing other puzzle and mystery game, even waiting for the next trailer/hint day by day if they had got obsessed, however, player’s level of interaction between the game was highly depends on the game difficulty and their level of interest within the game and the movie.