The Instagram account we had created for this assignment, S Y P H C O, is a suspense/mystery concept project that consists of five different short video teasers along with other media types, such as photo albums and audio work (turned out the scale seems not pretty small), to interact with viewers by leaving suspenses in videos, placing a simple word puzzle under every post, etc. The qualities that we had responded to through this task would be the portability of online screen media and the variety in media forms.
For a mobile social networking site, mobility has to be its key concern, that users can access it conveniently and comfortably anywhere through Internet connections, for example, Instagram had compressed the size of images and videos in every post since they had considered that the download speed of some Internet networks might be slower than average. Therefore, we had focused less on the video quality (i.e. resolution, noise amount), rather pay more attention on the content of our videos, is it eye-catching enough to draw the viewer’s attention in the first few seconds. Likewise, by knowing that people these days having a lesser attention span on using social platforms (the Hyper Attention concept), and their expectation of Instagram video length was 30 seconds, we decided to produce five 15-seconds short videos instead of posting a one minute clip on Instagram.
Regarding the media choices for social platform, text, image and video appeared to be the mainstream forms, that supported by common mobile devices. It is noteworthy that, compare to text, our brain is processing visual context 60,000 times faster, (especially everyone has a different first language) while sounds and visuals in motion picture could stimulate our different senses simultaneously. For the above reason, we had used video as the main media for each of the parts, associate with sets of photos and an audio only video (also to remind users not to mute these videos if possible).
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In making this small project for social media that included multiple media, planning would definitely be the most difficult part, not just to design the ‘plot’ of each short teasers, but how to arrange all the materials that we have taken, to construct it as a process of revealing the personality of the fictional character, by managing the upload order of posts, and content in each post (which support multiple photos/videos upload). Thus, we had captured sound effects, photos and video clips of a place at the same time, with several techniques like ‘out of focus’ and continuous shooting, in order to experiment the different arrangement of those different media types.
Also, we had realised that while doing a project in social platform that related to multiple posts, the post/upload action is irreversible. As real-time interaction wasn’t the main purpose of our project (unlike poll or live project), we had uploaded all the posts at the same date, however, since any media cannot be modified after being posted, once we want to change the order of media in a post or make a slightly change on, we have to first delete all the posts after it, which had proved the importance of every component has to be well-planned and well-prepared in running this kind of project.
Similar to those teaser videos and the fiction project that I had analysed, our videos were all composed of a small amount of shots, that described the main character by actions and locations that related to his personalities, in a vague approach that viewers have to puzzle it through using their imagination, as well as, we colour graded all the materials into a similar tone, and cut each of the clips to black scenes at the end, to maintain the consistency of the media object in the project.
Through this assignment, we had acknowledged that online media had changed our life in numerous ways, communicate by images, our working pattern into multi-tasking (eating and scrolling at the same time), as well as the producing multiple media synchronously, is it a one-way transforming, or it is happening in two-ways that we could change online media back? Furthermore, should media maker produce shorter videos to fit the expectation of online media users?