Interactive documentary, is a new form of documentary that tells stories of the real world by using different forms of media (such as websites and social media), sometimes including ‘footprints’ that we have left in the digital world, images we have posted on Instagram, videos of our daily life that we had published, could all likely to become a component of interactive documentaries.
Stated by Wiehl (2016), compared to traditional documentaries that mainly focus on big matters of our world, web-based interactive documentaries are more intimate that mostly exploring things happening in our everyday life. Which seems a perfect description of our small-scale project, that are planning to show how the Friday life of people living in different areas of Melbourne looks like, in nine different points of time from the early morning to late night. Our project is aiming to promote Melbourne to newcomers, and help viewers to reflect their daily life at the same time, of encouraging them to explore their own place of living.
Furthermore, along with the other readings, she had also indicated the main benefit of interactive documentary (which could also be a drawback), that the viewing experience of each user would be different. Since every viewer would have a dissimilar interpretation of the film, as well as, every of their action (clicks in Korsakow film) is non-definitive that, could lead them to different places in the documentary while missed some of the others, which they have to experience it several times to encounter all pieces of an interactive documentary. In response to the above concept of variability, one of the ideas of our project is to create a timeline for different person’s life in Melbourne, that viewers have to watch a few times to perceive the whole picture and the contrast between them.
In Korsakow film, the variability was achieved by the algorithm of each artwork produced, that the opaque logic hidden behind each film gave it meanings, and also provide it unpredictability in different extent. For instance, if all SNUs in a project has just one in-word and one out-word (which all in-words are different), a linear film would likely be made, since each of the SNU would only connect to one specific clip. In Making (with) the Korsakow System, Soar (2014) argued that an interactive film is failing if viewers had found out the logic behind it, which would make it less meaningful and interesting. However, in my point of view, the transparency of the logic is highly depended on the purpose of the film, for a mystery narrative, the logic have to be unpredictable in order to create suspense; but for an informative documentary that is not intended to be attractive, the logic behind it could not be too complicated that might interrupt viewers to receive the message it is presenting.