Our group became so productive in week 7 and 8. Till the tutorial on Monday in week 8, the schedule looks good, and I feel quite satisfied with this project.

In week 7, we first welcomed the exciting Korsakow workshop. I downloaded Korsakow demo version and planned to do this part for our project. During the first try of using Hannah’s clips, it was a little bit confused that I wasn’t familiar with the software and didn’t totally understand those settings. After a few tests, I learned that if all the clips have the same keyword, they would simply appear on the same page, and also we could change the in and out keywords to decide which clips would appear after clicking one particular clip. Then, we came to the interface design, and that was how the webpage would look like. There is one thing really annoying that I can’t see the preview of the actual webpage in Korsakow, so it needs to export every time after you make some changes and to see if the changes work well. In general, we just moved the first step towards finally using Korsakow to complete our interactive media work. At the end of that class, I was checking the new leased album, and fortunately found one cover that looked so abstract — a woman is chewing the bubble gum and the other end of the gum is sticking on a falling vast. I immediately thought of science fiction and AI, like the tv series West World. So, we collected the final twelves album cover, did about half of the shooting, and planned to finish all the video by Monday in week 8 to make our Korsakow webpage. 

On Thursday, we did the appointment with Hannah, and another group — Darcy, Sam and Denise，to get some feedback for what we’ve done. This appointment changed our previous plan of Korsakow design a lot, and brought the project to a more creative and non-linear level. As I mentioned, we were considering to build three genres — rock, pop, and others, to divide the covers, and show the original cover at the end of each clip. This design seemed to be very clear,  but it was too straightforward that viewers would quickly get the idea after watching any two clips. However, the point of an interactive media work should be the joy of exploring, thinking of each small piece and figuring the real meaning by playing around all the clips. So, we agreed with Hannah’s suggestion that the project could be more ambiguous. The final decision was to have an individual credit clip showing one second of the first impression, then fading into the real album cover, and all the music sources at the end of it. The interface design was very simple that we wanted all the clips to appear at the same page, so it would look like a real record store, and viewers could pick one CD to play, also, this design wouldn’t give too many hints of the real theme.

As the Korsakow person in our group, I watched some instructions on canvas, and tested with the existing footages on Monday’s class. Everything was going on well because our planned design was just easy to operate, and I really found it quite interesting to play with Korsakow after I understanding how it works. Looking forward to see the final result on Wednesday night.