Straight out of my Desire Drive

I’ll admit that when the course started I was rather lost. We were told to create content that needed to be neither polished nor designed for any particular audience or purpose other than for ourselves. Such an idea was absolutely foreign to me. I firmly believed that as creators of content, we had to manage a fine balance between the art and the industry. Whilst I have created artistic work in my recreation time, the idea of operating as anything less than a professional in my work was rather uncomfortable for me.When we were initially tasked to make videos, I thought of each video as a product that needs to be able to stand by itself, but also be able to be linked to a group. In retrospect, I think the model in my mind was similar to that of a Youtube comic’s, where they would upload short comedy videos. The problem with that I realize now is that Youtube comic’s don’t usually get to make content of their choice, as opposed to being given a theme, operate on a loose, if not nonexistent schedule, and usually have people helping them. My particular inspiration was communitychannel (1), also known as Natalie Tran, and my original thematic style of drawing my videos was inspired by this video (2). It held many qualities that made it accessible to an audience; it was funny, simple, and it could be related to, and thus, I felt it was a good model to work with. Indeed, the general response was positive during the first tutorial where we reviewed our videos.However, in Week Three, the topics gave me creative blocks and I struggled to make the videos work. With deadlines approaching, I was forced to just make something that could even be loosely related to the assigned theme. Thus I tried practicing Final Cut Pro effects and techniques for Backward and experimented making my animations with Walfas (3). By Week Four, stressful workloads forced me to give up my original theme. Thus, I decided to experiment further, especially since I had gotten a new webcam. This was when I realized how ambitious my original idea had been, when I hadn’t seriously considered the difficulty and effort needed for multiple thirty second videos on a weekly basis, with a theme that was forced on me. Perhaps, one with more skill in the field, might have been able to accomplish the tasks, but despite my interests, I was struggling.

By the time it came around for us to design our Korsakow project, I was thoroughly stumped regarding how I would organize my videos. One particular thing I had considered involved the tagging system and the number of possible videos each video should be able to link to. Out of the fifteen videos I had, if a video linked to very few options, the narrative would be restricted and linear, but if the video linked to a little too many options, it wouldn’t be much of a narrative. It would be closer to a database mode of information communication (4) and more like a dice roll or Gashapon (5). I generally found that with the preset three options, by designing each video to have at least one way of linking to other videos in the week and have the other one or two (depending on the number of videos made that week, whether the videos have been previously seen by a user, and computer randomization) use very generic keywords that could connect to a majority of the videos, there was a pleasant ability for the linked options to be suitably random, though I personally didn’t find much of a narrative formed. Thus, I could have possibly improved on this by having more types of keywords, so that single keywords wouldn’t link to ten, out of of fifteen, other videos.

Regarding my use of accompanying text, I was rather unconcerned over what was said, so just wrote what immediately came to mind. However, I noticed that I generally talked about my opinions regarding conceptualizing or making the film, or about trying out something new. Thus, I feel that my K-film might have an unintended purpose as a documentation of my experimentation with style. I suppose I should be hardly surprised, considering I had a rather ambitious goal for this K-film that by the time I sat down to link it all up, I had already gone through the videos all over again to consider how I was going to link them. Watching each video, made me think about my production processes throughout the past six weeks, so when forced to write something, I wrote about the production of the videos.

In conclusion, I feel that I failed to make what I originally intended. I failed the moment I could not continue my thematic style from Week One and Two. I was wrong to think that making each video a good standalone video with a thematic or stylistic link to the other videos would be enough. I think that for a good K-film to have a narrative, yet have one that is dynamic, the film must be seen as a whole from the get go. Thematic and stylistic links are not enough for meaning to be derived because users are naturally inclined to assume that if a text follows another, there must be actual meaning (6) and information to be read in the presence of one after another.

References

1)Communitychannel on Youtube, a popular Youtube comedian from Australia

2)’I hate grocery stores’, 2008, Communitychannel, a comic made using stick figure drawings

3)Walfas story maker, a flash program that is used to create scenes using preset visual options

4)Yellowlees, Douglas J. The end of books or books without end? : reading interactive narratives, (p. 27-36, 67-73, 83-88). Ann Arbor, Mich. : University of Michigan Press ; Wantage : University Presses Marketing, 1999

5)Coin operated vending machines that dispense ‘capsule toys’ randomly from a large container of similar looking capsules, each containing a different toy

6)Packer, Randall and Jordan, Ken. (eds.). Multimedia: from Wagner to virtual reality, (p. 275-278). New York: Norton, 2001.