I like the way that questions are posed to the user in Reinvention Stories and how answers appear on the screen. This could be useful in my question section:
Tag: processing the Farm
Sharing Resources
As I was scrolling through the “collaborative documentary experiment,” Highrise, I found this approach for making it easy to share materials about and from it. When I have some time, I’ll check it out and think through whether or not it’s useful for the searchable database I’m planning to include in my interactive story project.
Design Idea: Powering a Nation
I wanted to make note of this cool design feature on the Powering a Nation site:
I like how they use the diamonds as chapter markers. While you can’t see it in the screen shot, when you scroll over the diamonds the chapter titles appear. When you click on them the movie (almost) immediately jumps to the next chapter. Cool.
I also like how the text gradually appears on the screen in this section. From this:
to this:
Ir/responsible
As I think through what kind of storyteller I want to be and how I want to craft, tell and share my stories, I’m revisiting one of my early inspirations: Trinh T. Minh-ha’s “Grandma’s Story” from Woman Native Other. In the second farm film, The Farm, part 2: The Puotinen Women, I matched four different quotations from this chapter with Puotinen storytellers: the farm, Ines Puotinen, Judy Puotinen and me (Sara Puotinen). This morning I looked over some notes for the film and discovered another quotation:
In this chain and continuum, I am but one link. The story is me, neither me nor mine. It does not really belong to me, and while I feel greatly responsible for it, I also enjoy the irresponsibility of the pleasure in the reproduction. No repetition can ever be identical, but my story carries with it their stories, their history, and our story repeats itself endlessly despite our persistence in denying it.
Trinh T. Minh-ha
I want to play with this idea of being responsible and irresponsible. I feel a responsibility to pass on the stories of past generations, but I feel (in bad and good ways) that my passing on of those stories is irresponsible. On one hand, I worry that I don’t know enough, haven’t experienced enough, am not old enough, to tell the stories. On the other hand, I feel exhilarated and inspired by the process of sifting through the accounts, interviews and photos and crafting them into new stories to share with others. I want to tell these stories. In fact, I need to tell these stories.
In thinking about how to incorporate (and hopefully) maintain the tension between being responsible and irresponsible, I want to feature some clips of my sister Anne and my mom discussing the farm and how they could take responsibility for it when it was “their time.” I wonder, is it my time? What does “my time” mean when the farm is no longer in the family and my mom is dead?
Analysis: Hollow
In this analysis, I’m looking at the recent (it went live just a few months ago) interactive documentary, Hollow. Here’s a description of the project from the Kickstarter page (they raised over $28,000 for production and completion):
Hollow is an interactive documentary and community participatory project that focuses on the lives of residents in McDowell County, West Virginia. Hollow combines personal portraits, interactive data, participatory mapping and user-generated content on an HTML5 website designed to address the issues stemming from stereotyping and population loss in rural America. Community members will take part in the filmmaking process by creating their own documentary portraits and balloon maps. Hollow strives to bring attention to issues in rural America, encourage trust among the community and become a place where users can share ideas for the future.
note: While many of the other interactive documentaries that I’ve looked at or reviewed offer an about page directly on the site, I couldn’t find one here. Did I just miss it?
Design Elements
- desktop only, not accessible on tablet or phone…trying to raise money to create app
- lots of parallax scrolling in different directions: side to side and up and down with cut-out images, occasional animation, lush backgrounds + sound scrolls too
- beautiful images and video of West Virginia (image-heavy)
- text used in brief quotations or headlines, not many lengthly descriptions on screen (unless you click on info buttons)
- creative collages
- navigation bar at bottom of screen, can click on different chapters at any time
- pages must load
- icons on screen: i for information + triangle for video + star for bonus material (which can be unlocked once you watch the videos)
- continuous sound (background noises + music), automatically loads, but can be muted
- tons of content in each section, only available when scrolling through site, no resource page. (I’m noticing a real effort to create and control the user experience. Did the filmmaker choose to not have a resources page because they wanted the user to experience the interactive documentary the way they wanted them to? This seems to be a frequent desire from filmmakers).
QUESTION: How much can/should the creator control the user experience? How much freedom should the creator give to the user? When does freedom create too much confusion and chaos?
Content
- bunch (how many? not sure) short, 2-3 minute video portraits/interviews of residents
- footage from various residents (parents getting footage of baby, at the swimming pool, parade, riding on an ATV trail)
- quotations from interview are featured on screen, when scrolling after watching films
- infographics with statistics about area and its residents
- sharing stories of love for community, desire to fix it
Sections:
- The way it was: really cool scrolling infographic detailing history of rise and fall of county.
- These roots: on love of place, sense of connection, home
- For each other: community, coming together in crisis (flood of 2012), community projects, sports (football, swimming)
- For the land: drug culture, tourism, fishing/trout, housing/construction, creating new businesses
- When coal was king: history of county when prosperous through photos and videos (cool technique of focusing in on old photo of person and then fading into a current photo of them (which leads to video interview), October Sky festival, mining/mine-related illness/impact of mining
- Around the bend: the future, hope
Responsive
No.
Storytelling
- linear in terms of sections, starting with the past (section 1) and ending with the future (final section)
- centered around characters more than actions
- created to evoke a mood and sense of respect for the specific place
- mostly through images, sounds and video
- reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s idea of story as house
Interactivity
- scrolling through at own pace, can click on tons of different icons for information + videos + bonus material
- throughout doc there are opportunities to contribute content: tag pictures of home on hollow’s instagram page, answer survey questions
Strengths
- beautiful
- very effective in immersing user in story, enabling them to feel and experience the county
- creative displays of infographics
- cool use of parallax, creating collages of image, video, sound
Weaknesses
- too much parallax, it gets really annoying and tiring
- must wait at every chapter for it to load. This can get annoying if you’re trying to go back and forth between chapters.
- experience is too controlled by structure of site and filmmaker. While there are opportunities for interacting, they are heavily shaped by how filmmaker wants you to experience the documentary
- not responsive
- no resource page or way to access all of the information (videos, images, information) unless you tediously scroll through each chapter. Sure, this creates a “cool” mood and a powerfully immersive experience, but users may want to access the information again and in different ways.
Things to Use?
- the quotations, pulled out of the interviews and featured on their own page
- icons for type of content (information, video, bonus material. maybe?
- soundscapes? Not sure. Can be too intrusive, but I like the idea of background sounds to help evoke a mood.
Summary
This is a really cool interactive documentary, that is visually stunning and that offers a lot of great content. I’m bothered by the parallax scrolling and the efforts of the filmmaker to control the user’s experience. Is this the only way to create a mood and to immerse the user in the documentary, forcing them to scroll through and only giving them access to the material in one way? I hope not. I’d like to create a site that provides the user with more freedom and more access to the information in many different ways, but that doesn’t allow that freedom to confuse or over-complicate the stories.