Week 11: Video Project Documentation – Kat Valachova

Partners: Cecilia, Angel, Lily

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~kv795/week11/index.html

Our project is in the form of a web-based interactive diary. The story of our project is based on two friends – Miju, who is very popular, but inconsiderate towards others; and the owner of the diary, who over the time uncovers the true nature of Miju and reveals it to the rest of Miju’s followers. The visitor of our website can then follow this revelation through the diary, day by day learning about the diary’s owner’s feelings. The video is a form of visual representation of the story and is incorporated in the diary pages as clickable images, that enlarge themselves and automatically start playing. To scroll through the diary, one has to click on the right bottom of the page, so touchpad or a mouse are necessary. 

Documentation

Because this project is an interactive video, I decided to shoot a short video on my phone as a form of documentation in order to better demonstrate its flow:

The Process

Our goal was to create a story, that would somehow relate to our university, common space and relationships. This is how our prototype came to be. Our first plan was to capture the story of a vampire on our campus and his interaction with the school’s environment, as a reaction to the issue of the recent hotly discussed topic of abandoned things of the others in public space. He was meant to be an outstanding and popular person, who, due to his disrespect towards his friends, gradually loses his popularity and becomes an outcast. At the beginning, we hoped to create a multi-choice narrative, where the page visitor could decide if the vampire does (not) the bad deed and by doing so eventually deciding the vampire’s fate as the outcast. But due to various reasons, we decided go with the point of view of not the popular person, but rather his follower. And so the figure of vampire has become the model for our final version of our project, the school “queen”.

The picture above is an excerpt from our story-board narrating the story of the popular vampire finding a student’s card and tossing it away – the changing point of the whole story – as he is seen by his friends and finally abandoned. 

Post Mortem

Working in a group of four instead of two (as it was during the previous projects) was quite challenging in terms of communication. At the beginning it has on many occasions happened that the discussion about the collective project had accidentally lapsed into a heated discussion of just two people. Luckily, we managed to adjust this in the later stage, so everybody was engaged as evenly as possible. I believe this project has challenged me a lot in terms of being conscious of thoughts of not only one person (which is sometimes already challenging as it is), but the whole group. Before this, I was not even aware how hard this form of multitasking is. Hopefully, I have become a little better in it. In regards to the project, although the idea has changed a lot throughout the creation process, I believe that in terms of the final product and the overall division of work, we have done the best we could.

Leave a Reply