ASSESSMENT
About the Project
What our project is
Our project was aiming to be a series of interactive videos that transitioned from normal “day in the life” scenarios, to a more story driven concept, intertwining multiple different characters into the same universe. During this time, the characters would appear in each other's stories without them realising who they are or knowing that they would eventually come to interact with one another. This would have influenced the viewer to go back and rewatch each of the stories, spotting secrets and “easter eggs” (as they are known in games) within each story. Once all the main characters' stories have been completed by the viewer, (assuming they did them in the correct order) they would then reach the final episode, where all of the stories would round off together.
Our first interactive video (the one we have recently released) follows a character named Joe. His name is Joe due to his characteristics, as he is “just your average Joe”. This can be seen as he is a normal student, and follows different student characteristics, such as hating early mornings, losing interest in work or trying hard to keep on track of their work, cooking food to save money or ordering food out of sheer laziness. Joe was also chosen to follow these characteristics, as we knew that not only would this be the easiest role to follow due to ourselves being students, and knowing multiple students who would play the role perfectly, our target audience would mostly be students themselves, allowing them to relate to Joe and understand why he does certain tasks/make certain choices throughout his day. Starting off with this character would potentially influence viewers to watch other interactive videos we make in the future if they enjoyed and related to the first one that they had seen.
As for the other interactive videos we have planned, Joe’s characteristics heavily clash with the other two characters, making the story more diverse, allowing us to go down different routes, as even though these characters are the polar opposites shown within their episodes, they would somehow have to work together to achieve a common goal.
When uploading the videos on YouTube, only the first introduction video is public, everything else after is unlisted so that they are only accessible through engaging with the videos. At the end of each video the user is greeted by two or more options which can be selected by clicking one of the YouTube cards, this will redirect them to another video, continuing the story. When the user reaches one of the multiple endings, an ending screen will appear and they will have the option to go back to the start, or go back to the last ending and try again.
Final Reflections on the project
From left to right: Sam, Jake and Dan
Personal Reflections
Sam Tattersall
Director, Co-Video Editor and Camera Operator
Overall, whilst the project was technically a success as we did manage to produce an interactive video that ran smoothly, I personally do not class this as a success. There are various reasons why this project did not go as well as we had planned, the first one being ourselves; we had great ideas that we unfortunately did not manage to execute, and therefore had to improvise just under half the original script. We also started the project way too late, we knew that due to COVID regulations ending, desired places of filming would begin to become chaotic and near to impossible to film there with our ideas that we had in mind, however we still refused to acknowledge this and delayed the project even more.
Another issue with this project was actors. Our main actor Nathan was great for the role, and his availability was perfect for our sporadic schedule, as he was available on demand. But, we completely neglected how many other actors we would need for our original ideas, such as students to sit in a classroom; an adult to be a lecturer; and a group of men to pretend to be a gang. This was simply just way too ambitious of us, due to everyone we know having busy schedules. Communication was poor when contacting actors, as we had the mindset that they would just be available on demand, and assumed that they did not have anything planned.
The final issue was with sound; ot only was there loud hissing and distortion noises in every clip, resulting in us having to turn everything down to the point where it was inaudible, but the method of recording sound was different every time we recorded a new session, which made editing harder and sound quality throughout the videos vary from clear to terrible.
As the director of this project, I feel that I could have done a lot more to make this project better and have higher quality. We still received positive feedback from everyone that has watched it and taken in criticism, however it makes me sad to think how good this project could have been if we had communicated and organised to a more professional standard.
Jake Sherriff
Social Media Manager and Co-Video Editor
I think that this project was challenging but rewarding. I’m happy with how the project turned out, but it has taught me that organisation is a key part to make any project run smoothly. I know now that we need to heavily improve our communication skills; this is because we would be in a group call planning what our plan was for the next few days and completely forget to ask the actor if it would work around his free time. I learned that we needed to be much more organised in how we processed the audio and video clips that we shot; before we bought a clapper board, which allowed us to easily link up the audio and video files in post, I would hopelessly be going though each individual clip trying to find which audio file(s) matched with which video file. I also realised that after a day of filming we should have gone back and re-labeled all the shots so we knew exactly what was what this would have helped speed up the editing process massively.
With social media I think we did an alright job but could have improved in some areas. Our behind the scenes photos were quite good as we got a photo after basically every shoot but we could have posted more behind the scenes videos and bloopers. We could have also posted teasers of the video to help excite people for the project we were going to release. With using both Facebook and Instagram to promote our video we managed to keep the content the same over the two socials. Personally I think we could have mixed up the content over the two socials so we could have got people to move over the socials and it would have surprised people if they went from one to another and saw new content.
Dan McMinn
Events Co-Ordinator and Camera Operator
Personally, I think this project was a reasonable success in the fact that we actually managed to make a functional interactive video that looks reasonably professional. Since this was our first project of this nature, we didn’t know the ins and outs of how to successfully produce such an ambitious project. Along the way we did learn very quickly that good organisation and communication was essential to make shoot days run smoothly and efficiently. Our first few shoots were especially difficult since we thought we could get away with having a ‘rough idea’ of what we wanted to do; but in reality, we really needed a thorough list of everything that needs doing and how we’re going to do that. Towards the end though, we found our stride and learned from our previous mistakes, to help us run smoother as a team and work with each other rather than clashing on small details that we hadn’t previously discussed.
Organisation was harder than I expected if I’m being honest. This was the first time that I had coordinated a project as ambitious as this and I don’t think I was quite up to the role to begin with. As with many things, I learned on the job and began to find out what needed doing and what we needed to organise as a group before we made it to the location we were filming at. I’ve learned a lot from this project and look forward to how we execute future projects under the MeMyselfandI name.
Photos from Production
