Toronto Metropolitan University Open Journals
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Scriptwriting for Interactive Crime Films: The Case of Scapegoat
No full textIn recent years, the increasing number of interactive films being released, has highlighted the need for further development of methods and criteria that can guide the earlier stages of development, such as the scriptwriting process. Following the framework of interactive storytelling as a spectrum, it is acknowledged that writing a script for an interactive narrative that involves branching path options for navigating through the story, or multiple endings, is becoming more common and presents its own challenges. In this context, this paper examines established criteria used for assessing narrative quality and examines currently available software for interactive scriptwriting, identifying their affordances and limitations. Accordingly, we present Scapegoat, a short interactive crime drama, based on the model of British homicide investigations, and with the objective to investigate in practice the application of the criteria for narrative quality, together with the processes and elements of scriptwriting that can lead to a strong engaging story. We propose an approach that can efficiently incorporate crucial information of the interaction design, it can be effectively communicated to the crew and cast and used throughout the production lifecycle of the film. We highlight the crucial role of the on-set script supervisor for ensuring the interaction design is not compromised, and continuity is retained. We also discuss recommendations for further developments, including the importance of engaging the crew and cast early in the development process, together with future work into the requirements of interactive commissioners for television and film, and the need for standarisation in the industry
How to Make Immersive Technologies More Equitable: Confronting the Medium’s Colonial Legacies and Reimagining the Creative Process
No full textToday, immersive technologies—like virtual reality—are celebrated as natural empathy machines, capable of fostering meaningful cross-cultural understanding. I interrogate this assumption through my case study of an early twentieth-century immersive, interactive ride: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1903). The elaborate travel simulation and multisensorial, live-action scenes that followed offered millions of visitors a thrilling glimpse of the electrified future promised by American imperialism. Through 20,000 Leagues, audiences climbed aboard a simulated submarine and traveled to the Arctic (a massive refrigerated warehouse on Coney Island at the height of summer, featuring live polar bears and “authentic” Native Alaskans). Though perhaps experienced simply as entertainment, the ride was a potent pedagogical tool; the amusement introduced visitors to the thrill of “discovery” first-hand while erasing the violence of colonialism. The impact of this ride, and others like it, was profound, contributing to mass support for imperial wars abroad and racial segregation at home. Drawing lessons from my case study, I argue that the early ride was a precursor to twenty-first-century immersive worlds.
My work centers on the pressing need to reconnect immersive technology to its historical context or risk reinscribing the imperial gaze into contemporary experiences. To move toward this goal, I offer fellow makers and scholars terminology to articulate the manifestations of the medium’s colonial inheritance, critical questions to guide a more equitable cultural production process, and a contemporary case study of VR film, Traveling While Black (2019), directed by Roger Ross Williams, who is already engaged in this critical work
EXPOSED: Documenting COVID-19 in the Criminal Punishment System
No full textThis hybrid paper/artist presentation is focused on the interactive documentary EXPOSED [https://unjustlyexposed.com], which provides a cumulative public record and evolving history of the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on incarcerated people. EXPOSED documents the spread of COVID-19 over time, inside prisons, jails, and detention centers across the US, from the perspective of prisoners and their families. Original interviews combined with quotes, audio clips and statistics, collected from a comprehensive array of online publications and broadcasts, are assembled into an interactive timeline that, on each day, offers abundant testimony to the risk and trauma prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine. EXPOSED launched on October 30, 2020. It will be updated weekly until December 30, 2021. The scale of the project is intended to reflect the scale of the crisis. On September 1, 2021, there were well over ten thousand quotes, statistics, and audio clips in the project database. On July 8th alone, the timeline includes over 100 statements made by prisoners afflicted with the virus or enduring anxiety, distress, and neglect. The monochrome, image-less, headline-styled interface, which allows viewers to step through thousands of prisoners’ statements, is designed to visualize their collective suffering, signal that the injustices they endure are structural, and demonstrate that the criminal punishment system in the US, itself, constitutes a public health crisis
Exhibition of a VR Experimental Documentary: Using VR Technology to Work with Children and Mothers in Prison
No full textDuring the exhibition session, we propose to view a VR experimental documentary of 20’. The VR film is made after a three-year practice-based collaborative research on mothers and children living together in a condition of imprisonment. The objective is to understand their different points of view about the confined spaces they are - or have been living - and how they endured the challenges of raising children in prison, and also which are their hopes and dreams for the future. This Ph.D. research mixes theory and practice, with the intent to analyze the production of the VR film, made combining live-action shooting and animation
Objectives and methodology: The aim is to discuss which are the potentialities and also limitations of immersive storytelling applied to visual anthropology in closed contexts such as prisons, with the collaboration of multiple approaches and forms of art, like animation.
VR filmmaking process helped to research confinement - in confined places - during the pandemic.
The objective is to understand their different points of view about the confined spaces where they have been living in the past, and how they endured the challenges and the crises they faced during their childhood and motherhood, worsened by the pandemic. The attempt to hear their own voices and their perspective following Mirzoeff’s ideas (Mirzoeff 2011, 2015) brought me and a group of artists and practitioners to experiment and employ different forms of art and methodologies, such as illustration, animation, digital storytelling, photo-elicitation and anthropological observational fieldwork.
My hypothesis is that the VR filmmaking process – more than the normal ‘flat’ documentary cinema – helped to build and share a collaborative process (between academics, practitioners and the protagonists of the research). Furthermore, I (Rossella Schillaci) think VR technology helped to support the participation of children and youth, envisioning new possibilities for interdisciplinary collaborations and to better listening to children’s ideas of participation, and expression of their point of view about the present, past and mostly future, representing their thoughts, fears and dreams.
Intended results: reflection and debate about ethical problems, the potentiality of using new technology in the research and also in the dissemination of the results. How new media can facilitate and open a broad discussion about the topics that involved not only academics but also practitioners and decision-makers?
The VR film will be available for participants. An excerpt will be available for publication, together with a paper about the making process, the methodology, the challenges faced and the results obtained.
Are ‘BIPOC solutions’ or ‘white opinions’ represented in Oldways Diet Pyramids?
No full textI would like to thank the authors for presenting some evidence of the ways in which Oldways and the USDA have worked to incorporate cultural foods and dietary patterns into their educational materials and recommendations. I agree with the author’s primary assertion: there is a great need for cultural models of healthy eating. However, the Oldways resources cited and USDA statements included in the author’s response fail to demonstrate the ways in which those “give voice” to non-white cultures. Instead, these resources perpetuate the normativity of whiteness in two very important ways: they are performative and they reduce multi-ethnic regions to single dietary patterns, which subjugates and ignores the important historical context that gives meaning to food and food culture
Implementing a nurse-led quality improvement project in nursing home during COVID 19 pandemic: A qualitative study
No full textBackground: There is broad consensus that the quality of nursing home (NH) care is a research priority to advance NH practice. However, NHs often fail to implement quality improvement (QI) research projects and complex circumstances such as Coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic may further hinder compliance. This study aims to describe the challenges associated with implementing a nurse-led QI project in NH during COVID-19 pandemic and potential strategies for their overcoming. Methods: A descriptive qualitative study was performed, and three data collection strategies employed, including: 1. semi-structured, open-ended interviews with follow-up questions (one NH manager, three members of the NH staff, and two family caregivers of people with advanced dementia); 2. research diary; and 3. in-the-field-notes. A combined deductive and inductive content analysis was adopted to analyze data. Results: Challenges may be anticipated or unanticipated. QI projects should include preliminary assessments to identify the willingness to change and establish partnerships at multiple levels with all stakeholders, adjust the implementation plan to the organizational context, and be open to ongoing changes. Conclusions: Early and regular engagement of stakeholders strengthen relationships. Moreover, an ongoing reflective practice throughout the entire implementation process promotes openness to change, and finally learning and improvement
The relationship between electronic health literacy and individual factors among adults with chronic pain: A cross-sectional study
No full textIntroduction: Chronic pain requires individuals to develop self-management skills that rely on health literacy and, more recently, eHealth literacy. Very few studies have investigated potential predictors of eHealth literacy in chronic pain patients. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore potential predictors of eHealth literacy among individual characteristics and pain-related clinical factors, as a preliminary step to understanding the multi-variable relationships that could be examined in a larger study. Methods: A cross-sectional online survey was distributed to adults living in the United States with various chronic pain conditions using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. A convenience sample of 196 participants was recruited. The independent variables of interest regarding their relationship with eHealth literacy (dependent variable) included demographics, health literacy, chronic pain severity, pain attitudes and coping skills. Chi square tests of association, and independent samples t-tests were used to examine the bivariate relationships. Results: The majority of the sample suffered from chronic pain for more than 2 years with 48% suffering from chronic back pain. Most of the sample (n=184, 93.9%) had high eHealth literacy. Significant relationships were found between eHealth literacy and the following variables: marital status, education level, and age, as well as health literacy, chronic pain interference with activities and chronic pain attitudes. These warrant further exploration in a larger study using logistic regression. Conclusions: our findings provide new information on the relationship between eHealth literacy levels, pain-related individual factors such as attitudes toward pain, and clinical outcomes, i.e., pain interference with physical and psychological function. Although further research is needed to investigate eHealth literacy predictors and mediators, these findings promote the evidence-based development and evaluation of interventions enhancing eHealth literacy skills, as well as self-management skills of chronic pain patients
Screening Bodies: Women Watching Cinema in Post-pandemic India
No full textAs the COVID-19 pandemic continues to violently underscore the pre-eminence and precariousness of corporeality, the audiences’ bodily engagement with the screens on which they watch cinema is apt to undergo a range of shifts. When India implemented one of the strictest shutdowns in the world to control the spread of COVID-19, a population renowned for its fervent film fanbase, was forced away from film theatres. A privileged minority, however, was able to continue their pursuit of cinema by turning to the screens within their possession. This study engages with Indian women who have access to digital screens to watch Indian films.
Based on in-depth interviews conducted with over forty women from predominantly urban India over the course of three months, this study observes how these reconfigurations primarily proceed along three axes: shifts in the linguistic and ideological rubric where the body’s investment in the digital screen becomes emplaced, the emergence of new constellations of women’s communities centered around cinema, the increased introspection among women about the genre of cinema watched on digital screens, and the subsequent impact on their gendered identity
Archival Imaginaries: The Use and Repurpose of Archive Footage in Interactive Documentaries
No full textBesides presenting a creative account of reality, in a digital format, interactive documentary plays with the interconnectedness of intermediality by assembling various audio and visual sensory modalities, including moving images, photography, illustration, animation, text, and sound (Whitelaw 2002; Aston and Gaudenzi 2012; Nash 2021). Following this train of thought, the use of archival footage may open up creative possibilities, as it entails the repurposing of historical, institutional, or personal audiovisual materials into new narratives. Several authors (Russel 1999; Bruzzi 2006; Haggith 2012; Baron 2014) have significantly contributed to the critical reflection on the use of archives within traditional documentary forms, taking into account the historical, creative, and ethical layers of such content manipulation. The use of archives in interactive documentaries, on the other hand, is still a topic that requires more critical analysis, as archival footage drifts from its indexical nature (Haggith 2012) through decontextualization or repurposing, affecting the textuality of the interactive narrative.
This paper aims to merge these two territories and afford an analysis of how archival footage contributes to an epistemological account of reality in interactive documentaries. Drawing upon De Jong’s (2012) taxonomy to classify how archives are used in traditional documentaries, we analyze how Welcome to Pine Point (Simmons and Shoebridge 2011) and A Short History of the Highrise (Cizek 2013) reuse and repurpose analogue archives, while interplay these archival materials with other multimedia formats. De Jong (2012) identifies the following uses of archive footage: i) the archive as an illustration; ii) as a historical backdrop; iii) a metaphorical tool; iv) a narrative resource; v) and the archive as legal evidence. Furthermore, we analyze the interactive documentaries through the concept of “archive-image” (Didi-Huberman, 2008); i. e. the meaning deriving from how archives are used in interactive documentaries and how such footage is placed in the navigation structure of the interface, contributing to the multimodal narrative. We argue that interactive documentary provides a territory of engagement and continuous momentum to revive the past by using the archive as historical validation, as well as a space of shared collective memories while remaining open to new readings, engendering multiple archival imaginaries
Learning by Doing: Applying Research-Creation to Interactive and Immersive Documentary
No full textThis scholarly essay is about research-creation in the field of interactive, immersive and digital non-fiction storytelling. It seeks to shed light and update this approach to research, and to identify ways in which it can be rendered more accessible to both practitioners and researchers.
The essay revisits two recent factual narratives—web-documentary Field Trip (2019) and VR experience Myriad (2021), projects in which the authors were directly involved as practitioners. It positions these two digital practices in the body of literature on media innovations, before qualifying them as interactive and immersive documentaries (i-docs).
Field Trip is a browser-based 92-minutes documentary taking a deep dive into the history and social struggles around the Tempelhof Field, Berlin’s former airport turned public park. Myriad is a 32-minutes immersive VR experience narrated from the perspective of globally migrating animals, sensitizing the audience to the interplay and interrelationship of all life forms.
The authors explain how these projects have, in their respective and singular ways, opened spaces for iterative loops between creative practice and theory. Field Trip serves to exemplify how triangulation can be applied to creative media practice. This method, albeit a relatively classic one in research, continues to be a challenge for practitioners. The case of Myriad, in turn, is used to discuss two additional methods: core to audience and interdisciplinary iteration in experimental aesthetics. While these two methods in format development and artistic enquiry might sound familiar to practitioners, they are promising for closing some gaps in the design of academic research.
The two case studies speak to the diversity of research-creation approaches, methods and formats, while at the same illustrating how research-creation, as a research mindset, can facilitate the output of two things at once: a more ‘educated’ artistic expression and more grounded academic knowledge.
The essay further identifies the need to systematize and offer continuous support to researchers-creators. It argues that this fits the mandate of higher education art and design schools, which should be understood as research-creation competence centers.
The paper ends on five learnings meant to encourage digital media practitioners to develop an enquiry reflex and media scholars to “get their hands dirty” in partaking in innovative creative media projects