Fragments From a Vog

Fragments is my first proper sketch using the Korsakow System. It contains twenty six short sequences, and I’ve designed the interface to show ten links at a time. The relations between shots are all defined by keywords (13 of them), which is a lot of keywords but I’m intending to develop this as a structure that I can keep adding content to, so that it is less than a closed Korsakow film (what is now being called a K-film) than a structure I can use to keep adding material to. This particular iteration I think I will move, and just keep, as it is likely I’ll use this tool for teaching in 2010 and this early version will be useful for teaching purposes.

There is a main clip that plays, and then while it plays a keyword search is performed which finds matching clips. The preview images for these matching clips are shown below the main clip. When you click on one of these this becomes the main clip, and it in turn then provides matching preview images below.

Now, for this project all clips have been defined to have 2 lives, which means they can be played twice then after that they cannot appear in any search results (the images that appear under the main window are the result of keyword searches). This means you don’t get too stuck in the same content continually reappearing, but it also means you can return to something – not necessarily because it interests you but because the second time you go there you can then choose to go somewhere else again. This is an incredibly important point that very few people seem to grok it, and is why efforts a choose your own adventure structures miss the point. In multilinear narratives if I can never return to the same fragment, in other words if every episode I come to is new, then how would I ever know a) that my choices actually matter, and b) what the pattern/s is/are? Hence by having each clip with 2 lives there is a chance to return, to start to see the contours of connection, but also it means the work diminishes as you watch since simply viewing clips twice means they disappear from the work.

In addition, each clip has several keywords that it searches for. These do not all happen at the same time. The first keyword is searched for, and then at 2 seconds the next, and any subsequent terms are searched at 6, 8 and 10 seconds (and so on). This means as the clip plays material appears below, not all at once, but quickly enough that you have a pretty good idea, pretty quickly, of what else there is.

I have applied some simple text to each of the preview images and also to the clips. They’re deliberately vague, poetic, suggestive and evocative. For me. It’s a personal work, hook into it as you can since I figure if you begin to do it well then some bits begin to work. I guess I think of it as like song lyrics. Technically it is white text and for quite a few of the overlays over the preview images you can’t read them because the images are too light. I did try a few options but they all looked pretty bad so for now this will have to do, though I might just drop them in a future version since they aren’t actually doing a whole lot.

In Korsakow you can nominate a clip to be the first, you can even nominate several and it will choose one, but for this project what it opens with is randomly selected from the clip library. There’s no specific logic behind this beyond that there isn’t any clip that needs or should be seen before any other.

Now, things I haven’t decided upon yet. Metadata for each shot. Do I make it more blog like and include a specific date? Since there is no playhead progress bar with the videos should I also include duration, even perhaps file size? (Personally I do find it frustrating when you don’t know how long a sequence will run for, so I will probably add duration.)