My task was to create a choose your own adventure production in the style of found footage films. I had the choice to create it based on either short clips, still images or script based choices, I chose to do short clips. My general idea was to make an interactive film based on youtube made with the youtube inbuilt end card system, I had the idea to make a film about a scientist talking to the world through a webcam, telling the world that there's a meteor that will cause an extinction event about to hit the earth and the interactive bits would be the world/the audience voting on how to stop and who to save however I scrapped that idea an decided to go for something more simple. My new idea that I stuck with was a story about a father who does youtube and who's daughter is dying of cancer, the story follows how he deals with it and how his depression affects him. I have a family member who died of cancer ages ago so I thought I'd make it a little tribute to her hence the name Claire. 

​

Research wise I looked into Found footage films and their audiences for example reviewed a couple like The Blair Witch Project, I also made a 1500 words case study on interactive films and their history for example I researched into old interactive films such as Kinoautomat and Clue I also looked at modern day interactive films like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. I researched into the audience of found footage and interactive films to get some statistics and figure out my target audience. Lastly I looked at practical techniques such as using Construct and Celtx. Most of this research was actually surprisingly helpful I found that learning more about interactive and found footage films actually made easier to think of ideas regarding how i'd shoot my project and structure it plus looking sites like Celtx helped as I eventually used Celtx to write my script and I found it really nice and easy to use. I think it would've been better if I looked into more found footage films because I found making the film found footage the hardest. 

​

My project was mainly designed for my family but audience wise it was meant really for anyone above the age of 15 as there is depression and suicide in it. Following the screening my project was received relatively well, I was very surprised to hear people complimenting my acting seeing as I thought it was terrible. So a few examples of feedback I got was "I thought it was good, the acting you did seemed pretty realistic as if something had happened" "one thing I would say is that you look away from the camera quite a lot also try to get rid of the static noise" (My mate Dom/Prology). I'm happy that he likes my acting and I do agree with the looking at the camera thing as youtuber usually always look into the camera however I'm pretty sure I left the static in to make it seem more realistic. Another example is from one of my teachers Paul Herron "firstly I liked the idea of documenting a personal journey. It's a challenging subject and it's something that a lot of youtubers use to raise awareness with people going through the same experiences. I liked how it switched back to the phone as we chose what option we wanted, as we could kind of see the user physically swipe the screen, making the audience feel more in control. I liked how in the end it was the character swiping through their experiences, and the film stops being found footage too we can see how it affected the character. Thought that was a nice touch." "I think with the choices there wasn't many outcomes, except for the ending when suddenly you have to choose whether the character lives or dies. If the audience swiped or skipped a video they would miss out on quite a significant part of the story." I'm happy that he liked the whole phone swipe thing I was really hoping someone would like that and I do agree that there wasn't many outcomes but then again I wanted it to be more interactive than all different ending and stuff also if the audience missed a part of the story it's their decision and I like that because people can choose how and when they want to see parts of the story. From the feedback received I think I could improve on my framing and interactive choices like maybe adding a but more choice, this would give the audience more of a sense of interaction and obviously the framing would just make it look better for the audience. 

 

Personally I could've improved on my time management as lot of thing were really last minute, as I said before I probably could've done a bit more research into found footage films as that was the hardest part for me. Editing wise I could've improved on the interactive parts and text. On this project I learned how to use programs such as Celtx for script writing and Sharefactory which is a editing software on my PS5 as I couldn't use premiere pro, I didn't run into many problems except for some editing problems like one of the ending were meant to have eternal flame playing but when I uploaded it the video got blocked worldwide which was really annoying because eternal flame was Claire's funeral song so it actually had some significance. I probably need to develop my camera skills like framing and general settings. Learning the other types of softwares I can use will help me much more as I'll be using them in the future.