Audience
My interactive project is a timeline that records the daily of a normal college student during the pandemic time. This project's intended audience is college students who decide to let themself slack during the remote instruction and put most of their time on social media and video games. The purpose is to encourage them to set up a goal for the future and work toward it. Remote instruction provides a lot of free time for students and there is no set schedule for classes since students can watch the video lecture whenever they want to. This could have several results that affect students: developing a habit of procrastination, having an unhealthy lifestyle, and earning bad grades in classes. What I am trying to communicate is that it is really important to have a goal in mind and work toward it instead of letting video games and social media kill your time but not knowing that until it is too late.
Feature
Usually, for a timeline, it is about a transition between days and months, but for this timeline, I only focus on a specific day and the hours within that day. The idea is that although it is only about a certain day of the character described in the project, it can be treated as a daily routine that the character lives like this every day. The title page of the timeline uses “self-disciplined” to describe the character in the timeline. This is an irony and an alternation of the word’s connotation because what the character does every day is the exact opposite of what is so-called disciplined. But the character is lying to himself, telling himself that he is self-disciplined because he is maintaining his daily routine without anyone else forcing him to do so. Throughout the timeline, the character spends the majority of his time playing video games, but he is using excuses to tell himself that he is doing something that is good for him. For example, when playing the First-Person Shooter (FPS) game, he calls it training to improve focus and reaction time. For every video game he plays, he gives them an excuse so that it sounds like he is doing something serious and beneficial.
Process
Using the spreadsheet template provided by Knightlab, I am able to have a sense of what the timeline looks like. This gave me the idea of doing a daily journal of a person via the timeline application. I used exaggeration when splitting the time into different tasks of the day. The audience will notice that within the timeline, the time for studying is only 4 minutes per day( 2 minutes for reading and 2 minutes for foreign language). And for the foreign language, the only vocabulary that he is studying is “abandon”, I just think it is fun to include that. I got an insight into this timeline from my memory of last year when I first encountered remote instruction. I was pretty much doing the same thing that the character described in my timeline does: playing video games from day to night and only studying a little bit the day before the exam and deadline. The several pieces of training, which are all essentially video games, filled up 90% of the time of the timeline. Some of the games are games that I actually love to play and the others are what my roommates like to play. I really appreciate my roommates for the suggestion on the games chosen and how each of them could fit into a specific type of training. After splitting all the time and tasks, the last step is to put in images and videos for each activity of the timeline. All the videos and photos were taken by myself and put on Flicker and Vimeo. Also thanks to my roommates for giving me the consent to take a video clip of them when they are playing video games. This is basically how the timeline is created.
Learn
What I learned from this project is that taking a video is not as simple as I thought it would be, It is really time-consuming to find a good angle and take a clear one. And one video can cost you more than 10 tries because accidents happen all the time. Now I realize the hardships that media workers face every day when they are dealing with all these video things. Another big thing that I learned from the project is that finding a topic that you are really interested in and working on it will be a very enjoyable experience. Although it cost me a lot of time and energy, I am really enjoying myself along the path of creating this project because I am a fan of video games. Finding something that you are passionate about working on really makes it smooth and easy. Even when you run into trouble, you will feel positive about getting over it. Finally, I learned that in order to successfully convey a message, it is really important to put in your emotion and feeling to let the audience feel what you feel. And videos and images do a great job of sharing feelings and emotions which makes them a really good way of communicating because they are very active and energetic, and the message that they pass on is vivid.