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Presentation of Technologies | Interactive Documentary

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By Candide Uyanze and Trish Kanana

 

Table of Contents

 

Overview

We plan on producing an audio-based, non-linear interactive documentary centred around our experiences with language, as well as the experiences of the people in our network. As two women of African descent (Congolese and Kenyan respectively), we have several overlapping and differing experiences. Using our experience as a starting point, the documentary will branch out to explore the experiences of the people around us.

We plan on interviewing each other, as well as three people from our respective communities (friends and family) who will answer in the language of their choice. In terms of output, we plan on showcasing our audio on a website. The website’s taxonomy and interactivity, however, is still a work in progress and will be driven by the content of our interviews. Since we are leaning towards a non-linear storytelling approach, we’re thinking of extracting segments from each interview and grouping them with other similar segments. This way, visitors can select the category they’re interested in and listen to, skip forward, and skip backwards through segments this way.

In terms of accessibility, we are planning on having either synced transcripts or captions playing alongside the audio. We are also exploring the option of allowing users to toggle between the original language and English (see the last few pages of this document for potential implementations and styling).

Additionally, we want to add an additional level of interactivity to the website by allowing users to add comments in a “message-in-a-bottle” style.

 

Team Deadlines + Technology That Will Be Used

Audio

Interviewing period - both: Friday, Feb 12th  

  • Technology: cellphone microphone, Dolby On mobile app (to improve audio quality) 
  • Questions to ask: 
    • Your name 
    • Which language(s) do you speak? 
    • Which language(s) do you understand? 
    • Which language(s) can you read and write in? 
    • What language do you think in? 
    • Which language do you use the most and why?  
    • What are your earliest memories with these languages?  
    • How do you feel about the languages you speak? 
    • What role has language played in your life? 
    • Is there anything else that you would like to share that I haven’t asked you about? 

 

Transcriptions – both, Candide will transcribe our interview: Friday, Feb 19th  

 

Review generated transcripts - both: Friday, Feb 19th

 

Translations of transcriptions (to discuss) - both: Friday, Feb 26th (WIP Day) 

 

Trimming down, editing, correcting audio - Candide: Sunday, March 7th 

 

Website 

Ideation + Brainstorming: Collecting inspiration and looking for possible technologies: Thursday, February 4th  

 

Website wireframe - Trish: Friday, Feb 26th (Work-in-Progress Day) 

  • Technology: pen and paper, or wireframing website (Balsamiq) 

 

Test of technologies - Trish: ongoing 

  • Technology to test: Wix, Format, Twine, interactive captions/transcripts using HTML, CSS, Javascript 

 

Website design for all pages - Trish: March 19th

 

Website build - both: March 31st  

  • Technology: web builder (Framer, Wix) or from scratch using HTML + CSS + JavaScript and Netlify or GitHub to host the website 

 

Testing: until March 31st 

 

Work Completed Thus Far

We’ve started collecting visual inspiration for the website and researching how to implement some of the more technical aspects of our concept. Here is a roundup of this preliminary research.

Technology

Website 

  • Wix: a web builder that we’ve both used. That said, the free tier adds a banner, and we may run into some issues with implementing personalized code
  • Format: free to use through OCAD U. That said, neither of us has used this before.
  • HTML + CSS + JavaScript website from scratch: We would have more control over the website, and could host it for free on something like Netlify or GitHub Pages. Candide has intermediate knowledge of HTML + CSS, and we have both created projects with p5.js for Creation & Computation. We’re also both in the process of learning vanilla JavaScript. That said, this option will take more time to implement.

 

Prototyping 

 

Visualizing audio/video captions 

 

Waveforms, and other audio-related things 

 

Speech synthesis (text-to-speech, speech-to-text) 

 

Look and feel

Here are some quick sketches created on Figma of potential user interfaces. Our working Figma file (with screenshots of our inspiration) can be found here:

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