'The Body at the Dorm Party' (BDP) is an interactive video project, centered around a murder (gasp!) at, you guessed it, a dorm party. By reviewing videos of evidence collection and suspect interrogation, the user helps Detective Amina ('Detective' is her first name, not an indicator of status in law enforcement) solve the murder of Residential Assistant Aiyma Boddy. Intended to parody some of the more dramatic tropes in mystery, thriller, and "whodunit" genres, BDP makes use of exaggerated mannerisms, overly melodramatic themes and sound effects, and gaudy visuals to realize this goal. After examining evidence and suspect interviews, the user is expected to make a guess as to who the murderer is, as well as arranging the order of events associated with the pieces of evidence.
Process
I'm not much of a cameraman, but with a clear vision of what we imagined the visuals to look like, we were able to settle on angles for me to shoot in each scene fairly quickly. We shot as much footage as we could on the shoot day, to give me plenty of material to work with and to avoid having to work around our schedules to meet up again. The actual process of filming the videos ended up being quite pleasant; we all had similar ideas of what the final videos would look like, and the flexibility of the script meant no one had to memorize all their lines in one go. The main way this was done was by dividing the interviews into "scenes", intercut with color bars (implying the interrogations were being intermittently recorded), rather than recording it in one shot.
To edit the videos, I used Windows Movie Maker, which is a fairly outdated software that lack functionality, especially compared to more comprehensive editing programs like Premiere or AfterEffects; it does, however, have the advantage of running on my laptop without a significant lag. Once I realized I could achieve visual effects quite close to what I was hoping for in Movie Maker, I switched to it immediately. I have a lot more experience working with it (almost 11 years now), which allowed me to make and export edited cuts for feedback as soon as my teammates made suggestions. The many bugs in the software, especially when dealing with audio, did make it hard to assemble a soundscape up to the standard I hoped for, but it did a good enough job. The issues with audio were tackled (very well) by Matthew, using a DAWS, and I was able to plug in the new files with far better results.
I used mostly royalty-free stock audio for the background theme and the harsh "suspense" sound effect, in addition to segments of the dramatic classical soundtrack of Knives Out, a murder mystery thriller I had seen recently, which seemed like a perfect fit for a couple scenes.
Reflection
I learned a lot about the filmmaking process, as I do with every project involving filmmaking, but I appreciate how much more I learned about interactivity and film in the course of working on this assignment. Imagining how the user would perceive and react to each line of dialogue seems like something that matters in every film, but here we needed to look out to ensure a positive user experience that would also enable them to actually solve the mystery themselves. The process of working on this project taught me quite a bit about thinking of the audience, not only in ways applicable to interactive media but to film as well. I look forward to working on projects like this in the future.
Solving the mystery correctly will play a final video concluding the arc. While solving the mystery is very rewarding, our intention for the site was to entertain simply by using it. The project was conceived with humor as a priority, making the user laugh a little (or a lot), and I feel the videos and overarching site experience reflects that.