As part of the Dead Critics group, we've been experimenting with different ways to use instagram. Roz is the driving force behind these efforts, but I often muck in to put together posts. We've experimented with with "Creative Collectives" - micro-exhibition in response to a prompt, featuring our own work, photos, and occasionally other artists that have caught our eye. These have been fun to do, and we've started inviting guest contributors, which has been a nice way to build connections outside of our group, and increasingly outside of the MA.
Today we experimented with "Reflections" - essentially one of the group responding to the connections between the images in the collections, and our own work. I volunteered to do the first one on art and play...
My original plan had been to create a carousel of images and videos, with and without narration. The idea being that people could e.g. listen to the audio voice-over for the title, scroll over to an image, scroll and watch a segment of video etc. Sort of like a slideshow where people can advance the slides as they wish.
I prep'ed the audio separately, and got the whole lot - a mixture of PNGs, MP3s and MP4s - 14 files in total - ready to assemble into the post.
I was trying something rather new, so I expected setbacks... I wasn't disappointed...
Setback 1 - Insta won't allow you to add audio to an image as part of a carousel
Some lite research suggested that Insta would allow you to upload a custom audio file. I had assumed that it would work for images and videos alike... However, Insta seems to treat posts with videos and images different to reels... I discovered I had to manual create videos with the images and the audio tracks in Shotcut, and then upload them as videos not images.
Setback 2 - Insta won't let you add stickers to videos as part of a carousel
I was hoping to use the build-in captions 'sticker' to add closed captions to the videos with narration However, Insta won't let you add stickers to videos (captions are stickers) if they are part of a carousel. I COULD have just uploaded it without, but I rarely have the audio on when I browse insta, so I really value closed-captions. In hindsight, this was probably the better option at this point. However, I decided to capitulate and do the whole thing as a single reel.
Setback 3 - Insta captions are a bit crap!
Having made significant compromises to get this far, I was frustrated to find that the instagram captioning isn't really very good... It's a lot better than Shotcut, which makes you add the captions manually as text, but it struggles to understand my accent in places (for instance, I talk about play and art being "fundamental drives", but it transcribed it as "fundamental tribes"). Worse, it doesn't figure breaks in the audio into the captions - meaning that the first few words of the next section of audio often appear alongside the captions for the current section, despite not actually being spoken until some time later. Worse, during the gaps in audio it simply leaves the captions in place, often obscuring whatever is on screen.
Really, if I was following my own 'values' I would have abandoned the post at this point, and re-done it as one long reel with extra narration (the things that were going to just be images in the carousel ended up as just weird silent sections in the reel), and with manual captions - it's really annoying to do manual captions, but at least I have the text already. However, I was so 'done' with it at this point, I just uploaded it as it was. Consequently, it's not my best work, which irks me...
Next time, I think I will plan to just do it as one reel from the get-go. There are some pros and cons to this.
One Reel Pros:
- Everything is neatly packaged up beforehand and plays out as planned
- People are used to the format of watching a reel and know what to 'do'
One Reel Cons:
- More work to prepare (everything needs to be brought together is Shotcut)
- People can't scroll around and/or linger, stuff only appears for a long as it's on-screen - if people are slow to read a quote, it will go (you can pause a reel but not a lot of people know this, I suspect)
Carousel Pros:
- People can browse it in a more flexible manner
- Less work to prepare since images don't need to be 'compiled' into a video
Carousel Cons:
- People may not know to scroll
- Sections that are video may end with a "Play this again?" message obscuring the content
Although neither format feels ideal, the carousel slide-show format just feels like it is swimming against the tide here...
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