Journey to the End of Coal is an interactive document that I would like to analyze for the homework this week. This web documentary was made in 2008 by French production company Honkytonk. It takes the audiences to the downside of coalmines in the remote areas of Mainland China where miners have to work in very poor conditions with low payment as well as risk their lives everyday. The integrative web document was created by using 300 photos, 3 hours of video and 10 hours of sound in China by directors Samuel Bollendorff and Abel Ségrétin.
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Story elements
Although it has linear storyline because there are a beginning and an end, the middle is quite blurry because it depends on the decisions of viewers in each scene. Audiences always have to start at Beijing train station and end their investigations at Qijiagou due to the limited access of the coal mines.
Besides, it seems to be no such an event in this interactive document because it doesn’t have any conflict with the protagonist in the story. It simply provides questions for audiences to choose or ask the miners in order to continue the adventure in the movie. There are some actors in the document; the main actor is the journalist who is performed by the audiences to explore the whole story and communicate with other characters in the document. The other actors are miners and theirs manager. Although the audiences act as the main character in the story, they can’t decide the ending of it because creators set it.
In addition, with the description from the web, people can easily recognise that the story happened in that current time, which was 2008 and the specific place of this story is Shanxi Province, only a couple away from Beijing. The journey starts from Beijing train station to the around regions such as Datong, Taiyuan and Qijiagou to visit their major coal mines.
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Narrative elements
Although Journey to the End of coal has the arrange of narrative elements when the story starts at Beijing and ends when the journalist is prohibited to explore more about some accidents, it doesn’t need to follow specific chronological events. Audiences can choose to continue their journey through having conversations with miners or going to another places. They can either skip places or go back or choose different questions for miners to make the story occurs differently.
In the journey to coal mines, audiences will meet and interview poor miners who have to work with pollution, accidents and unfair work conditions to earn money and support their families. In the own pace, audiences seem to have real conversation with character to find out about characters’ lives. Thus, the speed is quite slow to make the audiences feel like they are truly in the conversations with the miners at that current time.
This document chooses the first person perspective as its point of view to demonstrate the narrative through the view of the journalist. Thus, it is clearly that the journalist, also the main character is the narrator who is telling the story inside the narrative. The story depends on what questions he decides to ask the miners as well as the destinations that he wants to visit.
Photos, videos and sounds were used as the web document format to recount the narrative of the whole journey.
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Traditional narratives
This interactive document still has linearity in order to guide the audiences from the start to the end of the story. However, it doesn’t have series of conflicts that lead to a climax and resolution. Although there are several options in the middle of the story, the creators already set the specific ending for the story.
Besides, the story has the journalist as protagonist as well as manager and authorities as antagonists. However, the protagonist doesn’t act like the traditional model. He doesn’t fight to overcome specific conflicts and achieve any goal at the end. Thus, it is convinced that there is a lack of traditional three-act structure. The story simply happens from the beginning to the end through the road trip of the journalist.
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Digital narratives
The numerical coding element is presented clearly in this interactive document. It is the combination of various kinds of media such as photographs, videos and sounds. Besides, text is mainly used to support the main character to tell the story. It also is seen as choices for audiences when they are on the journey to explore the movie, which happens in China.
The modularity is presented quite well in this interactive document. The whole journey was made from 300 photographs, 3 hours of videos and 10 hours of sound. The creators chopped down those materials and turned them into many different scenes to build up the journey for audiences to explore. As users, we can choose the destination that we want to visit or go back to whatever scene that we need to investigate more. Therefore, it also shows the variability of this digital narrative. Although audiences can skip or go back to specific scene, they cannot arrange the order of those scenes in order to create different structure or different ending. That is probably one of the limitations of this interactive project.
The programmed elements in this example are quite simple when the web only allows users to have elementary interactions with the story by providing some options through the text interviews between the journalist and Chinese miners during the journey. It doesn’t have complicated programming such as rotating a three dimensional (3D) model, changing the colour of video file, scaling images etc.
Besides, the participatory aspects in this example are obvious because the audiences clearly participate in the story by making their decisions in each scene rather than watching the movie passively. However, the participatory seems to be not strong enough because the web document doesn’t provide various ways to make the viewers have more creative options to interact effectively with the story.
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