Week 12

Workshop 4 - Evolution

As the semester comes to an end, as does the workshops. This was the last workshop, Evolution, that brought us one step closer to the finalisation and evolution of our project, our character, and our storyworld.

During this workshop, we listened to the very interesting presentations of Emma Keltie, director of the Newtown Girls, who explained the process in which she created the series, and where it is at today.
Witnessing a young media student achieving quite brilliantly and getting back from the audience really motivates me in making my character work.


After that, we got to listen to the very interesting presentation of Karla Conway, about her "reality game": 35° 17 South. That makes players live a real life experience through a digital platform.
I think all these presentations just made me realise that the feedback provided by the people, their interest to the story and their involvement in the activities is the best reward you could get from this kind of production. And it makes me want to make my character as fun as possible, so that the students at UC can rely to him and be involved.

After these enlightening presentations, Emma did a recap about the sustainability projects at UC, talking about the UC garden development, the "Winter is coming" phrase to make people aware they have to dress for the weather, and we had to form groups and choose one of these subjects, find a quick idea and make a pitch about the subject we chose.

After these 10min reflexion, we had to present our ideas to the "jury" composed by the professionals of cross media.

Our group picked "winter is coming" came up with the idea of selling our body warmth, as a personal snuggle buddy ! You can book you buddie online, share him/her with your friends on social media and never get cold ! Just another silly idea we had fun coming up with. I guess it's a good thing we didn't get to present that in front of a jury ! :)

Week 11

Tutorial - Experimentation

As a Rabbit Hole I finally decided to use the poster I posted in a few places around campus.
I thought of a funny poster that would encourage people to check my facebook page :

It's posted in 4 different spots around campus while I am getting ready to shoot my Web Series Pilot.
I put it on the Sustainability Panoramio Page : Building 9 and 7 and in the refectory.

Week 10

Tutorial - Experimentation

In this class, we where supposed to have found two platforms for our characters to be active on.

My character has a facebook page : Douchebag Nate
And obviously a Youtube page where the videos will be posted : Douchebag Nate

Now, we had to mix our characters in different story worlds, so we had to talk to people around and see how our characters could interact with others.
The three girls I was with had different characters. One had a rubbish bin, so she switched to a different group where they all had objects as characters. 

Lakyn had "Franco the farmer" which was a farmer coming to UC to talk about sustainability and Fair Trade. I guess her character could interact with mine in a bunch of ways : First, my character would have to do some research and interviews about sustainability for his assignment, so he could probably see Franco, and ask him to do all his research for him, since he would never do it himself. He could probably also make jokes about Franco the farmer to his friends and play smartass in front of girls by making fun of Franco.

Amy has "Lany the librarian", she is working at the library and is really sustainable.
Nate could probably hit on her, let's keep it fun and distracting, trying to get her to help him for his assignment. She would be a pretty librarian that would never help the douchebag even after several failed attempts to get her attention.

Week 9

Workshop 03 - Transmedia Hackathon

Experimentation.

In this supplementary workshop of an hour, the first step was introducting us to augmented reality, by downloading an app called "aurasma". We had to draw our character on a coffee lid and create a "aura" for the drawing to be recognised.

Then we had to classify our characters in a group. Choices where Bad - Good - Simple - Complicated.

I put my Nate in "Bad" even though he means no harm, it was hard to choose between Bad of Good and Simple or Complicated. I would say Nate is really in between of every one of these criterias.

Finally, we went through the slides and presentation of Tracy Benson.

She talked about how to engage an audience, and specially to engage them to our character. The aim of all of this being, of course, to make them act and change their habits about sustainability.

That is why, this week, we had to find a Rabbit Hole for our character. How are we going to introduce our character to our audience, attract their attention and make them connect to our character ? 

So I had a couple ideas:

Douchebad Nate is a architecture student, he is just like the people in the audience, I would have to find a way for them to identify to him, interact with him, and my audience being the students at UC, what would grab their attention, what would make them want to watch my web-series ?

What if we did some bad things really douchy all around campus so that people would start noticing and already hating the character? Here are a few examples : 

Graffiti where you're not supposed to

Lock bikes together

Block a water fountain



Of course, these are only examples, while I think about something effective and doable around campus.