New Projects People!!

Hey there guys, sorry its been a few days since my last post, theres been a lot going on with University work and home, all mainly good though!

So just to recap then; recently I've had a report to write, a dissertation proposal if you will. We were to write this along side a partner which I found to my surprise, worked really well! We had two weeks to come up with an idea for a title, synopsis, three chapters and a conclusion. The word count was only 1000 but we couldn't help ourselves for going slightly over that! We decided to focus on social networking and how it is connecting users throughout the world, so came up with the title 'How has social networking aided in the development of globalisation?' I was actually pretty exited to get started on this because it's really good practice for next year when we come to write our dissertation. Here we had the option of choosing to write a dissertation proposal or a review. In my case, I immediately opted for the review because I was shying away from the word 'dissertation'. I had been told by my lecture that my writing is too journalistic and therefore thought I could easily write a review, however after a brief talk to myself, I plucked up the courage and partnered up with Stevie Lennon where we went for the Dissertation proposal. I'm so glad I chose this in the end because it really did give me the practice I needed and helped alter my writing style from being journalist to a much more academic style. After researching and finding five sources, we got to work and it just flowed form then on. I would write the introduction and a chapter which I would then send over to Stevie via Facebook where she would look over it and add her bits in, then send it back to me where I would do the same. This carried on over the period of a week and finally it was finished! I think we worked really well together and I also think she helped me out without realising in a sense of sharpening up my writing style. Thanks Stevie! :) Let's hope for a good mark!

Convergence Media Teamwork. 

Once that report had been sent, I then had to begin to concentrate on a new project. We have recently began a new module; Convergence Media Teamwork, where we are to (in teams, of course) produce a transmedia response to a cause, issue or theme we feel strongly about. We are then to create a series of media assets and a structure of threads that connect 'stories' along side opportunities for users to participate; to engage in collective action rather than passive consumption. I found this exiting and couldn't wait to get started as there are so many ways you can build upon narrative strands and media elements. Once in teams of three, myself and team members took ourselves off and began brain stroming ideas. We knew that we wanted to focus on animal cruelty as the issue, and so once we had cleared this with our lectures we began storyboarding. Transmedia activism is storytelling by a number of decentralised authors (which in this case, is us) and we share and create content for distribution across multi platform forms of media.

We realise that animal cruelty is a very strong issue and intend to raise awareness of the positives and negatives aspects to this. I keep finding my eyes welling up upon researching and seeing photographs that have been taken of the suffering of animals :(

We want all of our transmedia elements to be in one place for ease of viewing for users, so we came up with the idea of creating a website (via Wix) which will be the main hub that users will go to. On this website will be much of our assets such as:

• Social media links and feeds (Twitter/Facebook)
• News report feed
• Vlogs (reaction videos) - more detail to come for this one
• Animated advertising campaign
• Diary of our own pets using Flickr and Blogger, their day to day life
• Postive and negative footage of animal cruelty
• Our own blogs - feelings, emotions throughout 
• Online petitions

We also aim to create questionnaires and polls that can be done online via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. We would like to go out onto the streets of Liverpool where we will create banners/posters/flyers and hand them out to the public, and if possible ask the public what their views are, show photographs and capture their reactions which we will make into a film and post up on our website hub. 

I know there is a lot to do here, it's only the very early stages but it's best to get started as soon as possible and as we all feel very passionate about this, we aim to put all our efforts in to create a clear and outstanding transmedia activism awareness scheme. Keep checking back!