Project Description
During the fourth week of the minor, we were given the opportunity to collaborate with students from VEGA in Cape Town, South Africa. My group consisted of 4 Fontys students, including myself, and 2 VEGA students. For this collaboration, I worked together with Simeon, Lindsay, and Julian from the DXD Minor, and Nasr and Tessa from VEGA.
This collaboration was aimed at creating a transmedia campaign that would raise awareness for Cyberbullying.
Approach
The first step within this collaboration was to brainstorm around the idea of Cyberbullying. Based on initial desk research, our team conducted a brainstorming session and created a mindmap with topics that fall under Cyberbullying.
We then collectively chose a topic within the brainstorming session which interested us the most and the topic we chose was Cancel Culture.
Cancel Culture refers to publicly "canceling" or calling out a person for words or actions that are considered offensive or wrong. The reason we chose Cancel Culture was because of how impactful its effects can be.
We decided to further brainstorm on Cancel Culture as well and created a separate mindmap for this presented below.
"How might we create awareness that forms and educates people about cancel culture and the consequences of it?
After creating the problem statement displayed above, our team conducted field research by sending out surveys within our targeet group, who are people between the ages of 18 and 25, to gain further insights on Cancel Culture. We received 60 responses and the main insights are listed below:
"Due to personal insecurity, people are subconsciously jealous of those that represent their own given flaws."
"People are more likely to agree with popular opinions even if they do not agree with their own personal morals. Everybody wants to fit in and not have an opposing viewpoint to popular culture."
There is no face-to-face accountability when commenting on people's posts online, therefore there is no fear of repercussion when posting hate online.
Execution
Based on the insights gathered, It was time to create our story which would be told through a transmedia campaign. These insights were useful to find out what triggers can be used within our story so people can relate to it. The idea behind our story was to spread awareness of Cancel Culture from the perspectives of both the antagonist and the “victim”.
The premise of the story is that people should be conscious about what they say to others and how they treat them.
The synopsis of the story is a situation where a girl puts her life on social media and gets judged and hated for doing this by not only her classmates but randoms on the internet. During this, there are many bystanders like her teacher and other viewers online. This all leads to her growing insecurities.
As you can see, insecurities from the 1st insight mentioned has been integrated within our story. Bystanders are also a representation of the people who sit and agree with popular opinions, and lastly, the absence of accountability within the story is also present because the girl gets bullied by randoms on the internet who are letting their opinions out with no fear.
The characters are as listed below:
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Holly is a 17 year old female, who is quite active on social media and posts a lot about her life, wanting to be recognised and become a social media influencer about fitness in the future. She does not have a large following, but she is building her platform.
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Rick is also a 17 year old, male, who is active on social media, but is known for his judgemental personality, and isn't afraid to comment on ones post whenever he disagrees. He can be quite ruthless "sometimes.”
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Thabo is also a 17 year old male, who is quite unfit and gets teased about his weight in high school because he eats too much, and everybody knows it, but everybody likes him, so he is seen as "cool" in school. Therefore, he mocks others for their progress and their winnings because he is insecure within himself.
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Ms. Dreyer, is the teacher of their class, and is aware of this bullying matter, but does not know how to take charge and help prevent these issues from happening.
The story arcs created are displayed here.
I created 2 mood boards to visualize the story world for the group to choose from.
One mood board is more colorful and bright. It resembles a cartoon world that can potentially keep people engaged.
The second mood board is more neutral-toned and dark. It resembles the real world which people may be able to relate to more.
Reflection
Overall, the VEGA Collaboration was an interesting project but I feel like it could have worked better if the collaboration was taken place in person and not online. It was a very hectic project as the South African students had other projects to do while simultaneously working on our collaboration. It was very hard to schedule meetings together that were not a part of class time, and we truly needed the extra meetups because it was crucial for completing what was necessary. In the beginning, I thought our group was collaborating well, but as the workload got heavier for the VEGA students, and fewer meetings were scheduled, it resulted in a not-so-happy ending. This was also the first time I have experienced such a weird ending to a project. Our google doc with all shared work was deleted by the creator, who was one of the VEGA students. I even reached out to both of them to try to ask for the document, or at least what happened to it, but I received no response, unfortunately. It was interesting to see the differences between how hard of workaholics they are compared to how laid back we at Fontys are. This can have something to do with the work ethic of people in general from South Africa. They seemed to work a lot after class on their own projects and continued into the late evenings. In the Netherlands, I don't really see anyone working on group projects after class time. I feel like the South Africans are within the defense stage within the DMIS model because I felt like a lot of the time they felt like they were against us and this is why I also think they deleted our final documents perhaps. Furthermore, because of how our group wasn't cooperating well, I feel like everyone had a different idea throughout and we were not always on the right track. I also feel like our project was incomplete and could've definitely been improved if there was better communication and time management. Therefore, after this collaboration, I took some time to iterate the story synopsis to match the story which we created. I am disappointed with the outcome of our project, but I still think what was taught within our workshops was very useful for me especially because I am majoring in Digital Marketing. Therefore, storytelling and campaign creations are highly useful and I will be sure to implement what I've learned in the future.
