Since the last blog post, not a heap has happened – in honesty, the project has lost a bit of its momentum as the semester has come to the pointy end. Two big hurdles have presented themselves at this part of the project. The first being what I call “2019’s Most Expensive Nap,” which went amazingly until my laptop got broken in the process of getting out of bed. Sending it away was the only option, but this has taken quite a while – and as a result we have lost raw footage that was going towards another two videos. This laptop was also our main editing station, as it’s portability made it easy to fit in work between other commitments.
The second hurdle has been our poor time management, and project management in general. The laptop was a catalyst for us to put “Crap Shacks” on the back burners for a little while, and dedicate more time to other subjects. I think management in itself has been the biggest let down for us on this project. The digital artefact has also been a great tool for learning about management skills – mostly the ones we don’t have, or need to improve. Time management is definitely something that could be improved. While we did instigate the idea of spending one day a week working on a couple of videos, we never actually scheduled a day to consistently do it. Having a set in stone routine is definitely something that would benefit future projects massively.
Our social presence is something that has also been poorly managed. My Twitter is still pretty uninteresting and inactive. Our Facebook page also lacks a consistent interaction with the audience and posts pretty rarely. I know that we ought to post more, but I guess the problem with having multiple people working together on a single DA so that you need to run it all by your partner. We delegated the jobs for actual production, for example I would film and edit, while Hunter did most of the scriptwriting and location scouting, but what we failed to delegate was how we were going to conduct our social media platforms and presence. This lead to neither of us really thinking about it that much, and eventually forgetting to be present online until a week or so before our OP’s were due. Whoops.
While we still have a passion for humour, it has become a little harder for us to actually create content that aligns with the page and its formula. We started off enthusiastically, but when we began to run out of easy places to make fun of, we started to run out of enthusiasm as well. There have been a few failed attempts at location scouting, because let’s face it, not everywhere in Wollongong is shit. It’s a lovely place. Maybe we were too specific with the original idea, and didn’t realise how many places we’d have to review in order to actually gain some traction as a popular page. I know that the specificity of the page contributes to half the humour, but in hindsight I’m sure there may have been a way to broaden our options and create even more chances to be funny if we foresaw how quickly we would run out of content ideas. Alas, we did not, but we did learn from it. Saying that I feel somewhat inspired to create a podcast now, but something tells me it might be a tad late to start a new DA. Oh well.
Thanks for checking out my last post for BCM114, it’s been a real ride. Hopefully in future there may be a new project up here for you to check out.
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