Ideating Devouring Wollongong

Step one for the creation of a digital artifact for BCM114 was to procure a group of like-minded and dedicated individuals with a wide range of skills and characteristics. Creating a team that has unique ideas and who through collaboration would be able to put something into action, Tobias, Angus and myself. Each of our roles brings an important component to this artifacts success. I tend to edit most of the video footage as that’s where I excel the most in. Tobias is constantly gathering important information and potential content for videos as well as making sure our process is always written down and Angus’ charisma and background in theatre makes him super comfortable around the camera and a personality that the audience wants to watch. Our complete and unedited ideation process has been documented below.

After confirming our group we quickly began accumulating and expressing where we wanted to go with this project and decided on something we all would have loved to have as first-year students moving to Wollongong. Initially, it was focused on great and cheap places to eat as a broke uni student in Wollongong; Uni-eats, snack react, students, eat, but we settled on pairing this concept of food in the Illawarra with events that also might be of interest to students and everyone who lives locally. We settled on Devouring Wollongong. What we essentially want to do is consume everything our new home has to offer and record this process in order to benefit and educate the local community. 

The concept of Devouring Wollongong arose as we identified an opportunity to create videos tailored for people visiting or living in Wollongong and the Illawarra. This idea was established early on and our group continued to alter and adapt our vision as we constructed the foundations of the idea. After multiple deliberations, we decided our mission statement is that we want to show off the Illawarra and demonstrate to both locals and tourists alike everything this place has to offer in regards to food and events.

We initially set up an Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube for our content to be produced on, however, after some criticism received on our pitch video, we agreed that the most efficient use of our time could be fully channelled into Youtube and Facebook. Our primary audience and reach are university students and as The University of Wollongong has such a prominent online presence through Facebook that we agreed it would be the right choice of social media to promote and complement our YouTube channel. This shows when comparing the following of each platform. Within the first week of starting our Facebook page, 200 people joined, most of who are university students. As shown in the analytics the number continues to grow but is slowing and so far our Youtube has 120 views and 6 subscribers. I believe it is very important to focus our engagement on Facebook and create relationships with followers by responding to comments before working on transferring this engagment to Youtube.

We had booked in to borrow out camera equipment to film Eat Street this Thursday, but, due to the rain, we decided against filming in fear of destroying the property. We all agree that not filming the content for our Youtube is a potential downfall and we understand that we need to start failing early and often,  this failure has lead to the decision that we will each post an individual video to kick start our content. We have rearranged plans for filming. I am very excited to begin producing more consistent content. I am so far confident in how we went about our ideation process thus far and happy that all team members are up for constructive criticism and change if necessary.