Campaign Project: Student Loans

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtg_fGyL2pg

In our workshop we started by watching campaign videos. I really liked them especially the free hugs campaign by. We were also recommended to look at Battlefront.com which is a website were people have created their own campaigns ranging from sport to sexual health.

We then got into groups and brainstormed about a project we felt passionate about and that we could create a good campaign on. Our group’s first idea was about money and the lack that students have so after researched we found out about ‘Buy Nothing Day’ which is designed to get people not to spend money on anything and to realise that the majority of what they buy isn’t needed. Based on this we decided we wouldn’t buy anything for a week and see how we got on. However this was so much harder than any of us anticipated and we hastily changed our campaign idea. We still wanted to do our campaign on money but instead we decided to do our campaign on the lack of money that students get and what we really spend it on and how it doesn’t cover basic living costs. I know that from doing this I got a better understanding of what I spend my money on and how quite a lot is on frivolous things that I don’t really need to buy. This really opened my eyes up and I realised I’m not as good at budgeting as I thought I was.

I also think that this project was very different to the psychogeographical project in terms of organisation skills and since I was in a bigger group I expected to have more time clashing issues but it was easy and the things we were doing weren’t that hard such as going food and clothes shopping, the train station and various shops. I also enjoyed the editing process of our project even though I was unsure of the software, I felt that the video showed what we tried but it was not clear enough and was quite slow paced in parts. We used our mobiles video camera to take footage and then window movie maker to edit.

I really liked this project and it was relatively easy to create and distribute our project to an audience because of new media especially with sites like YouTube. Our video was a perfect example of citizen journalism and videos made by the audience are everywhere on sites such as CitizenTube websites likes this cater for the audience in new media and have their voice heard especially if traditional media is not catering for the audiences views they can create their own media texts and they are.

Overall I think the project was good and I think using the internet as a platform for a campaign was interesting and think it is a good example of using new media to attract an audience.

References

(2012). Shop Less Spend Mpre. Available: http://www.buynothingday.co.uk/’ Last accessed 15^th March 2012

http://www.battlefront.co.uk/

http://www.citizentube.com/

Psychogeography Project

In this week’s workshop we were told about the concept of psychogeography, were the journey was more important than the destination. We had to travel by putting a conscious effort into our journey and about how we got from our starting point more than where we were actually going to end up. I thought this would be quite hard to do as I was fairly new to Leicester and had only stuck to routes that I knew, but I did like the idea of the unknown as I wanted to discover more places.

I have to say I was very excited by this and mine and Valerie’s first ideas were quite ambitious, even speaking about going to London and travelling based on Harry Potter locations and characters. After we settled down our first idea was to approach strangers in Leicester and get them to draw on tracing paper and we would then match these lines up with a map of Leicester and walk, this was based on a YouTube video we had seen. Due to time constraints and being unable to meet up on various occasions we started thinking of new ideas and after some research I found out about Luke Rhinehart a man who had used a dice to decide what he does on a daily basis. We liked this and decided to follow Rhinehart’s method of using dice to decide our journey. We decided to do our journey in Highcross shopping centre using 3 rolls to determine what shop we would end up in; first roll decided the floor odds bottom, even top; second roll decided the side odds left, even right and the third roll the number dictated how many shops we would walk to. I liked the project but I am also disappointed that we didn’t really travel to places we hadn’t been before.

After we had finished I was thinking about how we did our journey and I did like the approach we took and thought it was good but also nerve wrecking to take the thinking out of it and leave everything to something as simple as the roll of a dice, because of this uneasiness I am glad we went to familiar surroundings. 

Overall I really enjoyed this project and I feel that sometimes as people we just follow the same routine without even thinking about it so it was nice to do something like this to be out of my comfort zone. However I think it would have been better if we had been in completely new surroundings but doing it for a few hours in familiar setting was more than enough and I do not understand how Rhinehart managed to do it for over 40 years and let it decided the fate of practically everything he did and he still continues to.

References

Weiner, M. (2011). Rolling with the Dice Man. Available: http://www.sabotagetimes.com/people/the-dice-man/. Last Accessed 1^st Jan 2012