Project Five

My digital artefact is a YouTube channel with four other BCM 114 students who are; Ava Di Donato, Caitlin Koloski, Charlotte Pierro and Isabella Mallon. We developed this project because we wanted to try do little things each week to improve our happiness and hopefully inspire our audience of adolescents to begin to concentrate more of their life improving their happiness. Based on my twitter feed of the #bcm114, I have noticed that students easily access YouTube accounts over Instagram and other platforms, as videos can be engaging and easy to watch which is the reason as to why we chose to use YouTube as our platform. Personally, I thought this would be useful for our audience as they are able to watch videos of us instead of reading something in detail. 

Together, we decided we would develop this project by vlogging individually our challenge that week. At the end of the week sit down together to film about how our week went and whether or not our happiness levels increased.

The first thing I did was put a poll on twitter asking students what video they would like to see first. ’No Complaining for a Week’ won and so we begun filming every day for five days then sat down and filmed how our week went. 

This video was probably our best video made as the five of us were all very enthusiastic about the project and we took the video seriously by doing the challenge properly. It was also pretty much the only video of which we advertised. 

We spent roughly 3 hours filming and editing the video when we were together which was pretty time efficient. However, the feedback we received was to shorten our videos.

The second video we attempted was waking up at 5am everyday for the week. 

During this video, some of us failed to do the challenge on some days. This is where we came upon our first problem which was that the video was too boring if we tried to shorten it. This took out 2 weeks of our time, re-filming and re-editing, to ensure the content we put out was not boring. 

The end video we were not proud of. Our viewers suggested we try add in special guests into our videos which we failed to attempt. 

The third video we filmed was doing Yoga for a week. This video was the biggest mess by far as only 3 group members completed the challenge so when filming all together we noticed no enthusiasm and an extremely boring video. However, we tried to act enthusiastic and uploaded a video anyway. 

After we noticed a lack of enthusiasm, we stopped coming up with ideas because the five of us stopped making time for each other and some of us forgot about the project as a whole. I spoke to my tutor, who told me that not all 5 of us needed to be in the video. 

Therefore, the next week, Isabella and I, decided to film a ‘gratitude week’ where we vlogged everyday and put our videos together so that our project had some content to it.  This video, I realised the enthusiasm came back and made the video more interesting.

I was planning on filming an individual video where talk about things that make me happy, and asking friends and family what they do to make themselves happy. This video never came about due to lack of time as I found out too late that we could upload individual videos (not that it was a problem, just the timing was off).

That concludes Project Five. Next semester when I do a digital artefact, I have learnt that I will be branching away from group projects. The main reason for this is that during this semester I found a true passion for this course and am excited to see where it takes me in the future. In saying this, I don’t want to be part of something that may hold me back from what I am capable of creating. 

Until Next Time, R.