I’ve been experiencing the panic of being a bit behind on my blog and just in general after a few busy and brain-frazzling weeks. Please excuse me whilst I haphazardly recap over the past few weeks…

Electric December

So it’s been quite a few weeks without comment on our Electric December progress, so here is a brief summary of what’s been going on.

I expected the first meet with the ED team to dramatically expose me as incompetent, but I found that ideas flowed from me the more we discussed as a group. We had just received three brilliant presentations from Watershed and The Station marketing/communication staff which formed the basis of our discussion, seeing as we will be utilising online marketing heavily as our project exists online and our task is to establish an engage an audience.

We found the discussions with David Redfern (Watershed’s Online Publishing Manager) of particular use, as he manages content for all areas of the Watershed’s online scope. Emma who works on marketing for the youth organisation The Station also raised some interesting ideas about how we can target certain audiences.

In this first meet we were encouraged to look into DepicT, which is an international 90 second short competition. Similar to the Electric December website, it has a platform to view and discuss content and entries. However, due to the age and sensitivity of our contestants, we were discouraged from allowing discussion to surround the entries (for example, a film produced by primary school children should not be up for scrutiny!) this led to the topic of sharing and engagement. I really am pushing for a network of sharers and therefore want to look into a Tumblr platform which will give the opportunity to share and remark without it necessarily feeding back to the original upload. This also feeds in nicely with an article Hannah pointed us in the direction of which brought up the idea of what being ‘social’ in a young online community really means – and that is sharing and discussing material – creating dialogue and response. Since this meeting, it has been raised that the commenting function might not be an issue but I do not know what decision was made on this.

Other things discussed so far have included seasonal content grouping – i.e, making sure we have relevant past examples of films to tie in with relevant times. So perhaps around Halloween we will have a bunch of macabre films to gauge interest, as an example. This means for us to watch and make note of the archived entries – something which I am yet to do in great depth.

As the season is so far away in our minds, a lot of what is happening at the moment is preliminary research, planning and organisation. These are by far my worst qualities so I can only hope I show more enthusiasm and prove more useful to my co-producers once this stage develops into more practical tasks.

Since those early steps, we have had a very interesting (slightly mind-boggling) introduction to monitoring of success thanks to the lovely Lycia Hyper and her presentation/workshop on ‘The Story of Change’. It was useful to call out and contemplate our beneficiaries, objectives, impacts, inputs/outputs, and indicators within our project’s timeline. I felt like the method used to culminate these ideas was a bit over-complicated and I sensed the energy quickly dissipate in our group as we struggled to maintain clarity on what we were doing. It did however open our eyes to the importance of prioritising and distilling our audiences and smaller objectives within the main.

Now we very much need to focus on our leadership roles. As I have already mentioned, my ability to get a project off the ground is remarkably inept. I think it is fitting that I have a shared responsibility with Ella to focus on the design elements of the project – thinking about the aesthetic of the brand and the way we can effectively use it to create a community and a synonymousness with the work we are showcasing. Hopefully the more me and Ella debrief on this the more I will have to say in a weeks time.

So it is clear that in the time it takes me to catch-up, I need to make sure I am well acquainted with the archive films and the overall design and branding of the existing Electric December set-up, whilst checking in with Nicola’s brilliantly produced time schedule for events – making sure the project is running in the time we have set out for it.

I also think the team needs a pub-meet. Who doesn’t work better with a pint in their hand??