The Princess lived Happily Ever After!
Final BCM112 Blog
This blog post aims to provide a comprehensive overview of my experience with the group digital artefact of BCM112, while also highlighting the progression of my project since the first assessment. As I reflect on assessment 2, it becomes evident that my personal journey towards tangible and physical media has undergone significant development throughout the semester.
Following assessment 1, I possessed a well-defined vision encompassing the concepts I intended to incorporate into my DA. These ideas resonated with my personal interests and held considerable significance for me. Subsequently, our group project unexpectedly manifested some of these interests through its visually appealing design. Moreover, our web-novel successfully materialised ideas with LGBTQ+ undertones, as we focused on employing metaphors to depict queer love. Furthermore, our tangible media designs took an alternative direction by producing tote bags, deviating from our initial plan of refurbishing sustainable items from thrift stores and op shops - like the one on campus - although we did attempt to fulfil this niche. This was important to us, as we understand that members of our generation - who also double as not only our peers but our artefacts target demographic - care particularly about the environment and ethics. Therefore we had to consider the negative consequences that may come with using plain polyester bags.
Our trip to the Op-Shop
So, while our exploration of merchandising commenced with a trial run on tote bags. It came to our attention that tote bags actually contradicted our commitment to environmental sustainability. Regrettably, we neglected to thoroughly investigate the ecological ramifications of utilising tote bags while conducting our research on the values upheld by Gen-Z.
Throughout the duration of our project, I am proud to say that our group exhibited exceptional communication skills, fostering an environment of open dialogue and collaboration. As we had emphasised in our initial pitch, we actively encouraged and embraced a substantial degree of creative freedom among team members. One particular milestone that stands out in my memory is the immensely productive tutorial we had during the first third of the semester, which we mentioned in our pitch.
During this session, we engaged in a captivating discussion that spanned over an hour, delving deep into various aspects of our novel's direction, including character development, setting, and other essential elements. The sheer enthusiasm and energy we brought to the table during that exchange laid a solid foundation for the subsequent stages of our project, setting the tone for our continued productive collaboration.
Examining our merchandising from a transmedia perspective, we utilised various platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and physical displays to promote our online book. Our ultimate objective was to generate buzz and engage the university community by selling merchandise at our bi-weekly stall, encouraging campus-wide conversations.
Something I thought to do in one of our final weeks in tutorials together was to promote on more niche platforms, particularly Reddit. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase ‘There’s a reddit for everything’, so with this in mind, I thought there would for sure be a place for Saving My Boyfriend to find some new readers. I had a look at subreddits by searching keywords like ‘AI, good reads, web novels, fantasy fiction, chat gpt’ and more. In a kind of unexpected and unfortunate turn of events, we soon found out that subreddits like these are extremely, tightly moderated and often do not allow self promotion posts like the ones I was writing.
We soon discovered posts like these aren't welcome in most subreddits
Therefore, most of our posts were deleted after a short time and banned. And what I suppose is even more unfortunate is that the few posts that did remain up received hate comments. It’s definitely been made apparent to us that many people DO NOT like AI - totally valid - and thus are turned off from reading our novel when they hear the production process behind it. One of our reddit posts had comments such as “won’t be reading this”, “that is not art” etcetera.
I’m proud to say that I was labelled the ‘tangible media expert’ due to my strong interest in the sublimation printer and the fact that I had taken time to understand the maker studio equipment and printed the tote bags extremely well. However in saying this, I did at times feel limited and bored. It was unfortunate that there was really no use for these tote bags after testing a few and posting content for social media and therefore I feel my role in the team was a little more lacklustre in comparison to other team members. I have an extreme interest in social media management and in hindsight think I may have preferred to be doing more of the social media work.
Additionally, I am one of the team members who thought of a major portion of the novel’s characters and settings, and probably contributed most to the first creative discussion we had early in the semester. Thus, I feel a little bit of FOMO and disappointment that I was not involved in the writing team and just left these characters that I had created to other team members to tell their stories. I can admit that the level of effort from each team member was not at all equal - I believe Kiara and Acadia had to put a lot more work in than others did - and I suppose that can be the problem with group projects.
In saying that, I am very proud of our group and think we all did the best with what we could. We knew that our most important resource was time, and perhaps we just didn’t account for time like we should have, because I feel right now that a few more weeks together would really allow us to take the project to new heights. I have had an incredible time in BCM112 and will take these new skills I learnt with me into further studies and endeavours.
Final Group Report:
Available here
And they all lived happily ever after...
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