Each Image Has Its Own Story To Tell
category: Integrated Media
tags:

The Look Project

#LookAbove is a lifestyle! A positive way of seeing :)

It had been a great aspiring journey for our Look Project, the beauty of our project is that the more you contribute the more you get out of it and become addicted to. Not only do I check the #Lookabove hashtag everyday, I'm always thinking of new ways to challenge the hashtag, looking at the way other people interpret #lookabove and appreciate their work. It feels great to get feedbacks from contributors who also said how much they are hooked to the hashtag and can't resist to #lookabove everyday! The best part of this project is that everyone that participated had gained one way or another, perhaps becoming part of a new community or discovering a new way of living and seeing. It's not so much about the material gain from the project, but a gain in personality and character ;) Always #Lookabove!

Here is some posts demonstrating the progress and our #LookAbove journey:

Project Outline

LookAbove Community

Marketing Strategy

Contributor Analysis

Final Project: Concept and posters

In terms of participation, I think I've been involved in almost every part of the project... From coming up with ideas, planing, execution, and promotion...etc. As a result, I feel like I gained a lot and am satisfied with the development and outcome of the journey :)

category: Integrated Media
tags:

Participation

Comparing to the first half of the semester, I have missed some tutorials but still have attended the lectures. If I was away from class, I would often catch up on the details and works from my peers. I feel like my participation for this second half of the semester is weighted more on the outside class work that I did for this course. I had spent most of the time working on our group project and I enjoyed it a lot.
Mark: 68/100

Research

Since I found out the way to find the require reading online, I've been reading most of the weekly readings. Occasionally, if I find readings that relate to our group project, I would shared them my group during our weekly meeting. Due to the natural of our group project, I also have been looking at resources outside the require readings that would provide me with a deeper understanding of the way social platform work and how it correlate with the public and its audiences. I think the resources I found on public sphere and active audience really benefit my understanding of social media and also helped the way we imply the strategy and the structure of our Look Project.
Mark: 85/100

Blog and reflection 

Compare to the first half of the semester, I have been blogging more constantly as well as reflecting on our group work. As a result, I feel more confident and organised while we are doing group works because I had previously thought and planned about our group project. I feel like, there is an improvement of my blogging skill because I have been practising more. I am now more confident in expressing my opinions on my blog and feel less awkward. I'm still in the process of learning and I'm confident that if I keep on blogging, my writing  will improve and become more fluent.
Mark: 84/100

Social Exploration

I take this semester as a semester of vast exploration across many different online platforms. And over time, I've grown more confident with using each of them, hence, gradually showing more personality and character in my online presence. Over the course, I have become immersed in new media and has now starting to getting more and more followers on twitters and Instagram, meeting new people across different online platforms. I was very nervous about creating our own social campaign at the start, but am generally quite proud of our group's work. I feel like this semester had been full of challenge and this course has been constantly pushing us to be not afraid to try and just explore and have fun! I've gained a lot and shifted gradually away from an passive user, consumer of social media, to a more active online content creator! It is so much more fun being a creator and trend setter of online media, even just little hashtags on Instagram becoming popular is very exciting. I would encourage people online to be active and not afraid to push yourself and explore this world of possibilities
Mark: 88/100

Overall Self-Assessment mark: 325/4 = 81.25%

categories: Film/TV, Integrated Media, Uncategorized
tags:

I realised how inconsistance my blog posts are.... If our aim was to document our process of learning and the journey of the semester, this blog is the equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle that's pretty much missing half of its pieces, incomplete and jagged....

I feel like in my mind there is always so much to say and so much to show, yet when it comes to actually writing them down into blog posts..... hmmm....

I think it's the mismatched pace between the way I think and the way I write that make me feel so inadequate whenever I write... that goes along with writing essays and making speeches..... I'm always stuttering :/ To improve my blog post, it's not just a matter of actually writing a post every day, but more looking into the root of the problem. It's not that I don't like writing, it's just that I hate and often feel constipated whenever I write! Hence, I often just avoid it and persuade myself to use as little words as possible and tried use images instead to express my thoughts in it's arbitrary and metaphorical form.... Recently, I feel like that's not much of a solution but a cop out and I really want to change that! To be more fluent in the way I think and the way I express myself.

As the wind blows and brushes its way through us, came the enlightenment and the bloom that spring had been waiting for...
Our thoughts as streams of water, gushing down the edge of the mind, smooth and calm, flowing in an unwavering pace.
It's not enough to stretch our hands forward trying to content it... We got to feel it not grabbing it. Direct its flow into the writing, keep its flow at pace... arghhhh I lost it....

Sorry... I tried to fix/ restructure the last sentences and I lost it.... (funny how the first two just came so easily and randomly, I didn't even intend on writing them at all, I just needed a start to get to my point. Yet, when I just about to get into the point I've already lost it....) It's not the writing, it's because I stopped the flow and got carried away by the text and its content. While I was writing I was also thinking about the way I read and why I hate to read! It's to do with pace again, it just seemed extremely slow when I read. The way to explain the slowness is like trying to load a internet page using RMIT internet and safari.... it just lags and I hate when I am forced to blink at the screen, staring at a blank page, slowly loading its images and text. (Bare in mind the difference between "timeless" and "slowness".... Mad men is timeless, listening to a 3am empty street is timeless, but a traffic jam is just fucking torturing and slow.) That's why I like watching film and movie a lot more, because I feel at pace, it has its speed and pace , so I can easily surf through its wave, sail by the direction of its wind. (In motion picture, the pace is a given, we don't have to conduct or create it... We just have to follow the flow, 25 frames per second, like a train ride, u get on for an hour and half and you get off, arriving at whatever destination it brings you and you can go on to explore the land onwards) I should treat reading and writing as paintings and musics, it allows room for imagination and abstraction. If I can grasp the way to read, I think it will help my writing a lot! Read more is what everyone kept saying, and it sure is the way to learn! I look forward to the day I can grow to actually enjoy a read and get hooked on just like my endless nights of watching films after films until dawn!

Sorry I didn't finish the writing, not today but perhaps tomorrow.... lol yeh right!

This reminded me of a painting that I did back in yr 11... Fortune flows ;)

Thought I was ganna start my Asian Cinema essay tonight... ended up writing this random post for 4 hours.... 3am already (Being enjoying my Tripple Monday the whole afternoon! Homland, Dexter and Walking Dead!!!) ... Now it's Dial M for Murder time!! :D

category: Integrated Media
tags:

Haven't used photoshopped for ages!! Why can't photoshopped be easy to use like Finalcut and After Effect?

1. #LookAbove Snape and share - We will print out these and stick them around the CBD! 

 

2. #LookAbove12pm - Share it among friends and families and most importantly... RMIT!!!

The design of the poster is to keep everything simple to understand and easy to read! Instead of writing "Instagram" I used the Instagram icon instead, targeting at Instagram users! If you are a Instagram fan, the Instagram icon must attract your attention more than the boring texts! I also used red to make our #LookAbove hashtag stand out! I'm excited to see how this will go :D

category: Integrated Media
tags:

Our final project:

#LOOKABOVE MAP!!

Our Instagram contributes or mostly people from other countries, it will be quite hard to make a map for the world, so we decided to make a #lookabove map of Melbourne as a prototype for a bigger project in the future ;)
In order to boost our Melbourne #lookabove contributors, we've design these two ideas!
  1. #Lookabove12pm targeting at people who we know
  2. Make #lookabove poster and stick it around Melbourne targeting at general Melbourne Instagram users
category: Integrated Media
tags:

What should the final project of our #LookAbove be?

Definitely not a #LookAbove Collage.... Too Easy ;)

Can't believe how much contributes we have now! We started off we only 45 photos, now we have more than 1000+!!!!! #viralhashtag

category: Integrated Media
tags:

We used Chris Barker's theory of "Active Audience" as a guide to understand and analysis our contributors.

“Audiences are not cultural dopes but are active producers of meaning from within their own cultural context,” Chris Barker

We have decided to just keep the whole project simple and just you Instagram as the main platform. It is just easier and make everything less confusing.

Types of our contributors: 

  • Active contributors:People that are active in communicating and connecting with other users - @Peterchanur @jfnolen @angelmother @Waddy 772
  • Passive contributors: People that only use the hashtag to share photo - @floranewyork @cin_samm @drkain
  • Observer: People that click likes and comment on the photos but rarely share their own - @bossfather
  • Stumble-upon Contributes: People that see #Lookabove as a popular hashtag and started to use it.
    –  If we see new comers, we will welcome them and comment on their photos, turning them into potential reoccurring contributors!
    –  We are seeing more and more contributors of this type because our hashtag is getting more and more popular :D

Reference: Chris Barker (2003). Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice . London: SAGE. p325-p329.

category: Integrated Media
tags:

How on earth did we go from 45 photos to 800+!?
The secret is to..... be engaging and supportive ;)

Our strategy is to encourage our contributors. If we see a new contributor to the #lookabove hashtag, we would welcome them by saying things like, “nice shot! Welcome to #lookabove!”

We also have a team of anomonous users, basically Emily and I....  We go search for potential #lookabove contributes on Instagram and “like” “comment” on their photos! “Love this snap! You should join @thelookproject by using #lookabove hashtag”

 

Making people feel as if they have someone who cares about their photos and encourages them to actually keep on posting via the hashtag.

The nature of Instagram user is that they likes to take/ share photos as their hobby, so it make them feel special when there is an audience or community that’s looking at their photos. Makes them feel like their photos matters! And if they feel good about using the #lookabove hashtag, they will want to use that hashtag again and may even look at others work and connect with them.

category: Integrated Media
tags:

The #LookAbove hashtag is not like any other hashtag like #sky or #Lookup where users just use the hashtag to get likes. We started the #LookAbove hashtag from scratch, so over the weeks, we had been working hard trying to establish a relationship with our contributes, making them feel welcomed and hence, they often check back on the hashtag to see the many different creative way of looking above :)

WE #LOOKABOVE CONNECTS WITH EACH OTHER THROUGH IMAGES! 

Our Lookabove project, is not about winning a prize, there is no material reward in contributing to the hashtag. We had looked into the users on Instagram, people on instagram takes photo as their hobby, we don’t need to reward them for taking picture for #lookabove hashtag, the best we can do is offering them a community in which they can interact with other instagram users around world. It’s a give and take community, it’s not about achieving a specific goal or winning anything, it’s a way to enhance the Instragram experience, encouraging users to connect with people they don’t already know.

category: Integrated Media
tags:

We had a group meeting today and everyone loved the #LookAbove idea!
It's simple, creative and most importantly, it's sounds very hopeful :)

A project that aims a hopeful way of looking at the world around us! Stay positive and be creative! #LookAbove

Call-out: Ignore the mild demarcation of sight, we promise it will not end in plight. Ignore the physical structure of your being. Tilt your head upwards and start seeing!

That's see what the journey will take us! We are going to first try out different type of platforms and Emily and I are in charge of using Instagram! Come join the Hashtag #Lookabove and follow us @TheLookProject ;)