Digital Director: The Final Reflection

June 10, 2016 · by · in

Well, this semester I’ve had the pleasure of completing my third RMIT studio, The Digital Director. All in all, I would say that the experience has been a positive one – I’ve had the opportunity to immerse myself in a rapidly growing sector of the media industry while gaining experience in working with both a core group of colleagues and the larger group of classmates. I’m proud of the work I produced, and I enjoyed creating things within the ‘Sketchy Students’ umbrella, namely my two Twitter accounts and multiple behind-the-scenes videos.

13087136_994825020573019_804096263533711771_o

The major thing that I focussed on learning and understanding in this studio was how to use social media platforms to engage with a prospective audience. Upon splitting into different factions, I chose the social media team because I’ve previously had some experience with writing and production, and I find the growing prominence of social-media related jobs in the media industry really intriguing. However, my initial knowledge of the platforms, particularly Twitter, was limited. This meant that there was an initial learning curve, as I wrapped my head around what was required of me and how I could, well, deliver on my deliverables. I do think that in this area, the studio has been a success for me. While initially being an admitted technophobe, I’ve since learnt how to schedule multiple tweets across multiple accounts through third party apps, how to edit and upload visuals on Twitter, how to access and understand site analytics and, most important, how to creatively engage with Twitter’s 140 character restriction to provide infrequent ‘snippets’ of a character.

Screen Shot 2016-06-10 at 4.12.06 PM

In terms of the overall quality of my work, I’m fairly happy with the results. To be honest, none of my jobs were particularly strenuous, so there wasn’t really any excused for putting up substandard material, or not putting up anything at all. I’m most happy with the six behind-the-scenes videos I produced, because they allowed me to get creative on set, and come up with ideas and scenarios that I thought would be amusing or engaging. I’m also pleased with Morty Smith’s Twitter account. Creating 3-5 original tweets for the character each week was a challenge, given he’s a fairly one-note character, but I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity and attempted to integrate some tweets with current popular culture to increase their relevance, such as referencing a previous night’s episode of Game of Thrones in one Tweet.

If I were to continue with this project, or just with social media engagement in general, I’d like to branch out into exploring how other platforms work with each other. While I used the main ‘Sketchy Students’ account to link to our Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram pages, I didn’t actually explore them myself, but I think it would be pretty useful to gain an understanding of how they’re best used.

I won’t harp on any negatives for too long, given that it was a fundamentally positive experience, but I was disappointed with a general lack of communication within the overall class, particularly between the social media team and the management team. We weren’t hamstrung in any way, given how exceptional our team leader was at delegating and explaining our tasks, but the ‘behind-the-scenes’ concept took a good 2-3 weeks to sort out just because we were constantly being dictated to by different management members with seemingly different agendas. From the outside looking in, it seemed as if we could do without a ‘management team’ and let the various team leaders handle their responsibilities. Having said that, nobody could argue that the final product wasn’t a tremendous piece of work – it’s been fantastic to watch each episode get better and better, the culmination of a lot of talented people’s work!

Cheers Mark!