Week 11 Tutorial - Final Reflective Post
For my transmedia experiment, I created 2 characters in 1: The Bin Twins. The twins are inspired by the new side by side bins seen around campus and are designed to promote messages about putting the correct materials into the correct bin, and reducing the amount of waste produced by UC. In this way, I hope to promote good habits amongst my audience and inspire long-term change, in order to create a more sustainable campus.
Younger brother Waste is a simple greedy villain character who just wants to be fed all the rubbish he can find, while his older sister Recycle is a simple good character who tries to encourage sorting food (rubbish) and recycle some things, in order to help the environment.
Inspired by the bins in the UC Refectory, I drew cartoon style characters, giving them wacky haircuts and big googly eyes. I then transformed where the rubbish slots would be and made them into mouths - a frowning mouth for Waste and a smile for Recycle. While this is a subtle difference between the 2 characters, it will hopefully send a message to my audience that waste is bad and recycling is good. It was really helpful to have the 2 characters which were so opposite. I was able to use this to create contrasts between the two, and therefore double the efficiency of my messages.
My characters were primarily aimed at UC students, in particular those that eat their lunch in the refectory, as this is where I believe the majority of our rubbish problem lies. With this in mind, I constructed my main rabbit-hole inside the refectory as well as focussed most of my promotional posters there. I also put up a couple of posters around the childcare buildings, as I felt my characters would appeal to younger children as well. My hope was that the children would see the posters and nag their older siblings/parents to use the QR code, or at least create a subtle connection to be utilised when the children grow older, which would help to create long-term change.
My original poster was designed to introduce a bit of the personalities of my characters. Using different typefaces and wording, I hoped to show that Waste was a grumpy, selfish character, while Recycle was girly and kind. My original poster blitz was around Building 9, as I hoped to gain interest from other students who were studying Cross Media Production. Strangely, a lot of these posters got taken down and I never found out why. They weren't put in places that were particularly intrusive, and there was even one case where my poster was taken down and other surrounding posters were kept in tact. I didn't mind too much because the original poster didn't have a QR code or even a bitly link, so I was able to make these improvements do another round of promotion with my new posters.
The final poster takes on an even more simplified design, which incorporates my Bitly link to the twins' Facebook page as well as a QR code. While these both link to the same place, I decided to include both in the hope of reaching more people. Some students might prefer the convenience of a QR code, while others who might not have a QR reader might just take note of the link for later. I also got rid of the writing down either side as I felt that it cluttered the poster and I thought it was too much for the audience to read at a glance. I also made it into a funky square shape which I hope will stand out from all the other rectangle A4 posters around campus already. I was much more proud of this poster and put it up all around campus.
My main rabbit hole was to transform the bins in the refectory to look like my characters. Although it took a while to build up the courage to implement my idea, it was actually really enjoyable making the big cardboard cutouts and watching people's reactions to me putting them up. The character's definitely stood out from the otherwise dull refectory and featured large QR codes placed right on the bins' flaps. I deliberately placed them here as a queue for the audience to cross platforms, as its the one place on the bin where everyone has to look in order to put rubbish in. You couldn't miss them! Unfortunately, the rabbit hole didn't last very long until they fell over and were probably taken away by the cleaners :( ...I hope they put it in the recycling bin!! When I was making the twins' hair, I didn't really think about how much support it would need to stand on its own. If I were to do it again I would use a corflute or similar backing plate instead of just cardboard and perhaps it would have lasted longer.
After targeting the bins, the next phase of my promotion was to target the rubbish itself. I did this my implementing stickers of the Recycle Bin Twin onto rubbish that can be recycled, to promote putting rubbish in the correct bin. While I didn't actually have any evidence of my audience going through this rabbit-hole, the idea was to expose the audience to my character at the right time so the correct bin is at the forefront of their mind just when they are thinking of disposing of the rubbish. Perhaps if I had implemented this idea earlier I may have noticed an increase in my site visitors.
The Bin Twins were launched on both Facebook and Instagram, with Facebook being the most visited of the two. On the twins' Facebook page, I documented when the first rabbit-hole was implemented as well as regular updates showing interesting statistics about recycling. I also found that Facebook was the best way to connect with other characters, with the page getting over 20 likes.
In particular, The Bin Twins made a good connection with another character, Dot The Bottle, after finding some shocking statistics about the amount of plastic drink bottles that end up in the wrong places. Dot The Bottle is also trying to reduce waste created by plastic bottles so the 2 messages linked together well. Vendor the vending machine also made a good connection, as vending machines are the source of a lot of the rubbish going into UC bins.
Instagram was a method of sharing photos of The Bin Twins progress as I put them out into the universe and to hopefully give a general boost to the public awareness of my characters. Hopefully people trolling Instagram would see the cool photos and places where the posters were put and either visit these places or atleast follow the links visible in them.
While a lack of time and experience meant I wasn't able to implement this, I had another idea to create a mobile game of The Bin Twins. This was to be my main content for my characters, and would provide links to both Facebook and Instagram from the games home screen. If I were to receive funding for my characters, I would definitely implement the game and use some kind of Augmented Reality software similar to Aurasma to trigger the launch of the game whenever an audience member moved their phone across any one of the existing bins on campus.
After being introduced to Bitly on the 22nd April, I set up an account to track the popularity of my QR codes and click through links.
With a Facebook page already created and my first round of posters up, bitly confirmed that my characters were already receiving some interest. The first major spike in clicks came on April 24, the same day that I implemented my rabbit-hole of transforming the refectory bins. The majority of these were direct clicks, proving that people were using my QR codes to cross onto my online platforms. The following day was the ANZAC public holiday. I didn't receive any hits that day, which I associated with the fact that the uni wasn't open but they returned the following day which I was happy with. Soon after that the rabbit-hole was removed, so I decided to try another round of Facebook promotion instead. After sharing The Bin Twins page through my own Facebook, I received an amazing 13 likes in one day, which remains the most popular day by far. These were spread across both mobile Facebook and regular desktop Facebook.
Unfortunately I don't have any friends overseas and didn't get my characters to cross into another country. I did get a few clicks from unknown locations, which I put down to possibly mobile users who didn't have location services enabled.
Overall I really enjoyed watching the progress of my rabbit-holes using Bitly and will definitely be using it in future projects. My only regret is o=not implementing it sooner so as to get a more long-term range of my characters' popularity.
If I were to do the project again, I would definitely work as a group and create a team of characters who could work together to create much more content and therefore be able to reach a much wider audience. I also struggled a lot at the beginning about what was actually required of me, so now that I have a much better understanding I would be able to implement my ideas much earlier in the term. Inspiring the kind of long-term change that is required in order to create a more sustainable campus is something that requires a lot of time, so if I had had longer on the project I could hopefully have received a much greater response.
Another way of making the project more successful next time might be to team up with some marketing students and work on ways to promote our characters. This could include a festival type event where everyone has to do a small display to promote their characters to each other, as well as passers by. Students have been doing some really amazing work but I believe its the promotional side of the project - getting the characters our into the real world - which has let the project down. Another thing that also might help is to have some kind of agreement with the university cleaners that none of our promotional material be removed until after the semester is over.
Overall I have really enjoyed having a unit that was so hands on and creative. As I am studying both graphic design and media arts, I found myself using skills from both of these disciplines in order to produce a character that I am proud of. My favourite part of the unit was learning about augmented reality, which inspired my to do some of my own research into how it worked and some examples of it in action. My post entitled Augmented Reality received over 40 likes and reblogs, and was even featured in the tech section of Tumblr! Also after reading so many shocking statistics about recoiling, I have an added enthusiasm towards ensuring rubbish goes in the correct bin, and have learnt that putting recycling inside plastic bags is bad - something I have now implemented into my home life. I also bought a new stainless steel drink bottle and have been using that instead of plastic thanks to one of my friends' characters.
I wasn't expecting to get any kind of interest in my work, so am really surprised and happy with the 23 clicks I received on The Bin Twins Facebook page. This proves that some of the methods I used such as online Facebook and Instagram promotion as well as implementing real world rabbit-holes is an effective means of reaching the younger demographic. With this in mind, I believe transmedia is something that should be utilised as a method of influencing large audiences.
www.facebook.com/thebintwins
instagram.com/thebintwins
http://www.panoramio.com/user/7619109
