Siri- I’m hungry! said my friend to her smart phone. A happy to help voice replied with a list of restaurants flashing on her screen. My friend replied with a ‘thank you’ and was amazed to receive a ‘always welcome. why say thanks Rutuja.’ I was surprised at the personal addressing delivered by the operating system. We’re living in an age where we consider the options offered by our smartphone. When we didn’t have such a companion, we relied on reviews of friends and critics to recommend restaurants to eat at. Nowadays we consult our operating system to make important decisions or to provide us with options to choose from for any given activity ranging from shopping to finding directions to finding places to visit to even dialling a number. Handsfree is the way to be! Just speak your mind and if not a human, your companion phone is all ears!
Category Archives: Yum!
Food Quickies: Rearview
And it all started with a big bang! After forming our group of four that comprised of Mona, Shakun, Andy and me; we sat down to ideate for the blockbuster project of the semester – The Digital Story. We kept going in circles and didn’t seem to finalise on one particular concept so our angel in disguise – Andrea helped us to get going. What interests you’ll? Came the question. The first thing that popped in my head was food! (Maybe because my stomach was rumbling with hunger) I blurted it out and Andrea liked what she heard. The dots joined automatically thereafter. Melbourne is a melting pot of cultures which reflects in its diverse cuisine. Thus, we came up with the concept of creating a fusion based cookery show. Since we wanted to give it a fun angle, we couldn’t think of a more fun personality than Yuri. And we were set – we had an idea, we had a host for the cookery show. What next?
What came next was the great mid semester break. Along with the break came a full stop to our digital story. All hell broke loose when we returned to our cmwp class and heard that a few groups were already done with their shoot. We hit panic mode and decided to pull up our socks and sprang in action. Frantic calls were made to Shakun who didn’t turn up for weeks together. We had overshot our deadlines that we had put forth in the proposal weeks ago and realised we were in troubled waters. We had to steer our boat and so decided to sail without one crew member. A day prior to the shoot, I knocked off the script so that we had a framework to follow while on shoot, though most of the content was improvisational, I still tried to pen down a few punches here and there so that Yuri had an idea of the mood and tone of what had to be delivered. Mona and Andy took over arranging the props and co ordination with Yuri.
The day of the shoot dawned and so did our lost sheep – Shakun. While Shakun and I got the Kitchen and camera ready, Mona rehearsed the script with Yuri. Yuri was super enthusiastic and got into the chef’s skin really fast. Since I was operating the camera, the major difficulty that I faced was to set up the ideal master frame. After capturing the entire script on the master shot, I took a few cutaways of the food and couldn’t do anything beyond that because a close up wouldn’t work given the lighting and set up conditions. We wrapped up after a couple of hours and tasted our success. (The food cooked was yummy!)
The next hurdle was putting this piece of art on to a timeline and producing a final video. This responsibility lay in my soft hands. I hated the fact that I had to work on Adobe Premier Pro since I had a Windows system and belonged to the Final Cut Pro Fandom. After lining up the content on the timeline, I realised there were quite a few flaws in the footage. Eg- Yuri is pretending to put rajma on the pizza base with the spoon dangling in mid-air. I had to cover this up since this was the best take and so inserted a cutaway of the food on his voiceover. When it came to covering jump cuts, transitions came to my rescue. I tried to place an underlay throughout the show but the music wasn’t working , since it was posing as a distraction to Yuri’s punchlines and instructions. I faced a problem with exporting the final file too. I was confused as to what format would work best since this had to uploaded on a web platform. I exported it to MPEG2 and was satisfied with the result. Technical hiccups were a plenty but that didn’t deter my spirit since I had fun collaborating it all into one final product. Shakun created the awesome Food Quickies logo and fancy credit roll which I added to the timeline in the end.
When it came down to spreading the word, we went all out to create a buzz. As soon as we launched our Food Quickies page on Facebook and set up an Instagram account we got people interested in us by adding teasers in video and status updates. While Facebook took off in full swing, Instagram and Twitter lagged a bit behind. We generated suspense about Food Quickies so that people would come back to know more about us and hence launched our cookery show only on the 3rd day after going online.
Food Quickies has been one hell of an experience right from it’s conception till it’s final delivery. Though we faced rough waters, we managed to sail through and have made it to our submission! Egos clashed, things were thrown in anger, frustration set in; yet in all this fury we stuck together as a team and created something that we are proud of. So are you in for a Quickie? A food Quickie!
Social Media: The Real Deal
Likes, posts, shares, pokes, tweets, hashtags. Welcome to the manic world of social media!
It’s time to move on from checking in at your favourite pub every Friday night, posting a multitude of selfies striking the same pose, tweeting about your bad hair day to making use of the multiple social media platforms to build a worthwhile productive and beneficial network.
Thanks to the digital project, I was introduced to the real aspects of social media that could be used most effectively in order to build my folio online – from presenting it to making its presence felt. From building a professional network, to using my favourite social networking sites as a platform to market my work, to developing content primarily for social media users, I’ve started valuing the existence of social media after cursing it for its unwanted Candy Crush Saga Challenge requests, being tagged in randomness, and pokes from users with shady avatars.
As a starting point on the road to glory, one of my first digital projects – Food Quickies shall tread the social media path to get out there and make every participant say ‘Food Quickies’ even in their deepest sleep!
Starting from the type of content, Food Quickies which is a fun cookery show presented by a bachelor in Melbourne metropolitan, shall be ‘Edutaining’ in nature. The idea being quick food recipes to get you through the day, Food Quickies shall be informative in content but entertaining in approach. With the aim of getting absolutely anyone into the kitchen to dish out something yummy but tummy filling, the presenter shall be someone who will be able to strike a chord with absolutely anyone who is hungry.
One of the design tools to propagate an effective reach shall include a Food Quickies logo which will be the face of the brand. Though none of the group members are professional designers, we will create a logo that is simple yet effective.
Given the light hearted content of Food Quickies, the blog, tweets, and posts on the Food Quickies page shall have an informal approach when connecting to users eventually converting them to followers.
Since the social media strategy of Food Quickies encompasses over multiple domains, all the activity shall be regulated and controlled using Hootsuite – the social media management dashboard. Scheduling of tweets, posts, shares shall be done once in two days by setting times for each activity.
As a latest food vlog on the block, the post on How to blog about food by The Hungry Australian helped us getting started. Check it out as you never know when the foodie in you may want to eat, breathe, sleep, blog food!
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