Author: Fernandes, Leticia

Connecticut Public

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During the Fall 2018 semester, our ATION team partnered with Connecticut Public with the task of developing a way to stimulate a digital culture that would engage and interest college students.
Connecticut Public provides informational, educational, and inspirational content to the people of Connecticut. Their vision is to connect Connecticut citizens through storytelling and journalism that shares what matters most in the community.

Elizabeth Messina, Vice President of Media Innovation, informed us of Connecticut Public’s goals of appealing to a younger demographic and continuing their long history of loyal viewers. Many are familiar with Connecticut Public’s broadcast channels (CPTV, CPTV Spirit), NPR, and PBS; however, most of the individuals who engage with their content are not within the target market of 17 to 23-year-olds.

After much discussion, the team decided that creating a video interview resource would best suit Connecticut Public’s needs. By interviewing Connecticut college students about their interests and content preferences, the team was able to draw up trending themes that Connecticut Public could use to develop content to engage 17 to 23-year-olds, foster a digital culture, and develop lasting relationships with a new audience.

Initially, our team proposed conducting a survey to help us narrow in on specific content to cover during the interviews when we met with our client on October 5th at Connecticut Public’s headquarters in Hartford, CT.

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However, due to us being unable to have our survey expedited by the IRB (an institutional review board, task with evaluating the implementations and ethics in conducted research), the survey could not be conducted. By October 18th, the team adapted to the obstacle and decided to jump forward with interviews within our network sphere. This included having two of our team members, Corlis Fraga and Ben Chason, CITI (Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative) certified to conduct interviews.

We wanted the interviews to be insightful and spent great care in developing interview questions that would be useful for the client’s needs. After gaining client critiques, the team was able to establish suitable questions for interview purposes (ex: What do you find you need more of in your life since being at University, and do you think that having a lack of this is a problem for most college students?).

Two film dates (November 2nd and 9th) and 22 students later, enough footage was accumulated to develop a visual research archive for the client. Title cards and motion graphics were developed to introduce speaking students and the proposed questions, and transcripts were constructed to aid the client in their pursuit of isolating key themes of interest for 17 to 23-year-olds.

 

By December 6th, the interviews were delivered to the client, along with additional assets (transcripts, raw footage…etc.) which included a written document detailing the team’s perspective on what Connecticut Public could develop content wise based off the interview responses. Due to the team’s age and status as college students, our insight is meant to benefit the project and its objectives.

 

Throughout the semester the team remained dynamic in our approach to the project. There were times of in-person collaboration (ex: ideation, major decisions, interview process, presentation construction…etc.) as well as times where the skills of individual team members were utilized to divide and tackle the project from multiple sides.

 

The team consisted of:

Corlis Fraga – Project Manager/3D Animation/Project Coordinator

Corlis was primarily responsible for writing/organizational aspects and direct communication with the client. She continuously updated the team, formatted presentations, and ensured that deadlines were kept in mind throughout the semester. She was also CITI certified and asked interviewee’s questions during the film dates.

James Brockett – Project Manager/Motion Graphics/Film

James (Jimmy) was instrumental in the technical aspect of filming the interviews and operating equipment. He also compiled the audio and video footage that would be passed over to Malik for editing and created motion graphic templates to introduce the interviewed students in the final videos.

Ben Chason – Digital Business Strategies/Film

Ben was the second team member to be CITI certified and was the primary survey developer during the time when the team was attempting to carry out the construction and distribution of a Qualtrics survey to generate better interview questions. He also assisted in the technical aspect of the interview process.

Kaity Seman – 3D Animation/Motion Graphics

Kaity actively assured deliverables and assets developed over the course were polished and presentation worthy. She curated motion graphics seen in the polished interviews and was a great coordinator in reaching out to other students to get them to participate in the interviews.

Chris Glenn – Web Design/Film

Chris assisted in various aspect of the project, including presentation formatting and development, interviewing, and the curation of deliverables for both the client and for Student Agency purposes. He also shot behind-the-scenes photos and videos.

Malik Harris – Motion Graphics/Film

Malik was the ‘Jack of all Trades’ member and assisted throughout the project on both large and small tasks. Primarily, he edited all the footage and spliced the interviews together in the format submitted to our client.

 

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Challenges of the project included: team member sickness, time management, IRB exemption rejection, gaining interview volunteers, and our perception of how much time we had for what we wanted to complete. However, through our member’s determination and the ability to remain flexible, we were able to rise past the challenges that our client pointed out were very “real-world” obstacles. Upon reflection, finding better ways to communicate when not in-person (other that using Slack and email) is a task that we all must keep in mind for future reference.

Overall, the team worked well in meeting the end goal and was given positive feedback from the client. It is with hope that the resource generated will serve Connecticut Public well as they attempt to inspire greater interest from college students.

Here’s a sample of the work we produced:

Fall Call

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Over the semester our team has worked really hard to create this series of videos advertising the app FallCall! Maggie and Ali were our project coordinators, Ali took care of the motion graphics and also was very helpful on set dealing with camera and lights. Maggie took the lead on set and also helped out with the script writing. It was great that Kerrie let us use her acting skills for the “college student” video, she was really easy to work with and she also edited Noel’s video. Kaely edited Jim’s video and also provided the dog and house that we needed as props. David was really essential at our shoot in the woods helping with camera work and also worked on the sound for each video. Charlie was assistant director for the shoots in the studio with both Noel and Jim and was also very helpful when developing our idea and game plan with the client.

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We had a few challenges throughout the process like finding older actors and dealing with weather, but overall we think that this was a successful project. In the beginning of the semester, we had a lot of different possible directions to take and we spent a lot of time deciding what would be most effective for our message. Because we wanted to promote the idea that everybody falls we thought the docuseries would be really effective. We developed this idea over the semester and had to do a lot of pre planning and scheduling to make it happen. Once the shots were in the can we split up the post production work and tried to make sure that each video had a cohesive look.

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In the end we think that this video turned out well, to the best of our ability. Given more time we could have maybe been able to do test shoots, make a longer video or had more complex locations. However, we did with what we had and worked together to find the resources that we needed. The end product does a good job of marketing FallCall in a way that is engaging and interesting.

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Watch the FallCall team’s other two videos here and here

Trebel

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Trebel is the world’s first licensed music service to deliver downloadable music for free by combining digital advertising and social payment technologies. Their mission is to enable young people everywhere to enjoy on-demand music and other media in a safe and legal environment while delivering fair compensation to the artist community by capturing billions of dollars lost each year to pirate sites and “safe harbor” apps. Our Ation team was tasked with creating a low budget marketing strategy to help spread the Trebel brand through college campuses.

 

After much deliberation and ideating, the team decided to host a “silent rave” sponsored by Trebel at the University of Connecticut that would be free to all students so long as they downloaded the free Trebel app. The team tackled every aspect of the event, from planning with the schools event coordinator to researching and ultimately choosing from different headphone companies to utilise for the event. We also created a small collection of flat graphics and short animations to promote the event, as well as a promotional video of the event itself for Trebel to use in future advertising. The “silent rave”, a dance party where attendees hear the DJ through individual headsets instead of speakers, was very successful, leaving all attendees satisfied and introducing the brand to a multitude of new people.

 


 

Project Team:

Nicole Harvey acted as one of the two project coordinators of the project and was responsible for all communications between the client and the team, as well as planning with the school’s event coordinator for the event itself.

Skylar Agnello as a one of the two project coordinators aided in event communications as well as completely managing the filming, catering, and music at the event.

Katie Sawosik was responsible for research and development of the events RSVP ticket system, including graphics- she also largely aided in finding the proper companies to rent from for the event.

Nick Donati created most all of the flat and animated graphics and assets used to promote the event and was responsible for acquiring professional lighting, decorations, and transportation for our equipment.

Ariff Jeff created animated content to be displayed at the event itself and aided in managing during the event.

Aaron Kane secured the events DJ and was tasked with advertising the event including but not limited to handing out a large amount of fliers throughout the University.

The Werth Institute

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Spring 2018

At the beginning of the semester we worked to develop an understanding of what the Werth Institute is and what exactly it was that we were going to provide our client with. After deciding that we would create a logo, brand guidelines, social media guide, brand identity and a PowerPoint template for the Werth institute we began working on logo designs. We all collectively worked on various logo ideas and then presented them to the client. Once the logo options were narrowed down we were then able to delegate tasks for each of us to work on. While we each had our own assignments of things to do we collaborated on ideas and offered one another input and feedback.

One specific part of our final deliverable that we all worked on together was creating a tagline. Some difficulties that we faced throughout our work for The Werth Institute was deciphering what exactly it is and what they are offering to students here at UConn. Since this institute is new and we have not personally experienced it yet we looked at what other prestigious universities are doing to market and build a brand for their own entrepreneurship and innovation institutes. After giving our final deliverable we felt that we successfully completed what they had asked us to, however the client did have a few critiques so we needed to make a few final adjustments before sending over our final project.

Our client came to us with the problem of branding and brand identity. They were a new entity and they were starting from scratch in terms of who they were and what they wanted to look like. They wanted us to come up with a vision for the Peter J. Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. This included many things like a logo that fit together well with the UConn logo and different color themes. They wanted a branding style sheet to guide the institute in the future and powerpoint template for them to use when giving presentations about the institute. Social media was also important to them, so they wanted different social media tags and hashtags to use to promote themselves. Lastly, they wanted taglines or a mission statement for the Werth institute to catch people attention. A main concern that they had was students calling it the “Werth Institute” and not shortening the name to anything.

After our first meeting with our client Cathy Rocha on February 1st, we were able to gain a better understanding of the project objectives and from there, we made a structured plan to follow as a team. For our first task (creating the logo) we worked individually and drafted ideas of our own in which we visioned for the logo. We then shared them with each other and collaborated off each other’s ideas. We narrowed down our options, and presented them to our client during a meeting on February 27th. We learned that our client liked the logos made by Anna which included the oak leaves. From here, we were able to better assign roles for the remaining tasks. Anna worked on adjusting the logos based on our feedback, while the rest of the team collaboratively worked on creating a tagline for the Werth Institute, which was narrowed down and concluded by Allison. Once the logo was finalized, Anna put together a style guide. Ming focused on creating a social media plan including proposed hashtags and advise on when to post content. Hailee and Diana focused on creating the brand identity, while Meagan created the powerpoint template. However, throughout the entire project we all worked together and shared our thoughts and ideas on each individual task, ensuring our team had equal input and consisted of collaborative concepts.

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After figuring out what exactly our client needed from us, we worked collaboratively to brainstorm rough ideas for logos and other design elements such as color palette and font choices. We each made rough sketches of logos which we then narrowed down and recreated digitally. Once first drafts of a logo were done, we worked individually on other things needed by the client such as taglines, brand identity, social media guide, etc. We communicated with one another about the progress of our specific task throughout the semester to ensure everything was being done properly and efficiently. This made it easier to get everything done by our deadline and ensure everything was consistent.

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During this process we encountered a few obstacles. One of the biggest ones was client communication. We would have liked to have met with our client at least one other time during the semester to get feedback but they were unable to do so. There were also multiple occasions that our client did not respond to our emails or took a very long time to do so. We dealt with this by giving them multiple options to choose from for everything we created which minimized the amount of back and forth between ourselves and the client.

Another issue we had in the beginning was confusion on what “The Werth Institute” was. They are a relatively new program with no brand identity which is what they needed our help for. We solved this issue by communicating with the client and researching what The Werth Institute was, what they are trying to accomplish, and what similar institutes at other universities have done. At the end of the semester, our client was satisfied with our final deliverable with only a few minor adjustments needed.

Overall the team did a great job at working together, communicating and making sure that the work was split up in a fair way that allowed each of us to create a critical piece of the project. The project provided us with several learning opportunities when it came to client feedback, logo creating, logo presentation and taglines. Each member brought new ideas to the table during our class sessions and we were able to build off of each others ideas. I think that it took us a little while to fully understand the client and the brand that we were helping create an identity for. Once we had more of a grasp on the goal we were able to work quickly to come up with a final deliverable. If anything could have been done better, it would have been our timing for the final meeting. Perhaps if we had been able to move the final client meeting up a week or two we would have felt less rushed to make the last minute changes that were needed according to the client feedback.

Project Team
Allison Betlej
Diana Francis
Anna Jannott
Ming Montgomery
Hailee Parenteau
Meagan Ryley