A multitude of drops: August 2015

Flicks and Feasts - Weekly Reflection #3

03:55
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Classic Literature and Transmedia

Each of us has a story to tell.

As you scroll through my blog, you could easily head over to my Facebook profile or twitter and find more content, more photos and information about me. Each part on its own doesn’t amount to much, but put them all together and you get a more complete image of me and my story.

This idea of telling a single story across multiple platforms is called transmedia and the average person of today shares their story with the world through this method all the time. From movie stars and singers to youtubers and bloggers, many of us are no longer confined to one medium to tell our story but use many.

Traditional storytelling has often been restricted to one medium. Even when we’re creating movie adaptations of popular literature such as Harry Potter, this isn’t using multiple media to tell the one story, just telling the same story in a different way.

If the world has changed the way we communicate our lives, how come the way we tell stories hasn’t also changed?

While its true that we haven’t witnessed a storytelling revolution, the way we tell stories is changing - slowly.

Over the past few years via social media, innovative story tellers have been adapting classic literature for a new age.

The pioneer of this movement and the most successful of these adaptations to date has been Hank Green and Bernie Su’s series ‘The Lizzie Bennet Diaries’, a modern retelling of the classic Austen novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’.

The story takes place largely in vlog format on youtube as Lizzie tells the audience about her life. These videos are complemented by blog posts, tweets, Q & A videos and videos by other characters in the series, the culmination of which results in a 3D character and story that is so convincing and immersive, you might even think it was real.

Since the success of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, several more adaptations have arisen, from Shakespeare’s plays to Frankenstein, more and more are jumping on board this new method of story telling.

Here are some of my favourites:

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (Adaptation of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’)

Nothing Much To Do (Adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’)

Emma Approved ( Adaptation of Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’)

What do you think? Is transmedia the story telling method of the future?

02:33
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The $5 Challenge - failure

entrepreneurship

So last post I left you after we decided that we needed to move in a different direction for the $5 challenge. To refresh your memory of what happened you can take a look here.

For our next move we decided to look at event planning. Events are great. They’re not too difficult to organise, are lots of fun and bring in a reasonable amount of money in a short amount of time. The only downside is that you only find out if your idea is successful after you’ve invested your time and money and the event is about to take place.

The first event that we tried to organise was a movie night on campus. We’d hire out the campus centre cinema, provide snacks and charge a small fee on the door.

Simple right?

Well in reality it turned out to be much more difficult.

We sorted out the movie, bought our food, set up and patiently waited for our guests to arrive.

Except - no one showed.

So instead of it being a huge night like we planned, it ended up being more like this:

Considerably confused we asked some of the people we invited why they didn’t come, and we got some valuable feedback regarding how we promoted our event. For example, we should have been more personal in our approach and more descriptive about the cause we were supporting.

The movie night wasn’t the only event we tried to do, we also planned to have a dance party. We would run it similar to how MDS runs their parties and as these parties at Monash usually attract a regular crowd of around 40 people, it appeared to be a viable option. I used my connections with MDS and they agreed to provide us with teachers, equipment, advertising space and support on the night. Everything was going to work our perfectly!

So why didn’t it happen?

Because one very key detail did not fall into place. That is, we weren’t able to secure a venue. And so inadvertently that plan was also a failure.

We had several other ideas in addition to these, but none of them worked out. So when we finally completed the challenge at the end of 4 weeks, we had only made a profit of $47.

While we weren’t very successful at making profit, our failure provided a valuable learning opportunity. We learned the importance of marketing and of recognising the opportunities that networks present, which we can apply to any future business ventures.

Have you done the $5 Challenge? How did you go? I'd love to hear about your experiences!

05:07
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A multitude of drops

04:43
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Friends and Fancy Cheeses - Weekly Reflection #2

Reflection

23:36
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Australia - the world's leader in mammal extinctions

conservation

Did you know that of every 3 mammal species that goes extinct around the world, 1 of these is Australian?

Since European settlement, 30 species of Australian mammals have faded into extinction. When you include birds, reptiles and amphibians, this number sky rockets to well over 100 species being wiped out.

This is an insane number of species. How is this even possible?

Causing a species to go extinct is actually easier than you might think, and it happens far too often due to our own carelessness. In Australia the main causes include:

Habitat loss - Due to logging and land clearing, a lot of the habitat that these species called home has been lost or repurposed to fit our needs.

Invasive predators - Feral cats and foxes have decimated many populations of smaller species. For example, feral cats kills an estimated 75 million native animals every night across Australia, a loss that many species are unable to recover from.

Other invasive species - these include weeds, feral herbivores and species such as the cane toad which have significantly changed our ecosystem and reduced the amount of available resources for native species.

Fires - Over time due to human interference, there has been a change in fire regimes causing an increase in the severity and extent of wildfires which many species are unable to withstand.

But this is just the beginning of the issue. Not only have we driven many species to extinction, we are still doing it. At present, according to the IUCN, Australia has 96 critically endangered animal species. This means that these species, which include the northern hairy nosed wombat and the orange bellied parrot, are either facing an extremely high risk of extinction, or have numbers which decreased (or will decrease) by 80% within three generations. Some of these species may already be extinct.

But this doesn’t even begin to cover the scale of the problem. The IUCN red list hasn’t been updated for a few years and there are several other Australian species very near extinction that have not yet been recognised as critically endangered. One such species is Victoria’s own faunal emblem, the Leadbeater’s Possum. The 2009 Black Saturday bushfires destroyed approximately 42% of the possum’s habitat, halving the wild population to only 1500 individuals. This number gets smaller every year due to continued industrial clear felling in their habitat. It is common consensus amongst scientists who study this species that the Leadbeater’s Possum may not survive the next couple of decades if drastic action isn’t taken, but the classification, which hasn’t been updated since 2008, doesn’t reflect this fact and little is being done to protect the species.

Most of Australia’s wildlife is found on no other place on earth. Over 80% of our mammals, reptiles and frogs are unique to Australia, and are incredibly important to maintaining our rare and beautiful ecosystems.

It’s up to us to protect these amazing and unique species, and we can’t do it without you.

Visit the Australian Wildlife Conservancy here: http://www.australianwildlife.org/support-awc.aspx to find out more about what you can do to help save some of our amazing Australian wildlife and put a stop to the extinctions.

21:04
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Stepping down from Leadership

leadership

Throughout my university studies we are often encouraged to step up into leadership roles and to challenge ourselves, but we often don't consider the transition out of these roles. How do you know when its time to step down and move on?

I think this is a really big challenge that leaders face whenever they are in a leadership position. When a leader fails, they don’t have to make this choice for themselves. Rather they get pushed out or encouraged to leave by the people they’re leading. This is what generally happens in government, when we’re tired of a particular Prime Minister or political party, we vote them out. But what about when a leader is liked by their followers. What then? How do you decide to move on?

A couple of months ago I was struggling with this very question. I had been president of my high school alumni over the past year and while I knew that I had put in a lot of effort into building the organisation, the work no longer interested me. Instead of feeling excited and ready to face new challenges, new problems would leave me feeling stressed and upset, yet people still wanted me to remain in my position. When I mentioned possibly stepping down people were surprised and tried to convince me not to. Was it the best outcome for me or the organisation if I remained in my position of leadership?

This required a lot of self reflection and I had to ask myself some key questions.

- Is my passion shifting?

- Do I have the time?

- Is the work too demanding?

- Would I only be staying out of obligation?

- Is there someone who could do a better job than me?

- What’s best option for the organisation?

Thinking through these questions really helped me come to a decision. I found that amongst my other commitments I didn’t have as much time to dedicate to the organisation, I no longer felt passionate about the work and instead it left me emotionally drained. It's true that I felt an obligation to my team and didn't want to let them down, but I felt that there were other people who could do a better job and that if I remained in my position it would not result in the best outcome for the organisation. For these collective reasons, I decided to step down.

While I felt sad about it at the time, upon reflection it has become clear that this was definitely the right choice both for me and the organisation. A couple of my peers stepped up into leadership roles and are doing a great job and keeping everything running smoothly. Being free from this responsibility left me feeling like a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders, and has allowed me to pursue other opportunities. Contrary to what some may say, this was not a failure, but a valuable learning experience for me. I hope you can learn something from it too.