Thursday 27 October 2016

Banana Magnet

Today's collaboration mini-brief was... interesting!

Mine and Bronte's idea of an app called Hangry Hi-5 was selected. The concept was an app where you could order food and also meet new people to eat it with, like a combination of Just Eat and Tinder.


The day started off well, with lots of ideas and brainstorming, especially once we teamed up with a few other pairs to become a team of about 10 people.

However, once the whole room of about 40 students got involved, things started getting a bit more stressful! 

I really enjoyed working collaboratively, not just in a pair, but in a small team too. It's useful to get different perspectives on your ideas that lead to other, better ideas that you wouldn't have come up with alone. However, I think with a larger team of about 40, ideas start to get lost in translation.

Perhaps this was due to the fact that neither Bronte or I felt particularly comfortable being leaders! Thankfully we had Josh from Graphic Design acting as a spokesperson who conferred with each smaller team of students working on each aspect of the app (marketing, branding, the advert, the pitch and the presentation).

We had a bit of a dispute over the slogan - 'You might like me when I'm hangry' vs. 'Meet, greet, eat'. Bronte and I felt that the first one was better, as it captured both the hangry element of the app and the humour behind it, as well as relating it to the target audience of university students by referencing a well-known film. However, a lot of people chose the second option because it was shorter and snappier. But many people had trouble remembering which way round the words went anyway, and it felt like too serious a slogan for 'Hangry Hi-5'! But we took a democratic vote and the latter slogan won, but we were still going to use the first slogan as part of the voiceover in the animation.

Unfortunately the animation was lost because After Effects crashed, but we managed to salvage the basic points and still make a decent pitch.

Overall, I think today was an incredibly useful exercise in teamwork - listening to each other to get the job done! It was personally useful to me too, to build up my confidence a bit and to not take constructive criticism personally.

I do think we were the group that took this brief the most seriously!