Ideating

The process began with the idea to create a cooking channel to help uni students understand the benefits of cooking for oneself, particularly demonstrating how much cheaper it really is. This was to comprise of a YouTube channel, where the process of cooking was filmed with the recipe – similarly to the format of Buzzfeed, and to also have an Instagram with three posts, the original food, the ingredients and snippets of the process, and our version of the product. Especially by talking to a lot of uni students about it we knew our point was to really afford uni students the opportunity to follow recipes that would be, easy to make and far cheaper than the expensive ones they were buying (particularly noting uni students are generally poor at this stage in their life). This aim was really important to get right as we wanted the whole point of our DA to help people in an accessible and different way to what is currently out there. I think we did achieve this through our aim as it benefits the community of people we are currently in.

Prototyping

Once we got onto the prototyping stage I sketched out the structure of how we wanted the YouTube videos and Instagram to look.

This, in the end, was really important as giving your viewers a familiar structure and content flow can be extremely useful when gaining viewership. It enabled us to foresee what the content would look like before we posted anything publicly, which was important for us to get familiar with as well. We then went through a number of names, which would encapsulate what we were trying to do and be short enough to be a name to remember. Once we came up with the name, Textbook recipes, we created a logo with Photoshop. This was more important than I think we realised as it tied everything together in the end, it was featured in out YouTube videos and all of our profiles.

We did some trials with filming particularly with our first video, the Eggs Benedict, we practiced what lighting and angles looked best, using the format taken in the sketches. This was a really successful video for a number of reasons, which we only began to realise during our second video. 

The sushi video was our first #FEFO moment, whereby it was a little bit of a flop.

THIS WAS SO IMPORTANT!!! In hindsight, it completely changed how we went about our future videos. There was poor lighting, only one person doing the video and feedback given on it suggested that the effort to make Sushi and the price for all the ingredients was not worth how much you can pay for bought sushi, because it is so cheap.

This is when we started to rethink our DA in terms of what we needed to do for the future. We needed to have:

• Good lighting and good angles
• All three of us there so one person did the filming, one person did the cooking, and one person cleaned up/helped cooking process
• One video per three weeks is more sustainable than one per week
• Cooking meals which are more expensive out and quick/easy to make
• Use Instagram as a content funnel

Making

Having these goals made it so much easier to produce the three videos that would eventually follow. We broke it up into different types of meals to mix it up, which meant we created churros, pasta and burgers.

The churro video did take a little longer to produce due to mid-sems and the business of our lives but it ended up working really well.

As shown by our story, people were excited to learn how to make them, especially considering they aren’t you’re a-typical dessert. Furthermore, we learnt from our mistakes and made sure all of the iteration from the sushi video by both the audience and each other was put in place.

The pasta video was a really simply, cheap one to recreate, which I think is what made it so successful. It was also an idea that came from us tweeting to followers what they would want to see next.

The savings from this was a whopping $20.94 due to the servings you can get from the homemade version. Again, we implemented the changes we had recognised in the Sushi video.

The Burger video was when we started to get into a rhythm of creating content as the process became familiar. This one was also a recommendation from twitter, which was really exciting to see as we had started receiving ideas. Again, the savings on this were huge and we received good feedback from our viewers.

Future

I think if we continue this DA we would continue improve and implement ideas, to increase viewership. Some of these things could be:

• Using a better-quality camera
• Perhaps creating a stand to use enabling the birds eye view angle and less shaky videos

The aim of this DA was to create an Instagram page and YouTube channel providing both places to buy food in Wollongong and then these meals recreated on a uni students budget.

Stage 1: Sketch prototype

To start with the prototyping stage, I started by doing some sketches of what the end product will look like in order to move on to the tangible model.

The Instagram page was to have three posts per meal with the first being of the bought product and a review of the place, the second being the bought ingredients and the third the final product with how much was saved, as shown below:

The YouTube channel took its inspiration from Buzzfeed tasty videos, which would have the video taken from above, with the ingredients up the top with no words or person in the shot, just the hands making it, as shown below:

Stage 2: Tangible prototype

We have done two posts so far, which follow the model first suggested, shown below.

Eggs Benedict

Sushi   

Stage 3: Feedback

Eggs Benedict

The feedback for the Eggs Benedict received really positive from the group of followers we have currently. The post on Instagram received a couple of positive comments and interaction with our audience. It also worked with the purpose, as the Eggs Benedict homemade was far cheaper than the bought one.

One thing that also enabled audience engagement was the use of Instagram story, whereby certain functions can include reactions to content. This means we could use it to promote content already made, ask questions and create future content.

When making the video, all three of us were there, enabling one person to cook, one person to clean and one person to film. This was done during the day so the lighting was good. One thing that I notice when filming was that I had accidentally filmed vertically, when the logical thing to do was to film horizontal. Luckily when editing the video using iMovie I was able to just flip the screen.

Sushi

The Sushi prototype didn’t work as well, as we changed our approach to its creation. In order to pump out more content, we decided to start doing them by ourselves. Ashleigh tried to recreate sushi by herself but really struggled with the filming. In addition to this the quality of the film was not as good due to the time of day.

The feedback we got on the Instagram page was also varied. Particularly as sushi is so cheap to buy for around $3.50 per roll, and the ingredients list being quite long, it wasn’t the best decision to do sushi. Particularly as our target is uni students, they want affordable and quick meals.

After trying to make a video out of the film Ashleigh did get when she recreated it, we have decided to redo the video. There were too many pieces of the cooking process missing to make up the recipe and the video quality was poor.

Stage 4: Iteration

What worked

• Producing content every three weeks
• Filming during the day and with all three members of the group
• Using Instagram story and Instagram generally as a ‘content funnel’ in order to gain more feedback, create hype for new content and to gain more audience engagement

What could be improved

• Making sure filming is done horizontally
• Choosing meals that have a difference between them i.e. Chicken Pad Thai which costs $17 at Kinn Thai in Wollongong which only costs $11 to make for two people or Gnocchi from Kneading Ruby which costs $26 and would only cost $13 to make at home
• Second prototype made for the sushi recipe to create a better quality video
• Maybe attempting to make a camera stand in order to improve the quality of film if there is only one/two of us?