Express Lane: 140 or less

In its core, Twitter is just another social networking site. It’s mostly full of snapchat dog filter photos and more spam accounts than you could ever even imagine. Yet it has become more powerful than we could have ever imagined and all with only 140 characters or less which is strangely #impressive. Twitter can expose injustice, incite and document riots and of course sell hamburgers.

The internet is an overloaded tsunami of information that are all competing for your customer’s attention span. Suddenly your online presence is a course for concern, you have to utilize every social avenue in its correct form. Twitter is a great way to communicate with your customer base directly with tweets and retweets. The 140 or less character count causes your thoughts to have to be extremely concise and ends up with some very interesting tweets. Several tweets have been testing the waters on what interacting on twitter really means. Like any other marketing social media marketing means you have to appeal to your target audience and given that twitter is generally millennials most companies try to appeal to them. But given that the team behind the literal twitter handle are speaking for an entire company or corporation how much freedom you have when tweeting.

Like Wendy’s for example has a very interesting approach to social media and has been ‘roasting’ people absolutely ‘savagely’. The international fast food chain set out to make waves and get noticed online, almost nobody would have noticed if they just tweeted pictures of hamburgers with #freshneverfrozen. The team running the page seem to tweet at their leisure always with Wendy’s promotion as their main goal but the way they get there is very interesting. But what the most interesting is their responses to the tweets they get. It’s become an interesting twitter trend to tweet at @Wendy’s and ask them what to get at Burger King or McDonalds and they always have very interesting responses which is usually a witty response or a picture of trash can to symbolize a McDonalds. At first it seems very unprofessional and very risky yet it’s working. Wendy’s has gained legendary twitter status in a short time, just from these savage roastings.

However, Twitter can of course be utilized to do much more important things then sell hamburgers though. Twitter has been used by people to document important events all over the world giving us unfiltered unedited chunks of what is really happening in the world. When tragedy struck Boston during the Boston Bombing Twitter was the first to know about and got exclusive coverage until major news outlets covered. Within minutes of it happening people knew what had happened and family members knew who was safe. When Syria was under attack, its citizens used twitter to show us the realness of the tragedies that were happening. It was graphic and it was raw but it was real nothing was sugarcoated.

With Twitter being seemingly ubiquitous it’s one of the best ways to communicate with the masses. When incidents like the United Airlines incident footage of the attack was all over the internet. Twitter was used to directly spread information and footage of what happened and it had a direct influence on UA. Their stock immediately dropped an insane amount, before the days of the internet this incident would have never take off the way it did and would have most likely been swept right under the rug.

When 45 for some reason decided to respond to Syria’s chemical attacks with a hellfire of bombs which would kill innocent civilians it made rounds all over twitter. It’s impossible to not see 45 trending on twitter because that’s his favorite place to be. There was a direct feed of Americans mostly disagreeing with the attack but a few in support of, but also contact with people all over the world and how they responded to violence. It’s always helpful to get the opinion of the people outside of American viewpoint to see how vastly different we work as a country. Most importantly we got the viewpoint of Syrians and we got to hear and see that our actions have consequences, we could see the real human cost of our actions.

Contrastingly when Gov. Cuomo and Sen. Sanders passed their NYS free college bill we all got the inside scoop from twitter. People all over the web celebrated this victory for New York Students online. Yet while the bill is a great win there were some flaws and holes poked in it on twitter. In a day and age where it so easy to simply block people we don’t agree with, we really must make an attempt not to because we are really starting to devalue contrasting opinions, and that’s quite a misstep.

I chose to follow a diverse palate of ‘tweeters’ and chose Sen. Bernie Sanders, Arby’s and angry Bill O’Reilly prodigy Tomi Lahren. I chose sanders because during the primary election he was the one I believed in and social media was the way his political revolution spread. When major news outlets only focused on corporate shrills Trump and Hillary the bare minimum was shined on Senator Sanders so his momentum was made online and most of it was done by his voters and supporters. Whether it was groups being set up or fundraising events you were getting invites too it was all done online.

I followed Arby’s because they are doing a tremendous job with their social media marketing and have found tremendous success from it. As someone who someday hopes to run a social media campaign I found their bold attempt to appeal to a very specific audience as absolutely genius. Lastly, I followed Lahren as her political opinions and her show of blonde yelling never ceases to anger me. She’s controversial and she makes people mad and she knows that and she owns it.   

Twitter is a very unique experience because it is so limited and causes you to have to be so concise and precise at all times. It completely limits your writing style and really causes you to have to think outside the box. Writing a tweet that is informative and interesting at the same time is a surprisingly big feat to accomplish. I have a much bigger appreciation for the people who get paid to tweet all day long, it’s tough out there.

  

The Poster Child for Murphy's Law

Murphy’s Law states that “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” Always keep this in mind and do your best to prepare for it, which is of course much easier said than done.

The topic at hand was to create two videos both based on the same intentionally ambiguous topic. The first one touched on your personality and the second a collective effort of the group where your individual ideas were collected and displayed together under the same ambiguous umbrella. Murphy however paid the class a personal visit for this project at the expense of the students.

Initially the idea proposed and worked on for the first half of production of the video proved to be unsuitable given the resources we had. Instead of focusing on the idea given the group essentially wrote the pilot script for a television drama. While everyone in the group was vocally supportive of the original pitched pregnancy narrative it was simply out of reach with our limited production capabilities time and length constraints, the inability to speak throughout and a budget of exactly zero dollars and zero cents. While other groups were rounding home plate on their videos ours had to be brought back to the drawing table. This became the first of many interruptions the group faced in creating the final mastercut of the film “Time Flies”.

Ultimately after a weekend of group chatting the decision was made to create a video that was just an ambiguous representation of how something objective and undaunting such as the passage of time is so unique and subjective to every single person. Still the production capturing of these videos was a bit difficult. When filming the personal shot several homemade camera mounts had to be made in order to create the proper angles and steadiness that are needed with a production team of one single person who spent a great deal of that time onscreen. Many scenes had to be reshot over and over and over again as the phone being used to film would continuously fall over, run out of storage space or simply force close out of the camera during the middle of a shot. In every plan that was set up for creating this project found one or more ways to go haywire. After production finished it turned out those problems were only the tip of the iceberg based on the immense amount of technical problems we would then run into.

To identify a possible root of the problem was the fact that Apple’s interface on all their hardware is purposely built to be unique to their competitors like Microsoft. That’s objectively how they create their products their brand and even the way they market themselves. That said if someone has spent their life using Microsoft computers almost exclusively may find an iMac to be slightly difficult to navigate. If you’re Apple illiterate in any way, you will have to get your feet wet...before you really hit the ground running (or swimming).

It became a running theme that when somebody in the group was using iMovie single files or entire finished videos would simply vanish into thin air before transference was even thought of. This tragic phenomenon coupled with the unpredictable nature of the weather in Buffalo put post production way behind schedule. Entire class periods became dedicated to editing, searching and pulling our own hair out. Individual footage would present one minute only one computer and not another and then only the other and then nowhere. Fragmentation became a big problem as well when only bits and pieces of footage would be available for some reason. So the flash drive would be reinserted to get all of the footage put back in and once again only fragments were available.

Moving further into post music became an unseen catastrophe, as mentioned previously there was a set budget of zero dollars and zero cents. This meant that buying bargain bin songs off iTunes was out of the question. Majority of the group after lots of trial and error inexplicitly obtained their music from alternative sources that are still unknown. However almost an entire class period was devoted to first finding a suitable song and then to the obtaining of it.  1/3 of the group decided to skip that whole mess entirely and used songs solely found in the iMovie and GarageBand sound effect library which didn’t have any downloading involved and all the songs were Creative Commons royalty free music. To its credit the free sound effect library was rather extensive as easily held 200+ sounds and short song clips.   

The biggest technical issue faced in putting the groups full length together was that of transference. Getting our physical copies of the individual videos onto one computer to create one official mastercut. It’s still shrouded in mystery whether the issue was simply an iMovie issue or a flash drive issue but there was a communication that was lacking from one computer to the flash-drive to the mastercut computer. Even if the files were all on the master computer they were somehow inaccessible and thusly unusable. Interestingly this was not an issue of amateurization as even when a professional spent the better half of 11:00-12:50 trying to help transfer the files they were still inaccessible. A common occurrence was that the entire group’s iMovie Library and iMovie Theater would be put onto the flash-drive ready to be open in the master computer and the Library and Theater both would be registered as being there in iMovie and therefore accessible from the computer but were for some reason greyed out. The grey font of death rendered the footage unusable until this afternoon when everything went according to plan.

Ultimately video can be much more concise in conveying a message given the fact that it’s the combination of every form of art and expression that preceded it. With that in mind the topic of time was able to be explored much more thoroughly in this medium.