The Band Age: a proposal for a crossmedia project

“The Band Age” is a project that makes us of different media platforms in telling the story of five teen-agers who are in a band. Primarily, it is a teen-age drama program that will tackle developmental issues in teen-agers.

The project is educational because common teen-age developmental issues are presented through the experiences of the characters. Viewers are expected to learn from the experiences of the characters. The program will also provide positive role models to the youth. The focus of the project is on adolescent developmental issues such as: Self-identity, Self-expression, Coping with their emotions, Intimacy, Interpersonal relationships (family, friends), Sexuality, Coping with peer pressure, Drugs and alcoholism.

Through exposure to our project we would like the target audience to:

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  Identify and understand the changes that they are going through – physically, mentally, emotionally
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  Learn how to maintain interpersonal relationships – family, friends, team, intimate
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  Realize and set their goals and aspirations and make concrete steps in attaining them
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  Identify their role in society and recognize their capacity in contributing to the betterment of society

The project will be carried out using different platforms. Specifically, they are the following:

Television. "Band Age" is a 1-hr weekly teen-age drama about 5 young people who are involved in a band.

Radio. It will be supported by a 1-hr weekly musical-talk show hosted by the band's manager.

Internet. The project will use existing free websites such as Blogspot, Multiply and YouTube because they are accessible and free. Characters from the TV show will be shown maintaining accounts with these websites and viewers can easily access them in the internet when they want to.

Really am starting with my thesis

I've created this blogspot to accomodate any thoughts I might have on the thesis I have resolved to write and finish next year. I am currently an MA Communication student at the Ateneo de Manila University here in the Philippines and am trying my darndest to finish my thesis on crossmedia storytelling.

I was introduced to crossmedia storytelling during my three month short course stint at the Radio Nederland Training Center in Hilversum, the Netherlands. We received training on producing cross-media formats for educational programming for children and our final project was a cross-media project proposal. Even before going to the Netherlands, I was already set on doing an educational program for children as my MA thesis. The final project we pitched for RNTC was Band Age, a cross-media project I've conceptualized with two other course participants from Indonesia and Sri Lanka. We have decided to create a project for the teen-age audience who are in need of guidance in terms of their personal developmental issues. I will later post snippets of my project proposal for Band Age.

For a while, I was discouraged to pursue crossmedia storytelling because it seemed too complicated, but thanks to my former student, I was inspired to go back to crossmedia when he said he could hook me up with their CEO to pitch Band Age. I thought if I could have Band Age on air, it could give my thesis a big push.

There, I've started this blog on my crossmedia thoughts. Hopefully it would give me my much needed boost to really start my thesis.

I've been reading a lot of crossmedia stuff from Christy Dena and Monique de Haas their works have really inspired me to push through with this research for my masters thesis. I've also come across this great site by Gary Hayes who talked about what audiences want. I so love them now. I still have a lot of researching and thinking to do to finally get this thesis off the ground but at least I've started somewhere. Hopefully it will get me somewhere.

Gambarimasu, fight-o!