“Happiness is a state of mind. It’s just according to the way you look at things.” – Walt Disney
This is one of my favorite quotes by Disney, it tells you that there’s always something brighter to look at. You can find happiness in the smallest of things, your mother’s smile, the flowers fluttering in the wind, or even the in the first rays of a sunrise you can always find happiness if you look for it. Disney in itself has always been a very important part of my life, as a child I would immerse myself into Disney movies and shows to look for my versions of happiness. As a little girl, I was obsessed with the ideas of fantastic magical worlds that Disney took me to, I would watch these movies over and over again to understand the world it was set in. I would look and latch on to every new detail and wonder why things weren’t the same in the real world, in my reality. Over and above that, I was completely obsessed with the Disney princesses and happy endings, they gave me a great sense of comfort, even as a child I knew that not everything was going to work out the way I wanted it to, my mom had a very popular streak of saying no to me. I associate Disney with a lot of feelings, mostly I look back and think about it with feelings of comfort and hope, every bad day of mine would end with a Disney movie to try and make me feel better, so when thinking about what to do for the digital artefact, I had the fleeting thought of suggesting something to do with Disney or animated features to Irene. Both of us immediately jumped onto the idea of it since we shared an interest in it and thought it would be the best thing to do. From there we had to decide what niche of audience we wanted to target and what our ‘problem’ was exactly.
After a lot of brainstorming and weighing down the pros and cons with each other, we decided that we would base the digital artefact around Disney music. During our discussions we realized that not many people are aware of the stories and fairy tales that most of the Disney movies are inspired off of, so we decided that we would both sing and also spread awareness among Disney fans of what their favorite Disney movies truly are, the real fairy tales and myths that made them up. We decided on singing because the both of us have a very keen interest in music and we also realized that our DA did not have a ‘hook’ of sorts to bring footfall to our account.
Working on a project like this taught me many things, we’ve been producing and experimenting with digital artefacts for quite a few trimesters in university, but I have never gone through with an idea that actually corresponded to a hobby or deep rooted interest of mine. At first, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go through with it since I’ve always been a bit conscious of singing in public, but with my colleague, Irene’s support I gained confidence and made up my mind. I really wanted to do it, and I was actually excited. We decided to name our project ‘Walt’s Workshop’, we used this name as this effectively portrayed the sentiment behind our project; it was based on Disney and essentially our small workshop since we were creating things that revolve
As for the next step of the project, we had to decide what kind of content we would be creating, would they be longer videos or shorter ones, and what platform we wanted to utilize to share these videos. We ended up deciding to use Instagram and TikTok, as they had the perfect video formats for the kind of content we wanted to post, short videos. As for our target audience, we realized that the content that we wanted to create and share would not be suitable for a younger audience and ended up narrowing down our niche to Disney fans who enjoy music and listening to conspiracy theories/untold stories within the area of Disney. So our age groups are young adults/ adults in the range of 18 to 28 years old. Since the concept of our project is to be both informative and entertaining, we had to carry out research of our own to try and understand what our audience wants to see, and to achieve this we reached towards Reddit to observe the kind of movies and music that they are currently enjoying or interested in. My time on Reddit was purely on an observational and ‘note-taking’ basis, during this period I was on the subreddits, r/disneymusic, r/disneymovies, and r/disney. I noticed that a lot of the Redditors were interested in covers of Disney songs and were actively discussing theories and that made us realize that we were on the right track.
We had to do quite a bit of our own research, regarding the stories them selves. We started off by diving into the question of who’s fairy tales are these in the first place? As said by (Robert, M., & Powell, W. L.,1969) “In undertaking to collect, transcribe and publish the popular tales whose tradition was still alive in the German states at their time, the Grimm Brothers were scarcely thinking of more than preserving them from oblivion before their decline became irremediable.” they worked tirelessly to preserve their culture through these tales.
At first, we thought that all of these stories came from the Grimm Brothers’ collection of fairy tales, but we were wrong. Although a huge sum of the stories do indeed come from the Grimm fairy tales, but we also see the names of Hans Christian Anderson and Charles Perrault mentioned constantly as inspiration. The Brothers Grimm were scholars and academics who had a particular interest in German Folk tales and mythology, so they dedicated most of their time and energy to going to German villages and localities to learn and document their local stories and tales. The stories themselves were not at all suitable for the younger audiences, rather they were extremely gory and violent and dealt with very heavy and dark themes. To find the stories themselves, was an easy feat. I found a website ‘World of Tales’ that contained a collection of fairy tales by The Brother’s Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Charles Perrault, and many more authors.
Disney used these stories and turned them into child friendly fairy tales that preached about love, hope, and belonging while the reality of it was quite different, for example, The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson was a very dark story, the mermaid went through various trials and tribulations to get to her Prince, but in the end finds him married to another woman. As an ultimatum from the sea witch, she has to kill the prince in order to live, but she cannot go through with it so she ends up killing herself instead. This is unlike the Disney version of the story, wherein Ariel gets her Prince and a happily ever after.
After conducting our research, we decided that the first post we wanted to make was on the story of Tangled. This movie was inspired by ‘Rapunzel’ by the Brothers Grimm, we decided to go with this movie as it is a fan favorite and we would be able to try and capture an audience. The format of our posts would be such that the first upload would contain a cover of the movie we will be talking about that week, since the first week was Tangled, we chose the song ‘Healing Incantation’ and the following post was a narration of the ‘True Story’ of Rapunzel. We did this for three weeks, with the movies ‘The Little Mermaid’ and ‘Cinderella’. We were initially going to promote and conduct our Digital Artefact on Instagram and TikTok but saw that our TikTok was getting no engagement whatsoever, so we decided to stop using it as a platform and focus on Instagram alone. The reason we were pretty adamant on Instagram is that, they are currently boosting reels and their reach, so we would be able to get to a larger audience rather than on TikTok which is currently so saturated with content, that it’s either a hit or a complete miss.
Honestly, we faced a lot of difficulties in staying consistent with our posting, we had planned to stay active on our stories alongside the normal feed posts and reels that we would be posting but with our schedules and unforeseen circumstances, we were unable to follow through with our initial plans. This was our biggest downfall and the reason that we lost out on so much engagement, just because of the fact that we were not active on our stories either. We thought that if we posted according to our posting schedule, we would be able to gain around the same number of views and likes each time but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Overall, we realized that posting after 7 pm on weekends gets us a decent number of views but it still was way less than what we expected.
We also found it challenging to film and create our content together since we had clashing schedules and were unable to meet up, we decided to segregate our responsibilities and, split the work in half. So, every week each of us would handle the production and upload of one video after deciding what movie we wanted to focus on for the week. We decided to alternate between the narrative videos and the singing videos each week so that the both of us would have some sort of experience handling both.
As for the analytics of it all, we are currently at 46 followers, this is a far cry from what our aim was but we realize that it is because of our inconsistency in being active and engaged with our audiences. Our account reached a total of Our best performing reel is the narration of the ‘True Story’ of Tangled, the reel got 2,770 views and 35 likes. Following that was the cover of ‘Part of Your world’ from The Little Mermaid, the reel got 1,295 views and 47 likes as well as 8 shares. And that was followed by the ‘A Dream is a Wish your Heart Makes’ cover from Cinderella which garnered 498 views and 24 likes. Through the course of this digital artefact, we ended up reaching 4,704 accounts out of which the majority of them were non-followers (4,694) and only 10 of them were our followers. We engaged with a total of 111 accounts in the form of comments and shares on our content.
All in all, I think that the digital artefact would have been able to gain a lot more views and had potential if we were able to post more consistently and generally have been on active on our Instagram stories and tried to engage with our followers more.
Instagram – @walts.workshop
References :
- Robert, M., & Powell, W. L. (1969). The Grimm Brothers. Yale French Studies, 43, 44–56. https://doi.org/10.2307/2929635
2. Worldoftales.com. (2022). World of Tales – Stories for children, folktales, fairy tales, and fables from around the world! Available at: https://www.worldoftales.com/#gsc.tab=0.
My BCM workshop 