The Global Campus Studio Project as a chance for students from across the world to collaborate.

Tuesday 30th September 2025

For our first session, we were put into break out rooms with students from Stuttgart University and from Toronto and asked to create a ‘Persona’ for a publishing company called Kosmos which is a German company that specialises in educational books for children.

Our peers turned out to be graphic designers and marketing communications students which was a change of pace from the mostly arts students we interact with.

After looking at the Kosmos website, we decided to make our persona a mother instead of a child, as parents are the ones buying this product for their children. We created the persona of a working career woman who wants her child to be academically focused while not spending too much time on screens, but also giving the child the freedom to chose what they learn or play.

We thought that she liked detective books so buys age appropriate Kosmos detective books for her son, and encourages him to build a healthy after school routine while her and her husband are away a work. When she does have time with her child, she makes an effort to include him in tasks like cooking which relates to the Kosmos cookbook.

When one of our teammates presented our work, we were complemented on how we related the persona to the company’s portfolio.

To be honest, this first session gave me a bit of cold feet especially regarding use of AI on an ethical level, but I want to try and see this through for at least another week as I feel that I might learn to help round out my skills.

As my first session, it was quite chaotic as I wasn’t fully sure what was going on. I was quite surprised to find out that my peers weren’t all necessarily artists. I am both excited and nervous to see how this project progresses as well as hopefully meet those who I was supposed to be in a group with throughout this.

Tuesday 7th October 2025

This session focused on the ways films and media are embraced by foreign audiences and what lessons we can take form that.

Ahead of this meeting, we were encouraged to read interviews from Bong Joon Ho (director of Parasite), SS Rajamouli (director of RRR) and Greg Peters (CEO of Netflix). I found Rajamouli’s interview really interesting reflection on the way Indian language films are received by Western audiences. Something he brings up is his distaste towards terms like Bollywood, Tollywood (and by extension Nollywood) as it centres America’s film industry on the world and creates the idea that everything else is version of that.

In our breakout rooms, we discussed international films we liked and films from our countries that became popular abroad such as Squid Game, Kpop Demon Hunters and Alice in Borderland. We liked that these shows have intriguing concepts that address universal themes while also staying true to their home cultures.

We also discussed TV shows from our countries that became popular internationally. For the UK I thought of shows like Adolescence and BBC Sherlock which became very popular abroad. Adolescence particularly addressed a kit of issues that are not only present in the UK but across the world. My teammates in Canada talked about shows like Turning Red and Past Lives as examples of Canadian shows that broke out. Interestingly, both go these shows also is about the experience of being Asian Canadian.

Virtual Coffee Meet

For my Virtual Coffee Meet, we organised via a WhatsApp group, I was pretty hopeful that we would find a time for us to all meet- 3 of us were Canadian, 1 British, 1 in Germany. Despite trying to organise throughout the week, at the end if the day we had to create a powerpoint to show who we were. To be honest, this disappointed me quite a bit because I feel that it’s a lot easier to connect with others who you can hear their voice and speak to them directly rather than over Canva.

Despite this, it was quite interesting reading over people’s slides. We live across oceans but we all live in multi-cultural metropolitan cities and live quite similar lives. Some of the people did degrees that I had never heard of so learning about that was new. I would really like to visit Stuttgart and Toronto (especially since one of my favourite comics is set in Toronto), and it would have been nice to make some friends that I could visit but alas!

Tuesday 21st October 2025

For this group task we had to develop a social media strategy to promote something to a different country. Today our breakout room had 3 of us- me, a Canadian and French student studying in Chile. I thought that it would be good too try to promote a French singer to an English speaking audience, following from artists such as Stromae who gained notoriety outside of their countries. Because Canada has official languages in both French and English, I asked our Canadian member whether English speaking Canadians are more likely to listen to French music but he told me that the English and French Canadians have a pretty strong divide, which I didn’t know.

Our Ideas:

• Marketing the personality, not just the music
  • Day in the life vlogs, interviews
  • Collaborating with an established English speaking artist’s audience with videos like “French food vs American food”, “British slang v French slang”
• Tiktok as the main platform for viral marketing
  • More polished Instagram feed, but also “photodumps” for authenticity
• English subtitling for songs
• Trying to still stay true to their local demographic (keeping songs still in French)
• French fashion design to create a more high fashion concept/ vibe. Plays into people’s assumptions about France
• Collaborations with other artists eg. Stromae and Coldplay, Central Cee and Freeze Corleone

Essentially, we wanted to market the personality of the artists, by introducing them to English speaking audiences via collaborations with established artists they know. We would use short form content platforms like TikTok to have more high energy, casual, chatty content while Instagram would have more polished, editorial posts as well curated “photo dumps” to make the artist seem both aspiration and relatable.

How we would measure our success:

• Measure streams from outside of Francophone countries
• Social media followers and engagement
• Viral sound/ audio on Tiktok
  • Could pay influencers to use the sound
• Getting shows or a tour abroad
  • Festival lineups

Tuesday 28th October 2025

For this week we watched an interview with the director of business at Harper Collins, who is based in Germany but works with teams across the world.

For our discussion this time we had to find cultural differences between our countries, however we quickly started realising that there were not very many differences between Toronto and London. We both on the whole value politeness, holding doors for people, profusely apologising. The main differences we found were sports culture and British people maybe being more direct when responding to feedback than Canadians.

Tuesday 4th October 2025

Ahead of this week’s GCS meeting, we went to see the Vincent Van Gogh immersive exhibition in central London. This exhibition was a mix of a traditional art gallery, projection spaces to immerse oneself in, activities (which though probably meant for children captured our attention anyway), and sets that brought Van Gogh’s paintings into a 3 dimensional life. I really enjoyed the sets, especially of Van Gogh’s bedroom, it did me feel a fraction closer to the painter and felt like stepping into his paintings. It reminded me of the Ghibli exhibition at the Art Science Museum in Singapore. I wasn’t a big fan of the big projection space, while it was beautiful I thought some of the graphic choices were extremely strange in an immersion breaking way.

Immersive experiences have become quite popular after the covid pandemic ended, our task this week was to try and create and market an immersive experience. One of my group members suggested creating something for an upcoming horror film. Remembering the talk from Nexus Studio, who are quite big on reaching beyond the confines of a screen, especially their collaboration with horror focused film studio, Blumhouse, which utilised AR technology to try create an enhanced atmosphere for VR watchers that was unique to the film they were watching as well as their room. On reflection, maybe it wasn’t very ethical to just nab their idea like that but my group mates liked it and built upon it.

Because the VR idea was something that could be best in your own home/ solo, we branched out to ideas that were more community focused. We landed on escape rooms, which are both very popular and also on brand for a horror film integration.

Overview on Global Campus Studio

These classes were overall quite interesting as they covered a lot of topics that wouldn’t generally be covered in an animation class, especially things to do with marketing in a digital age. It challenged me to think about problems and audiences in a way that I traditionally would not have. Topics such as film funding, crowd funding and interactive experiences were things that were relevant to me and shone a lot of light on the projects. Unfortunately, I did find my engagement in GCS going down as more of my groupmates failed to show up to sessions which was a shame because I was initially excited to participate in things like the Virtual Coffee Meet so I could get know new people and potentially make new connections. If I were to do this again, I would probably try to make more of an effort to reach out to my groupmates out of the session or to bring more energy to the work so it might rub off on others instead of getting me down.