I was first approached by the event organisers with this opportunity to conceptualise and lead the Digital Experience for Supernova, which was a smaller-scale rock concert on campus, last held in 2015.
The Digital Experience team we set up grew to include Design, Marketing, Event Coverage and NFT sub-teams of more than 16 people. As this project was a collaboration between 5 organisations, I also assisted in liaising with multiple stakeholders from both student and staff levels, marking my first foray into project management.

Enjoy the Aftermovie shot and edited by the Event Coverage team or read on to find out how we pulled this off.

Because this event was a collaboration between several different parties, it was important to reach an agreement on what we expected of it and what it would stand for. As such, I facilitated a branding workshop with representatives from four student groups on themes we had in mind for the event. The session concluded with a majority vote on the theme Ignite.

Ignite stands for a burning rebirth as the event is the first physical campus life event after two years of Zoom university online. It also brings to mindvisuals ofblazing sunsets we see over UTown Green on most evenings, especially fitting for the end of summer break.

As with most music festivals, Supernova was to have its own festival merchandise as well. After extensive discussions on logistics, design and marketing, we scoped our range down to T-shirts, tote bags, drybags, and card holders. Most of the merch was designed by yours truly but we also engaged a designer to help.
When the date drew closer, we also published an Event Guide in the form of a website, containing all the key essentials a festivalgoer would want to know. This website is still live and accessible as of 11 Feb 2024. (best viewed on mobile)

A fascinating concept we were keen to try out at this event was NFTs but because it was not a ticketed event, we could not use them as tickets like they usually are. Due to a shortage of time, it wound up as an added bonus for customers who bought a particular bundle of merchandise including food and drink coupons.
To build hype and excitement for the event, we also made them evolve over time, from a cube to exploding on the day itself to reveal the object encased.
If I were to do this over, I would have allocated manpower specifically to focus on this early as our small team was stretched thin trying to deliver this in addition to juggling other responsibilities for this project.

We ran campaigns on several different external channels including the Freshman Orientation Programme microsite, Office of Student Affairs Instagram, and NUSSU Instagram. We opted to establish our own Instagram page and Telegram channel in order to post more freely without the scheduling restrictions from other channels. These were supplemented by shares and mentions by affiliated organisations' social media pages as well.
We engaged a marketer to develop our marketing strategy including key content pillars like Educate, Engage and Empower. He was in charge of conceptualizing the posts before I would design the visuals for the copywriter to caption.

Because we started official marketing efforts late (less than a month before the event), we had a limited runway to build up hype and traction. But for the time we had, the volume of engagement we received was decent as seen from the analytics above. For future events, I would definitely begin event planning much earlier in advance to allow ample time for marketing, especially in our situation where we did not inherit a previously established page and had to build a following from scratch.

As a music festival celebrating homegrown talents, we wanted to feature our lineup prominently in our marketing. However, being student groups, few of them had well-taken promotional shots of themselves.
As such we organised a photo shoot for them, coordinated and shot by the Lead Photographer & Videographer on the team. I was responsible for editing the images in line with our branding to be social media-ready.

This project has been an absolute blast to work on, being my first foray into project management on this level. Time was not on our side and we struggled a fair bit with the amount of work to be done, especially liaising across the different committees and collaborator organisations. But it was all worth it seeing the large turnout on the day itself and hearing how much fun people had. I consider it a privilege to have been part of this team and to create such a memorable university experience for fellow students.