Since my last idea for my major project, I received some criticism and thought a lot about how to improve it. The idea of traveling around the world to underrated cities and places is not boring, but it seems to be lacking a USP. There are already a lot of content creators that make their living by blogging their traveling experiences, especially on YouTube. So my task was to further specify my idea and find more of a niche.

I still want to stick to my old ideas of traveling and exploring, but I´d like to do a kind of unusual travel guide. The idea is to research lost places, like old abandoned buildings or city parts and present them in the form of a web series. Doing this I want to focus more on the history of these place, rather than just showing them. Every lost place has a history. And by researching this history you can often learn a lot about why it was built, what it was used for, how it got abandoned and maybe even how it was reused and renovated in an impressing kind of way. All of these stories combined tells you a lot about the city it is in.

For example, in my hometown Hanover, there is an old bunker from world war 2, right underneath the central station. During my research, I was surprised by the fact that I, as a city resident have never even heard of it. The bunker has huge dimensions, with originally holding 2100 people. But the bunker was split while building a tunnel with shops after the war. Now being split in half, one part was reused by the German train company to build a backup control center, controlling all of the trains in Lower Saxony. The other half was kept in its original form but also has some interesting stories, like for example being the emergency night shelter for 400 Mexican football fans who missed their train after a world cup game in 2006.

Research

A lot of my production and business related research will not dramatically differ from my old idea. I will still have to care about all of the production aspects myself and create a journalistically valuable piece of entertainment. Also, the audience and the commissioners will stay similar. In my topic-related research, I will have to speak to people who worked at the lost places at the time, this would be the best kind of information source. Also, I will need to do plenty of research regarding the history and potential reuse of lost places, including how to present it in an entertaining style.