Viral Man: The Making Of – Part 4

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With a clear idea of what our Swine Flu campaign would involve, Touching Man was well on his way to becoming a reality. In the last entry, I wrote about how we had developed a few ideas for what he should look like. In this entry, Touching Man finally makes an appearance. Unfortunately, a lot of the photos that I had for this entry were deleted when I lost a significant amount of my hard drive a few weeks ago and so it’s not as populated with photos as it should be. I apologise for this!

Making Touching Man’s costume

At the end of the previous week, I had spent an hour or two searching online for a stripey green and black jumper or tshirt for Touching Man’s costumes. It’s surprisingly hard to find that combination of colours. Green and white, no problem. Green and black, impossible. Luckily however, eBay came to our rescue and I placed an order for this jumper, which was exactly what I had imagined his top should look like.

We also had to consider what the bottom half of Touching Man should look like. It couldn’t take away from the main focus of his stripey top and with that in mind, we decided on some black jeans and for his shoes, some green flat shoes.

Also at the end of last week, we had purchased some long, neon green tubes for Touching Man’s spikes. They would be cut to size and slotted into the back of the jumper. However, because the jumper cost nearly £20, we didn’t want to go to the trouble of cutting it up only for it to not work and so we decided to buy a cheap £3 tshirt to test it on first.

To make our spikes, we began by cutting them down to 10cm tall. To keep them secure once in the back of the tshirt, we used some thick, sticky paper to place on the inside of the tshirt, before cutting a hole through it and the tshirt, making a slit for the spike, which held it in place quite well.

In addition to the spikes, we had also bought a pack of pegs which we then spraypainted green. We experimented with using the pegs instead of the larger, plastic tubes for spikes and found that the plastic tubes were far more visually appealing than smaller pegs and so we scrapped the pegs altogether. As I said at the beginning of this post, I did have lots of photos of the development process which were unfortunately corrupted when I lost a lot of my data a few weeks ago.

Since it was to be me who would be dressing up as Touching Man, I put the tshirt on and walked around while the spikes were in the back, seeing if they would stay securely in place. For the most part they did, which was good news. For the most part, we had succeed in developing most of Touching Man’s costume. There was one last thing we had to find: A wig.

The Wig

I personally didn’t have any set ideas about what Touching Man’s wig should look like nor did I quite know where we might find one. Luckily, Will and Jerry did and we went searching. Most of the wigs were quite normal and just not flamboyant enough to Touching Man’s personality and then Will spotted the most flamboyant wig we had seen. Wild, blonde with subtle green streaks. Admittedly (and in retrospect wrongly!) I wasn’t very keen on the wig. I didn’t think it was the right choice, but I didn’t know what the right choice was. I was hesitant about buying it but I reluctantly did so in the hope that perhaps it would look ok once it was with the rest of the costume.

The Makeup

On Tuesday, the jumper came and it was spiked-up in a similar way to the tshirt. On Wednesday, it was time to finally try the makeup on along with the costume. I wasn’t looking forward to trying it as I knew that it may be difficult to get off.

Me, Hannah and Will found a quiet room and while they waited outside, I changed into my black jeans, green shoes and stripey top, before coming back in to begin the facepainting, with Hannah taking charge of the small white pad and filling it with green makeup and then applying it to my face. 20 minutes later, my whole face was green. It was surreal to see myself no longer skin-coloured.

I then put the wig on and all of us agreed that the costume, wig and facepaint were a perfect choice. My earlier apprehensions about the wig were now gone, after seeing myself in a few photos that we took at the time. Again, I do apologise but I no longer have them.

I only had the makeup on for 15 minutes as it was only to do a ‘screen test’ of sorts. Getting it off proved to be much harder than putting it on, with both Will and Hannah using plenty of facewipes to get rid of the excess, leaving me a strange shade of orange. In order to get the rest off, I retreated to the toilets, going via the library reception and greeted with some understandably strange looks. Once in the toilets, I spent a good ten or fifteen minutes trying to get my face back to its original colour but didn’t actually succeed. In the end, I got as much as I could off and then the rest in the shower once at home.

Filming

The next day, it was time to begin the filming of our short videos. We had already organised some of the storyboards and this helped us to map out our filming schedule for the day. Again, Hannah took on her makeup assistant role and turned me green and then for the rest of the day, we filmed. It was a really fun experience filming although frustrating as well. Although we had done our best to make sure that the spikes were secure in the back of the jumper, because I was moving around so much, they kept falling out while filming. It meant having to cut and redo the scene, adding time onto the filming and we were already under a very tight schedule. This was in addition to Will and Jerry going down to London later on in the day for a week and so no further filming could be done until they were back.

By the end of the day, we had managed to get roughly 60% of the videos completed, with the rest needing to be completed when Will and Jerry were back.

Touching Man’s First Photoshoot

On Friday, Hannah and I travelled from Chester’s Warrington campus to Kingsway, the university’s dedicated arts campus. Warrington campus unfortunately did not have its own photography studio and because we needed to produce a poster campaign, it was important that the photos looked professional. Neither myself or Hannah are trained photographers so it proved difficult to set up some good shots, but we perservered.

Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.

Some of the photos, as you can see from above are a little dark because we didn’t get the settings or lighting as good as it should have been. In other cases though, as with the third photo above, although it’s not white, it does create a nice background and this particular image ending up being internally used to promote the campaign.

Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.
Some of the unmodified photos we took.

As you can see from the above three photos, the studio isn’t particularly huge, but when the photo is cropped to the bounds of the background paper, the photo suddenly feels much bigger.

In the second of the three photos above, you’ll see that I’m hiding behind the paper. One of the assets that we wanted to design for the campaign was desktop wallpaper, which would be placed on all of the library computers. However, I didn’t want Touching Man to dominate the wallpaper but instead simply ‘infect’ it by occupying a small, but noticable space on it. You’ll see what I mean a little more clearly when I make the project live with all of its assets.

Touching Man is Touching Man not because I personally play the character but rather, because he has a very defined personality and appearance including expressions. Take this shot for example:

The character loses all personality when he doesn't smile.
The character loses all personality when he doesn't smile.

This is one of the test photos where I’m not posing. Notice how with a lack of emotion, all the fun of the character disappears. It was important to retain this crazy, manic look in all of the photos. And retaining such an expression over the course of a five hour photoshoot is quite tiring!

As I had found out already, taking the makeup off proved to be a very timeconsuming process. In fact, although we finished the photoshoot at around 6:30pm, it wasn’t until 7pm that I felt comfortable enough to jump on a train home with the least amount of makeup left on me!

In total, Hannah and I took just under 100 photos. We both kept a copy and over the weekend, I began to see if I could get them to work in a poster campaign. However, as already mentioned, many of the photos that we took weren’t good enough to use and because of this, I decided that a second photoshoot was necessary.

This week had been quite productive and a lot of fun. We had developed Touching Man’s costume, shot some of our short videos and had a photoshoot. Next week would be the penultimate week of our project and it would be a big one.

In the next entry: Two more photoshoots, the unveiling of Touching Man and…a name change?

Viral Man: The Making Of – Part 3

viralmanthemakingof

In the previous Making Of entry, I wrote about how we had come to rest on our chosen Swine Flu campaign – Touching Man. You’ll notice that I keep calling the campaign “Touching Man” and not “Viral Man”. There’s a reason for this, which will be explained further on. In this entry, I’ll be writing about our efforts to come up with a unique look for the character and how he’d appear in videos.

Mini videos

Through our research in the first week of the project, we discovered that there were seven or eight main symptoms for Swine Flu and we wanted people to see Touching Man giving his victims these symptoms as separate videos. So, we wanted a video for sneezing, one for coughing, headaches, tiredness and others. However, because the campaign was about defeating Touching Man, these videos on their own wouldn’t work. It would look like he was winning. To counterbalance we decided that an identical set of videos would be filmed but with a twist – The ending would be different to each one. Essentially, video A would show Touching Man winning, while video B would show him losing.

Storyboards for the short adverts.
Storyboards for the short adverts.

My drawing skills aren’t the best, as you can see above, but Monday was spent developing a range of storyboards for all 12-14 videos that we wanted to produce. Because these would be in the style of adverts, we knew that they wouldn’t be more than 15 seconds long, which meant that we had to think of something suitable and funny that could be conveyed to the viewer in a small amount of time. Not only that, but we then had to think of an alternate ending for each one. Some of the videos proved difficult to think of endings for, while others seemed to make complete sense.

The frustrations of Flash

In addition to the videos, the committee had expressed their interest in developing a screensaver which could then be used on all University computers. We were really interested in doing this too but our downfall was that out of all four of us, none of us knew an extensive amount of ActionScript for Flash. Without this knowledge, the task of building a screensaver proved frustrating to say that least.

What we wanted was quite simple in theory. We wanted multiple spikey virus balls to continuously bounce off the edge of the screen and each other. We wanted to be able to set the speed, size and collision detection on each of the balls.

Because none of us knew much about ActionScript, we had to rely on finding and cannibalising various scripts found online, but none did quite as we wanted. Having no real experience with ActionScript, it proved to be a serious challenge. At times, we got close to a solution, but it just wasn’t quite polished enough to work. After two days of trying, I felt that it wasn’t worth carrying on and had to unfortunately scrap the idea.

The website

Part of the Touching Man campaign included a website to house all of the supporting elements such as a poster campaign and somewhere to house the short videos that we’d be filming. This would not only take up a lot of time on the project, but the responsibility of designing and coding it would have to fall to one person and one person only because it would be quite hard to work collaboratively on a site that was constantly being updated at two ends. I had already volunteered to take on the responsibility of designing the site and had also started a few sketches of what the site could look like.

Possible website to house all assets.
Possible website to house all assets.

My Flash skills aren’t fantastic, as already described, but I knew that in order to attract people to it and actually use it, the site must be built in Flash. It needed lots of transitions and animation to help immerse the user in Touching Man’s world. However, because we didn’t actually have any content for the site yet, it meant that we couldn’t even start work on it until the last few days.

miniexhibition2
Speaking with the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu.

On July 30th, we stopped work on the campaign to help out with welcoming the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu to the university to open a new building. I’ve already written about that particular day here so I won’t write about it again, only to say that it was a pleasure meeting him as he was a really nice man.

Turning the spikey balls into a reality

From the outset of the campaign, we were really keen to have something physical that we could give to new students that would remind them about the campaign. Because the Swine Flu virus is shaped like a sphere with spikes, we thought this would make a great toy or keychain. We began to research into companies who offered anything along the lines of what we wanted, going so far as to open up real time conversations with suppliers in China via Alibaba. There were one or two companies that said they had what we needed, but because of the language barrier, I didn’t feel confident enough to place an order with them.

Instead, earlier research had found an American company that stocked exactly what we needed. Rhode Island Novelty offered a set of eight different coloured spikey ball keychains and after a few emails back and forth, we managed to work out a great bulk price for 2,500 of them – the number of new students that would be joining the university. They proved to be really helpful in supplying us what we wanted. The order was placed and would arrive within a few days, all the way from America. I do wonder if they’d had such a large order for keychains before!

Touching Man’s costume

The last thing we sorted out for the week was what Touching Man would be wearing for his costume. We had decided that he would definitely need some sort of spikes and that he would definitely be green. I personally had envisaged him with some sort of shell on his back and was really curious to see if we could find something that would fit that vision. So, with that in mind, we took a trip to the local Homebase!

We visited a number of shops including a gardening store, pet store and a general convenience store to find anything we could use to make the costume. In particular, we were looking for things to attach spikes to and indeed things to make spikes from.

A few examples of spikey textures.
A few examples of spikey textures.
Our chosen spikes
Our chosen spikes.

Above are just some of the things that we found. We had already set ourselves a budget of less than £100 to buy everything we needed for the costume (though we had a budget of three times that) and so using every day items and colourful toys like above proved to be a good cost-saving idea. Similarly, we also looked at these items too:

A possible shell for Touching Man's back.
A possible shell for Touching Man's back.
A possible shell for Touching Man's back.
A possible shell for Touching Man's back.
More ideas for Touching Man's spikes.
More ideas for Touching Man's spikes.
Interesting floor graphics.
Interesting floor graphics.

Although I was quite intent on buying some sort of shell for Touching Man, most of the stuff that we found was either too heavy or simply not usable. Additionally, both Will and Jerry said that they didn’t feel a shell was necessary. After a lot of persuasion, I sided with them and decided against the shell idea, but we picked up 12 of the long, green, neon sticks that you can see above. It was quite funny taking them to the counter. I don’t think people buy these things in bulk.

In addition to the above things, we also took a trip to Hobbycraft to buy some green facepaint, pegs, spraypaint (to paint the pegs), green felt and lots of other green things in general. In just a few days, Touching Man would be making his first appearance…

In the next entry: The birth of Touching Man and his first public appearances.

Viral Man: The Making Of – Part 2

viralmanthemakingof

In the last post, I wrote about how our design team was formed and how we had spent two days brainstorming ideas for our first presentation the following Thursday. In this post, I want to tell you about how we arrived at the Viral Man idea.

One of the good things about writing about how Viral Man was formed is that over the course of the 5 weeks, I took some time to fill in a daily activity report. It gave a brief overview of what the team had done that day. It’s amazing how much information you can forget if you don’t write it down!

Fleshing out ideas

Having had a very short week the week before because we started on a Thursday, we had a lot to do before the coming Thursday. Although we had written down lots of great ideas, we still didn’t have an overall plan for how each of these ideas would be tied together. They didn’t have much of a theme running through them. In order to present something to the committee of people responsible for approving the project, I felt it was necessary to narrow the ideas down to three completely different campaigns. In order to do this, I decided to fall back on something which I swore I would never use again once I had finished university – an Initial Response Map (IRM).

A few more ideas.
A few more ideas.

An Initial Response Map as it suggests, is a designer’s initial ‘reply’ to the brief that they’ve been given. It shows that they understand what has been asked of them, that they have done initial research into the problem and ideally, show that they have enough information to present the client with three different ideas which can then be taken forward. There’s nothing stopping two ideas being mixed together, but presenting all three to a client is important so that they client can then choose how to proceed. An IRM shows the client that the designer is competent and on the same level.

I had grown to hate IRMs because I always felt that they weren’t as useful as promoted in university. I felt that there was too much emphasis on gathering research, rather than focusing on any ideas that I already had. Whether this is actually true or not, it’s how I felt at the time. However, with a presentation due in four days time, I decided to fall back on it.

Over the course of Monday, Hannah, Jerry, Will and myself sifted through the many ideas that we had and came up with three strong themes that had potential. They were:

  • Quarantine
  • Touching Man
  • Pick-up Lines

Quarantine: A brief overview

This campaign centred around inviting students to be a part of the campaign via social networking, a website and a print campaign. “Quarantine” focused on a fictional student diagnosed with Swine Flu, who had been locked in their room by their friends to prevent him from infecting everyone else. On a special flash-based website, visitors could see the trapped student via CCTV which his friends had installed to monitor his condition. Users would be able to click various things around the room and have the student interact with them.

This idea was influenced by the likes of Subservient Chicken, which allows users to type in a command and watch as a man in a chicken suit does as they ask.

In addition to the website, the campaign would be supported by a poster campaign, inviting users to visit the site and help the student escape. In addition to the poster campaign, special post-it notes would be stuck around campus with unique codes. When a user enters a code into the website, the student does something new. The post-it note idea came about via my own post-it note project which proved successful.

Touching Man: A brief overview

Touching Man centred around a real life characterisation of Swine Flu. By turning Swine Flu into a real, live person, it would give Swine Flu a voice and its own personality. Touching Man would take pleasure from infecting people with Swine Flu by simply touching them. The public would not be able to see him as he crept about, but would exhibit symptoms of Swine Flu right after Touching Man had touched them.

The campaign would be supported by a website and poster campaign, along with a social networking presence on Facebook.

This idea was influenced by The Wind, a fantastic film made for Epuron, a German energy company. It works because you instantly feel some sort of human connection with the character, even though the character is portraying something which has no human qualities.

Pick-Up Lines: A brief overview

This campaign was all about tongue-in-cheek innunendo and put the focus on getting students to use preventative measures against germs such as tissues and anti-bacterial gel. With phrases such as “She blew me!” and “He dumped me!” and with images of tissues, we felt that we could give a sexual connotation to something that had none at all and by doing so, create a cheeky campaign.

Supporting this campaign would be a website, designed in the style of a personals column, with adverts such as “I want you to blow me”, only for the user to click on the advert and be presented with a tissue. Additionally, this campaign called for short videos to be filmed where tissues and gels and other preventative measures would be interviewed, giving a voice to something which would otherwise not have one.

On Wednesday, the day before the presentation, I began to write up a small booklet that held all of our research so far, a brief overview of the above ideas and anything else that we felt was necessary to present to the committee. This included the provision to have some sort of themed student union bar night where students would be able to buy cheaper drinks if they came in clean or dirty fancy dress i.e. french maid for clean or binman or dirty.

Possible events for the bar
Possible events for the bar

On Thursday, all four of us attended a committee meeting at 8:30am. Most of the meeting was taken up by the committes responsibilities to the university but an hour into the meeting, we had a chance to discuss our ideas.

Jayne Dodgson introduced the four of us to the rest of the committee and I handed out the booklet that I had produced with the ideas and research in, guiding them through each idea and their merits. Each idea got a few laughs and approval, with plenty of comments on each idea, which was great. It felt good to have come up with ideas that were being received well by those who would be approving it.

After discussing each idea, I asked if they could make a decision on which idea they wanted to move forward with and again, we went through the merits and disadvantages of each one. The Quarantine idea was rejected because although it was a great way to get students involved, the committee were fearful that it was too much work to take on within the timeframe. Additionally, they thought that the information may be too specific and at the time, thought that Swine Flu may change into something different in the coming months and anything that we filmed or designed might be too specific for the here and now.

The Pick-up Lines idea was received really well for its cheekyness, but partially rejected because the committee thought it may be a bit too risky, especially in the first few weeks of the new term. While the committee liked the idea, they were concerned that it might promote the wrong message about the university.

And so the strongest idea, Touching Man, was settled on. From the very start, we had been really focused on this idea. It just seemed to shout out to us and so we were quite pleased that it had been chosen by the committee. We left in a positive mood and spent the rest of the day looking around the various campuses to see if there was anything special we could do for the project in certain places.

Designing Touching Man

The next day, we set to work on coming up with ideas for what Touching Man should look like. It was very important that we get this right, because the character would literally be the face of the campaign. His appearance would tie all of the campaign’s assets together.

I already had an idea of what I wanted him to look like and the main thing was green. Green face, green clothes. Green. For me, there is no colour that better communicates “virus” than green. However, there were also other ideas to consider. These included Will’s idea of a character similar in appearance to the Angel character Lorne. A classy, well dressed character marred by green spikes coming through his suit and with a green face to go with them.

My idea built upon the use of spikes, but gave the character more of a bug-like personality, with a spike-covered shell on his back, stripy green top, green underwear on top of his skinny jeans and some antennae to go with it.

The third idea was courtesy of Hannah, who wanted him to be a very classy gentleman, wearing a tuxedo and bowler hat and a handlebar moustache.

Potential costumes for the character.
Potential costumes for the character.

The importance of green was emphasised by Will’s idea and my own, while the spikes in both of our ideas related back to what a Swine Flu molecule looks like. Because we didn’t have much of a budget to actually buy different costume parts, we decided that my idea was the easiest to accquire and still stay under budget.

And so by the end of the full first week of the project, we had now gotten to the stage where we had picked our campaign and how Touching Man should look. It had been a slow week getting to this stage, but now that were all focused on one idea, we could start to flesh out what we would be doing for it. Touching Man was taking shape.

In the next entry: Developing storyboards for a range of videos, a visit by the Archbishop of York and a trip to…a gardening store.