Viral Man: The Making Of – Part 6

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This is the final entry in Viral Man: The Making Of. After five posts and now this, the sixth, I hope that you’ve had an insight as to what I did to get to the final stages of the Viral Man project. In this entry, I’ll be talking about the filming for Viral Man and the impact that it’s made on the University as an institution, the students and the external press. Unfortunately, as I’ve said in previous posts, I did have photos to go with this post but lost them in my hard drive crash so again, I apologise!

Viral Man goes filming

On the last Monday of work, we set about making plans for filming Viral Man’s main interview video. This two minute video would introduce people to Viral Man, while the smaller 15 second videos would show how he could be found infecting people in any manner of ways from making them cough and sneeze, to giving them aches and pains.

I was becoming quite accustomed to being dressed as Viral Man now. You could even say I was enjoying it. Although it was nothing more than facepaint and a wig, it does make you feel very different knowing that people around you are looking at you in an entirely different way.

The previous week, Jerry, Will and Hannah had spent time developing a script for me to read through while I was concentrating on designing the poster campaign. I hadn’t had much chance to rehearse it until I got to see it on Monday morning. It wasn’t actually that much script for a two minute piece of video, but because there were to be pauses and cut-aways, it easily added up.

Hannah did my makeup and I got dressed as Viral Man once more and Will set the camera up in one of the unused ‘quiet rooms’ in the library. The room, while not soundproof, is indeed quiet and made an excellent fake office.

As mentioned in my previous entry, the committee had had some reservations over the type of voice that Viral Man would have and I hadn’t really come up with a new one as of yet. It meant that I had to try and come up with a voice as we were filming. I knew that I wanted him to sound ‘husky’ and as if Viral Man himself had the flu. But at the same time, he needed attitude and even a bit of anger. Anger at the world for not loving him!

I wrote the script out on A3 pieces of paper and Hannah held them as far back as possible while I read them. The trouble was that because I wear glasses and Viral Man most certainly doesn’t, I was blind for most of the time I was reading! It meant that the script couldn’t be too far away from my eyes. Ideally of course, it would have been better to memorise the script altogether, but we just didn’t have the time.

Having gone through a few test runs, it was clear that it looked as if I was reading from a script instead of looking at an interviewer off camera. Because of this, we ended up refilming the interview the next day.

This time, I had tried to refine the voice a little more and I had the advantage of knowing the script a little better. This time, I read the script in sections, pausing to memorise the next part. I was allowed to do this because as I said earlier, we’d be cutting away from the interview to various mini videos so it didn’t matter too much if the script wasn’t read in one go.

I had a lot of fun being filmed as Viral Man. It was the first time that Viral Man had had a chance to speak. In the mini videos, Viral Man only acted, never spoke. It was fun to give him a bit more depth and allow him a point of view.

On Tuesday we also met up with some of the members of the committee and showed them a rough cut of the interview to make sure they were happy with the voice and script. It was a bit of a backwards way to do things, filming everything and then getting approval, but it was the only way we could do things quickly, as we didn’t have much time left. Thankfully, they were happy with what we were doing.

Once all of the interview filming was complete, it was then up to Jerry to put everything together in Final Cut. And so here for your viewing, is the video for Viral Man:

The next day, we did some final filming for some of the short videos outside. It was funny watching people’s reactions as they wondered why they were watching a green man doing strange things.

Later that day, to help with the transition of handing over all of the campaign assets, I wrote a campaign manual for those who would be responsible for keeping it going and a character profile for anyone who would be playing Viral Man. I think it’s really important to make sure that people understand that the character has a very specific way of acting and to go against that would go against the project.

Saying goodbye to Viral Man

Wednesday ended up being my very last day as Viral Man and in a way, I was quite disappointed! I had become accustomed to going home half green so much so that I felt comfortable enough to even take a trip to Asda in full Viral Man costume (including green face and wig) just to see what sort of expressions we’d get. It was hilarious. People looked at me as if they hadn’t quite believed what they had just seen, while others burst out laughing. There were also a few children who were either incredibly curious or incredibly scared. It was a fun experience and once which I’ll miss being a part of.

On Thursday, my penultimate day of work, I took a trip over to Chester to get some test posters printed and handed them over to the committee, along with a few copies of the campaign manual and character profile.

The Last Day

Finally, on Friday, we took delivery of 2,500 spikey balls for the project, along with 2,500 stickers. This ended up being one of the most fun days of the project, mainly because all of the more challenging stuff was now out of the way. Instead, the morning was spent removing all of the packaging from the spikey balls so that it was easier to distribute them. We also cut A4 sheets of stickers down to A6 for easier handling. While Hannah, Will did that, Jerry focused on editing the rest of the videos for a 4pm deadline. As for myself, I had very little to do now that my job as Viral Man was complete! I had designed two poster campaigns, beer mats, stickers, set up a Facebook profile and YouTube account and of course been the character of Viral Man in person. It was weird to now be struggling to find something to do.

At 4pm, we managed to get everything burnt to disks and handed everything over to the committee. It felt great to have completed a project that we were all quite proud of. To go directly from being a student of the university to staff of the university and be repsonsible for creating a campaign that would affect 15,000 students sounded like a daunting task at first and yet for the five weeks that we worked on it, it turned out to be a hell of a lot of fun and a project which I’m proud to have been a part of.

And with all of that said, I’d like you to head over to the Viral Man project page and see everything that was designed as part of the project. I’d love your thoughts on it. You can also become a friend of Viral Man on Facebook at www.facebook.com/viralman.

Thank you for reading these posts and I hope that you’ve enjoyed them. It’s been useful for me to write them as well, as it’s great to look back over what I’ve done. There will be one more entry about Viral Man and this will be to do with presenting it to a total of 1,500 students – on my own!

Viral Man: The Making Of – Part 4

viralmanthemakingof

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?