University of Chester Archives - The Work Of Neil Martin

Viral Man: Since then…

With the Viral Man project completely finished, it was time to launch it, but not without a few changes.

Unfortunately, the symptom videos which we filmed were eventually not used as the committee thought that a lot of them weren’t as funny as intended. It’s a shame, as we thought that they really added to the project, rather than just the one interview video.

Additionally, Hannah had volunteered to dress up as Fresher’s Flu, a friend to Viral Man and together they’d infect students. We incorporated this into the script of the interview and Hannah volunteered to don some pink facepaint, pink clothes and even some pink hair extensions to become Fresher’s Flu for the day. Unfortunately, this didn’t make the cut and the committee requested that the interview video be reedited to remove references to this character.

Viral Man goes live

The Viral Man project was developed in the middle of July/August for a September launch and the committee had always intended us to be present at the student’s welcome meeting to introduce the video to them. Both Jerry and Will weren’t sure if they’d be around for the welcome meeting and Hannah didn’t want to do it by herself at one of the two campuses, but I was really keen on gauging the student’s reaction to the video, even if it meant standing in front of a few hundred people.

In preparation for the presentation, I made a very simple PDF with my name on it and some key points. Having sat through a similar welcome meeting when I was a new student, I knew that they wouldn’t want to listen to me go on and on and so my presentation would last no more than three minutes, though I had been told I had ten. I wanted to incorporate the video directly into my PDF, but unfortunately, I was told that there wouldn’t be time to give me a copy of it to do so. I was assured however that there would be AV technicians on the day to help make the presentation run smoothly.

On Sunday 20th September, I headed over to Chester and watched everyone start to gather in the large sports hall which was now home to around 700 seats. I spoke to one of the committee and she told me that the video was ready to play on disk. I just had to open it up. As I said, I was told that there would be AV guys there who would do that and so I wasn’t looking forward to having to close my presentation down, insert a disk and play it. In theory, that sounds like the easiest thing in the world, but when you’re on a stage in front of 700 students who just want to go for a drink, it’s much harder. I was also told that I would be presenting twice, as there would be two lots of 700 students to speak to. Something which no one had informed me about! This made things twice as nerve-wracking.

Once the hall was full, I realised just how daunting it was going to be to stand in front of everyone on my own. While other staff members had done this on a yearly basis, the most people I had presented to was 30 of my fellow classmates. 700 students was on another level!

viralman39 — It doesn't look like it, but there's 700 students here.

On stage first was the Vice-Chancellor, Tim Wheeler and then followed other important staff, some of which I’d already met. I was up last, right after Gay Rabie had spoken to students about Swine Flu.

When Gay took to the stage and delivered her presentation, the first thing I noticed was that she had used an image of Viral Man in her presentation and while this in itself wasn’t a bad thing, it made my introduction of Viral Man a little less pronounced, especially since there was no explanation as to why the image of this green man was in the presentation.

And then suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I managed to see someone enter the sports hall. As I turned to look at them, I realised who they were. Viral Man. As someone who had been playing Viral Man for roughly two weeks of my life, it was absolutely surreal to see someone else dressed as him. Green face, the same wig I had worn, along with a stripey jumper, black pants and green gloves. And holding a green umbrella.

It was at this moment that I felt just as confused as the students sitting in the hall. I hadn’t expected him to make an appearance like this, especially before he had been properly introduced by me but because it was so unexpected, perhaps it worked.

Viral Man began walking towards the front of the hall. You could even say he was strutting, twirling his umbrella as he did so and making his way onto the stage where Gay Rabie was still speaking and coughing as loud as he could. I was bemused and so were the students. And full credit goes to the person who was playing Viral Man as he did a fantastic job.

Gay finished her presentation and suddenly I was introduced onto the stage. I could not believe how nervous I was. My hands were literally shaking. I was very thankful that I had a small script prepared for what I wanted to say and a presentation.

I said hello to everyone and explained who I was and why I was there. “And this is Viral Man”, I said to the crowd, but then had to fiddle about with a laptop to get it to play. As I said, this is usually the easier of actions, but when you’re literally shaking with nerves, it was like a lifetime waiting for the CD to load.

Finally, it played and I was able to take a 90 second breather as they watched the video. To my surprise they laughed. At the right parts. It’s a great feeling to know that something you’ve created has been enjoyed by so many people.

I would call the presentation a success for both the project and for me personally. For the project because it was a culmination of five weeks worth of work and for me personally because to speak in front of so many people was incredibly nerve-wracking. I knew I would be nervous beforehand but I still wanted to do it because what better way to overcome your fear of something than to confront it?

After the launch

Since introducing Viral Man to students, the project has been featured in numerous press articles including The Chester Chronicle, The National Student and Nursing Times. I also spent a fair amount of time regularly talking to students as Viral Man on Facebook and it was great to see him being mentioned in people’s status updates. Additionally, Viral Man was also tagged in a number of photos after students had taken some of the posters from various places just because they wanted them. I think this proves that Viral Man was indeed popular and successful.

In conclusion, my time spent on the Viral Man project was a hell of a lot of fun and resulted in a project that I’m very happy with. Given more time, I would have loved to have built a website around Viral Man to better focus all of the campaign assets such as the videos and perhaps some downloadable content. On the plus side, the Facebook profile for Viral Man proves continually popular, with more people adding him as a friend every day. My only hope is that the people responsible for updating the profile and interacting with students maintains the level of fun and quirkiness that Jerry Clark, Will Bollen, Hannah Bradshaw and myself managed to create over the course of five weeks. A fantastic project to work on.

Viral Man: The Making Of – Part 5

In the last entry, I wrote about how we had developed the campaign to the point where we were now in the studio, taking photos in preparation for the poster campaign. Unfortunately, having looked at them over the following weekend, I decided that they weren’t good enough to use and so on the following Monday, we went back to the studio.

Photoshoot Number 2

On our first trip to the studio, we had to set up ourselves and as I’ve already written, I’m not a photographer. We struggled along and did take some shots that were adequate, but none that stood out. Luckily on the second visit, we managed to find Mike Pumford, Kingsway’s technician who generously took a moment of his time to help us out and set the equipment up correctly and we started taking much better shots.

A few unaltered photos from our second photoshoot.

As you can see, these images proved to be much more professional, even at an unedited stage. We ended up taking a lot of photos. Some good, some bad. But there were quite a number of them that stood out.

A few unaltered photos from our second photoshoot.

In order to get people to pay attention to the posters, I felt that some tight closeups of his face were important. His costume was secondary. His green, over-exaggerated face was what would attract people to look at and read the posters.

Making Viral Man larger than life

The next day, I began sifting through all of the photos we had taken. With three photos picked out, I set to work on making him larger than life. It was important that the character only resembled a normal person, rather than simply looking like a person with green facepaint. So, in order to do this, I started exaggerating his eyes to the point where there was no doubt that these eyes could never belong to a normal human being.

A digital makeup check and an exaggeration of the eyes.

I started by performing a digital makeup check on the eyes, improving the coverage of the facepaint on the eyelids to the point where they looked much more naturally blended. Also, I have brown eyes and they looked out of place on such a green character so I changed the colour of them. Finally, I exaggerated the entire area of the eye to much larger proportions. Of course, the beauty of Photoshop is that you can do these modifications seamlessly and it did the trick. I also increased the size of the character’s nose and mouth, and did the same makeup checks on the lips, while digitally pulling the sides of the mouth up a little to make it look as if the character was grinning more than humanly possible.

A much less human grin.

The Logo

As I showed in an earlier entry, I wanted the character to have a logo of some sort. Something that would tie all of the various elements of the campaign together and I knew roughly what it should look like:

A logo to tie all elements of the campaign together.

Now that we had taken lots of photos, I had something to reference. It was important that it wasn’t just a generic silhouette like in my above sketch but adequately referenced the character. And of course the thing that stands out most about the character besides the fact that he’s green, is his hair. And so this is what I came up with:

You’ll notice that it says Viral Man, not Touching Man, as I’ve been referring to throughout these entries. And I’ll get onto that in a moment.

After designing the logo and writing the copy for the posters, I was very happy with how they looked. And here they are:

All three posters.

You can view larger versions in the project area, which will be going live within a week of this post.

The presentation

After four weeks of working on this project, surprisingly, we had still yet to actually show anything to the committee responsible for giving it the green light. We had wanted to keep it secret until a point at which we could properly present it i.e. The above posters and photoshoots.

On Wednesday, I spent the day designing a screen-based presentation which I was to deliver the next morning to introduce the committee to what we had so far. I travelled to Chester for an 8am start and set the presentation up in the meeting room. At 8:30am, everyone arrived and the reveal took place. I had designed the presentation to slowly describe why the character looked the way he looked by cropping various photos of him, starting at his green shoes and working all the way up to his face. At the final reveal of his face, everyone seemed to like it.

In addition to the reveal Touching Man’s face, I had also been practicing my voice for the character and recorded a basic example script so that the committee could get an understanding of how he would sound in videos. Have a listen.

Unfortunately, there were concerns about the voice sounding too much like a speech difficulty and because it was a university-produced campaign, they didn’t want to offend anyone. This was understandable and the voice was scrapped for something more recognisable and normal.

Overall however, everyone was really pleased with how the campaign had been developed so far and were looking forward to seeing the finalised videos.

One of the things that came up in the meeting was the creation of the website. I hadn’t been looking forward to designing the site as there wasn’t much time to do create it and a Flash website takes time. Luckily however, the c0mmittee expressed their interest in using social networking instead of a website because they were worried about maintaining the site. It meant that we could focus on building the Facebook profile and more time to film the videos.

One final thing that the committee asked for was a second poster campaign that ran with the government’s national campaign’s slogan of “Catch it, Kill it, Bin it”. This meant another trip to the studio on the same day, where Hannah and I spent the afternoon taking more photos.

Photoshoot number 3

Just before we went to the studio, we spent an hour looking for props to use in the three new posters, showing how the character could be caught, killed and binned. That meant buying a net, anti-bacterial gel and a large bin. Quite a strange shopping list.

The photoshoots are fun, but quite tiring. It’s much more than a case of just taking three photos and that’s it. It’s getting the right photo, with the right focus, lighting etc. And this takes a hell of a long time to do. We spent a long time getting shots to look right.

A friend came to help/watch us take more photos in the studio and literally provided a helping hand to hold some anti-bacterial gel to look as if he was killing me with it. I also took some shots of his arm on its own so that I could play around with it in Photoshop and add it to a photo of myself.

At the end of the day, we came away with nearly 300 photos. That night I started to develop the photos into posters.

The name change

The next day, I recieved a priority email alerting us to the fact that the committee had changed their mind about the name “Touching Man” as they felt it had too many negative connotations, especially for a university-led campaign. Instead, they asked if they could use “Viral Man”. This change came after I had already designed the posters, logo and set up the Facebook profile. Admittedly, the four of us responsible for running with the name (And telling the committee about it at an early stage) weren’t happy with the name change and I tried my best to persuade them to keep “Touching Man”. It wasn’t to be though and “Viral Man” was chosen as the new name.

In retrospect, it’s completely understandable. I think that because we had been working on it on our own for four weeks, we had become quite accustomed to the name, regardless of if it was suitable enough for the project. While “Viral Man” is a little more tame and obvious, “Touching Man” does indeed bring too many negative connotations and the name change was justified. And so Viral Man was born.

I made the required changes to the posters and logo and set up another Facebook profile, this time in the name of Viral Man. Luckily, the 2,500 stickers which had been designed for the campaign had not been printed yet and they needed to be changed to reflect the change of Facebook profile address.

And so the penultimate week was over and there were now two poster campaigns, a Facebook profile, stickers, a logo and a countless number of photos that had been taken over the course of three photoshoots. Next week would be all about filming and finally, signing, sealing and delivering the whole campaign to the university in preparation for its launch just a few weeks later.

In the final entry: Two days of filming, an interview with Viral Man and taking delivery of 2,500 spikey balls.

A massive hard drive failure

Unfortunately, my hard drive decided to temporarily die last night and as a result, I’ve lost a serious amount of work. This includes over 20,000 MP3s, countless numbers of photos from years past and most importantly, a lot of my work for University and clients.

It is perhaps my own fault for not backing the work up to DVD more often, but it does mean that I’m now trying to piece together what little I have left. It’s awfully frustrating and perhaps even a little saddening to know that you have spent so long working on building up a collection of memories and hard work only to see it be deleted.

Included in the lost files is the work that I’ve recently completed for the University of Chester. This is perhaps the most important thing that I’ve lost as there was a lot of work put into it. There are now no PSD and AI files to fall back on, should anything need to be further edited. On the plus side, there exists three copies of the final artefacts on DVD that were given to the University and I’ll be asking for a copy of one of them so I can at least file it away and upload some images to my portfolio.

It goes without saying, but if you do happen to be a graphic designer or work in any sort of profession where you create vast numbers of files on a daily basis, make sure you back up regularly. I didn’t and now I’ve paid for it.

A visit by the Archbishop of York

Two weeks ago, I began working for the University of Chester, along with three other past students to develop a campaign that will promote awareness of Swine Flu to its new students in September. The project is only four weeks long, but in that time, we are to produce a full poster campaign, website, viral videos and anything else we deem necessary. It’s been given the support of the Vice Chancellor, along with many other departmental staff and is essentially completely up to us on how we go about delivering the campaign. It’s fantastic to be working on something that will potentially be seen by up to 15,000 students spanning Chester campus and Warrington campus. More information on this when the project is completed.

As part of my responsibilities, I, along with the others that I’m working with were asked to set up a small exhibition for the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu. On Thursday, he opened a new building at Warrington campus and I got to meet him.

miniexhibition1 — A small exhibition of advertising and graphic design.

The Archbishop is certainly not what I expected. He’s quite down to earth and, well, normal. He spent time speaking with everyone who had taken the time to set up their relevant department’s exhibition and seemed interested in everyone. and everything he was shown. It was nice meeting him.

miniexhibition2 — Speaking with the Archbishop, John Sentamu

New Project: One Design Show

As mentioned in one of my Tweets, me and my University of Chester graphic design class had an exhibition on June 18th to show off our finest work to design agencies and the public. As part of the promotion of the exhibition, I was tasked to produce it. This included invitations, posters and a website. You can view the work here.

Producing an entire exhibition is certainly a different experience than simply creating a one-off piece of design. Producing an exhibition means taking everything into account and being responsible for it all fitting together and I have to admit that there were times when it didn’t seem like it was going to be done on time.

It all started at the beginning of March, when the class were told about the exhibition and the need to form a design committee to help organise and produce the show. A group of seven students originally volunteered to help steer the production in the right direction. Over the course of the next few months, we’d slowly begin to develop the show. To help with this, I set up a Facebook group and liaised with the tutors to send out an email to everyone asking everyone to join it so I could keep the class up to date with developments.

We invited the whole class to begin coming up with themes for the show. Something that the design committee could work with to develop invitations, posters and anything else that was needed. We gave people two weeks to develop their ideas into A3 boards and then discuss them with the rest of the class. This proved to be incredibly successful and from this, the idea of using exaggerated facts and figures was chosen.

The committee begin coming up with a range of facts that could relate to design students and their three years at University. This included ideas, hangovers, swearing, paper pads and computer crashes. These facts were then given large figures, based on one person’s experiences, multiplied by 60 (the number of people on the course). So where the average person may have 20 coffees a week, 60 people will have nearly 200,000 over the course of three years. What was clear after coming up with these facts and figures was that there was one fact that would always remain at 1 – the design show itself. This realisation helped to steer the project into the interesting direction of thinking about the exhibition as a culmination of three years. A filtering of ideas, good times, bad times and arriving at one design show, hence why the show was given the name “One Design Show”.

The idea of the past three years being filtered into one show made me think of how it had been tapered to a point – the point being the show – and this gave me the idea of making the invitation a triangle. Something that had a (literal) point to it. Using a triangle for an invitation would give added impact when sending out to design agencies and colleges because how often does someone recieve a triangle-shaped piece of mail?

One of my tutors had mentioned in passing that the previous year’s students had managed to make the invitation its own envelope and this was something that I also wanted to do to so I began to experiment with triangles and how they could fold up into an envelope to keep it secure.

An initial idea for the invitation for One Design Show

The first idea consisted of a hexagon, with a cut from the centre to the edge. The invitation would then fold up into a concertina, leaving a triangle shape. The problem was that in order for this to work, there needed to be enough copy/image to fill 12 pages (six triangles on one side, six on the other) and this proved to be too much and not necessary. This design also meant that a separate envelope was needed. Additionally, because there was a lack of bleed area between the triangles, it meant that some of the artwork was bleeding into another triangle. In short, the idea failed, but the concept was there.

Sticking with the triangle idea but simplifying it, I decided to try it with three panels next to each other instead. This was much easier to handle and it meant that by adding a tab at the end of the triangles, I could fold the whole thing up and the tab would secure it in place, thereby forming its own envelope. I went with this shape and started on the design work.

The numbers for each of the facts were quite big. I wanted some way of trying to relate these big numbers back to a digital medium and the obvious choice was pixels because that’s what any piece of artwork is made up from at some point or another before being printed. I have always enjoyed the work of people like eBoy and their method of using pixelation as an art form. I wanted to take this and try and make it work on a larger, invitation and poster-sized scale. For this reason, I decided that iconography would be great to use.

The original set of icons and one blown up.

I love working with iconography. It forces you to be economical with your design because you only have a 16x16px area to work with. Communicating a computer crash or a hangover in such a small space is quite an interesting project on its own but I had to make the icons work at print resolution. When a 16x16px image is printed at 300dpi, it is less than 3mm in width. This meant that the icon would need to be blown up if it was to be seen. However, by blowing something up so small to such big sizes, it was inevitable that they would look blurry and messy. Photoshop’s default method of resizing images is “Bicubic”, which is useful for things like photos. However, Photoshop also has another resize method called “Nearest Neighbour”, which allows pixels to stay sharp at larger sizes even when resized to ten times its original size.

The icons that I designed, although nice lacked colour and so a few of them were eventually redesigned including a red coffee mug instead of a white coffee cup and a few of these icons were using on the invitation that can you see on the project page.

Once the invitations were designed, it was then a case of finding a quote from the printers. The design department didn’t have a large budget to spend on promoting the show and tasked me with finding a suitable printers to print 400 copies of the invitation. Luckily, the invitation was small enough that two would fit on one A3 page, which meant that it immediately cut the costs in half. Unfortunately, due to the unusual shape of the invitation, they could not offer diecutting for price inside the department’s budget and this meant that I, along with a few other people were tasked with cutting them manually.

400 invitiations manually cut and ready to be sent.

After the invitations were taken care of, the next thing was Moo Minicards. At an early stage of producing the show, I had remembered a great website called Moo. They offer business card-like cards, slightly smaller called Moo MiniCards. I thought these would be a great addition to the show, allowing someone to take something away from it and keep a piece of student’s work with them. My idea was to put a piece of student’s artwork on a total of 100 cards and order 5 packs of them. Each pack costs just £10 so it was well worth it. I requested that all students send me three pieces of their work with their full name and website address. These cards were then scattered all over the tables between each student’s portfolio, making the tables come alive with colour and inviting people to pick them up and look more closely at the work.

Moo MiniCards scattered all over the tables.

The next thing to design were the posters which would help direct people to place in which the exhibition was being held. Originally, the idea was to produce 5 x A1 posters that would be easily visible around the campus. However, after walking around the campus and figuring out where the posters would go, it was clear that more than 5 would be needed. The budget didn’t allow for this. Instead, the posters were designed at A3, which meant that more could be produced and a fraction of the cost of 5 x A1 poster. A series of 8 posters were designed and printed twice, giving me 16 posters to place around the campus in preparation for the opening night.

So as to identify each piece of work on display, nametags for each exhibition stand were designed in the same style as the invitation and placed above each stand. Although a very simple part of the whole production process, these triangles, like the invitations had to be manually cut out of card.

The exhibition, ready for opening night.

Finally, a simple website was designed by myself and built by Liam Gallagher, another student on the course, that housed a few student’s work, descriptions of it and information on the show itself including when it was open and how to get there.

A few of the students who exhibited and/or helped with the show.

Overall, producing the University of Chester’s graphic design show was a really good experience. Liaising with so many people about so many different aspects of the show proved to be very difficult at times due to other coursework-related committments, but I believe that the end result was executed well. In particular, I was really happy with the quality and popularity of the Moo MiniCards that I had designed. As mentioned, I had a total of 500 cards printed and by the end of the seven day opening period of the exhibition, there were less than 100 left. Also, I was pleased to overhear some of the public who attended the opening night of the exhibition express their approval of the posters I had designed. It’s always nice to hear that something you’ve designed has been met with praise.

I’ve really enjoyed working on such a large scale project and I hope that I can do so again in the future.