Major Project - Plan 1

I had changed my plan of doing a documentary about immigration whilst interviewing my family (shocking, I know), but still kind of stuck to the theme of doing an interview. I wanted to change the plan as my original one required me to rely on my entire family to make this project happen, and since we are all too busy I figured I need to change the project to fit my schedule and something that I can mostly work on by myself. Well, kind of.

Anonymous Feedback on MP Proposal Form

I have researched into how to go about planning a social media campaign, and found this reddit thread of someone asking if these street interviews are effective.

I found out this style of interview actually has a technical term! It is MOS, "Man On Street", and I did not even put two and two together initially, but these kinds of interviews have been around for decades now! I remember first watching videos from Jimmy Kimmel's show and they were going around Hollywood asking people strange questions. I loved watching these as they always made me laugh and they never stopped being boring. With MOS being the base of the project I want to include that in the name of the project, so I have come up with "Creature On Street" as I feel it rolls off the tongue nicely! Cute name, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCZMmTlTv6Q

Slight change of plans

After having a chat with my lecturer James Norton, we came up with a better idea to give my project a more unique charm. Instead of just me coming up to people asking questions for the MOS interviews, I am going to make an alter-ego of an alien who just landed in Cambridge, and in the search for a good place to settle in it goes around asking people questions about humans and the area. I want this project to find people who feel they do not fit in, the people who got made fun of as a kid at school for being weird, and not to quite a bad politician, but also for those who feel like "an illegal alien". I want this alien character to make people feel included, heard and represented.

I started off with thinking about the alter-ego itself, considering the make up and outfits I am going to have to curate, the personality, names, background and all sorts of other things! It is always good to start off with a moodboard, so I went on pinterest and curated a folder with all the images that inspired me.

This is what I have ended up with. I have always loved aliens, but Pinterest still quite is not showing me what I want. This is the best images that I could find which were up my alley, which I can definitely still work with. There's a consistent colour palette of that specific lime green, with a mix of blues and blacks. I had also added a few antennae pictures to inspire me to make my own, as all the ones I have seen on Amazon were not what I wanted at all.

Since I really like make up anyway, I decided to just start experimenting straight away! My creativity comes out best unannounced and unplanned.

I would say I got the green face paint itself on point. The application was a bit difficult though as I am using Snazaroo face paints, which are water-activated and in person you can see the brush strokes on my face. However, I do not think this will be a problem in recording, as I am definitely going to use my iPhone to record the content, and that amount of detail is not going to get picked up. If it does become a problem, I can always try other make-up face paint, like P. Louise, Sunset Make up or Glisten Cosmetics, which I have heard good reviews about, they are just out of my budget range.

Once I finished doing my first practice run of the make up, I actually posted a video to my personal TikTok account asking people to help me with any advice they might have. I can do as much research as I can, but human opinions are the ones that matter the most, because I trust people's instincts. Once it had been a few hours after I uploaded that video, I had a lot of kind strangers give me advice!

My video ended up with around 27,000 views, roughly 100 comments and over 2,000 likes! Numbers that I am most definitely not used to, and I am very happy that people ended up coming to the rescue.

I got a vast range of advice and tips from these beautiful humans, with most of them talking about black eye contacts. I would have worn them in the video if I wasn't so scared of them, as I've never worn any ever since my optometrist said my eyes were too small for even regular ones. Some of the other advice included things like different coloured contour, extended eyeliner, dramatic lashes, with one writing "Keep your bottom lip black ad upper one blend with skin colour". I do love the wonders of your videos going across all different kinds of peoples devices, as you get this outcome! This is why I enjoy posting on social media. I will be doing a second practice run of the make up with all these comments in mind, but I want to get on with the other planning aspects of my alter-ego.

I have done a bit of thinking for the outfits that I am going to pair with this alter-ego, and since this is an alien who is trying to understand humans, I thought it was only fitting if it wears something "tacky" and "strange". From my 21 years of being a human on Earth, I think I am a good judge on this.

This is the very small plan I had made on my Miro Board, which explains everything, but to put it in a short sentence; either my alter-ego is going to wear oversized pyjamas, or a tacky combination of a funny shirt + jorts + socks with sandals. I wanted the alter-ego to wear something that people may potentially comment on, prompting questions/comments like "why are you wearing that?" or "I wonder if it knows that outfit is not good" in order to get more engagement. I am essentially going to be comment-baiting, which is a way that top advertisers use to get engagement on their posts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ishBTEHP9IU

I have found that this video best explains what comment baiting is, and I want to experiment with these methods to get as much media attention as I can, as I want as many people as possible to know about this campaign.

Pecha Kucha presentations:

We had a lesson on a presentation style called PechaKucha, which derives from Japan and it relies on the system of 20 slides with 20 seconds for each slide. This style of presentation also relies on only images, giving the audience a split attention span so they're able to focus on what you are saying and able to focus on the product you are delivering. I made my presentation roughly in this style, but I did struggle with finding appropriate images.

We each got feedback on our presentation and project, and I did not get much feedback, but this must mean that I am on the right track and that noone could think of anything else to fix about my project!

Interview Planning

I have moved on to planning interview content and questions, and on my MiroBoard I had written out in detail what I wanted to do and where. For example, doing an interview inside a library was inspired by ThatLibraryShow, where the premise of the content is trying to stay as quiet as possible whilst Derek Gerard, the show host, blends awkward interactions with funny pranks to get raw reactions out of people. As for the other locations, I chose outside of my university as it is a pretty busy street, and I could catch a lot of students who might be interested in participating. Parker's Piece is another location which a lot of students, but also locals and tourists, walk by as it is an avoidable park if you want to get around town. Basically, East Road and Parker's Piece have heavy foot traffic at all times, so this would highten my chances of getting a participant.

I also curated genres of questions to ask specific people, like if the participant is a local homeowner in Cambridge I could ask them about the Grafton Centre. I need to be able to ask them questions which I am confident they know the answer to in order to avoid awkward interactions which may put off the participant from doing the interview. I also made up questions to jump on the cool wagon, asking people about recent trending terms, like "looksmaxxing", because it is funny trying to explain these Gen Z terms to somebody who has no idea about anything. It is giving the same energy as having to explain to your grandma what social media is.

The "Recreation TikToks" bit I put down as a potential idea for filler content inbetween, such as OSHUCLIPS' content he went viral for, where he stops strangers on the streets and asks them what song they're listening to. I was actually stopped by him too (well, I called out his name because I was excited) as at the time he was a Cambridge local, but instead of asking me what I was listening to, he switched it up and asked "What are your pronouns?". I am not going to insert this clip here, because frankly it is very cringe and I do not look like that anymore, but this clip ended up going viral because I gave trolls the perfect opportunity to bully somebody for being who they want to be. Looking back on it, I hope that did not destroy my digital footprint. What I'm trying to say is that recreating already viral content might boost up my views, as people can decide for themselves whether I executed it well or not, and either way I get people commenting.

I also made a seperate questions for interviews plan where I categorised them more into topics, as you always want to prepare more questions for your participant in case some of them don't land well. I wanted to create as many questions as possible for backup whilst also keeping the confused demeanor that Glorb would have asking these. So, for example, I have a category for hygiene/skincare where I have a funny question that includes asking about "daily drowning", which if it is not obvious refers to a shower, but because Glorb is an alien and typically probably would not take showers, they see it as a daily ritual of drowning oneself in water. I am hoping that with the nature of these questions I will get some sort of reaction from people, whether that be laughing at Glorb or laughing with them and then trying to explain to Glorb that human don't drown themselves on a regular basis.

Aswell as asking about hygiene, food and movies/music, I included questions about celebrities and adapting to human life, as these would be questions that Glorb would hopefully want to ask the most about as they would not know where to start with trying to fit in on Earth. I want the participants to feel as though they are doing good in helping an alien try to understand humanity. And speaking of, I also included sort of philosophical questions, because I can imagine a conversation between me and alien getting kind of deep. I have included a question like "What makes you, you?", because sometimes as humans we get a bit ahead of ourselves with busy lives and managing workloads and this would maybe give the participant a second to question their own humanity, guaranteeing a purely human, raw response.

As well as interview questions, I also prepared another genre of content I could create inbetween, maybe even with the same participants. This would include speed rounds where Glorb asks the participant to quickly explain a word, so for example I would ask them to define a pet, or what time is, or what "rizz" means. This could also serve as a back-up idea if the participant does not want to do a long interview, but would rather something quick and spontaneous like this. It is always good to have back-up plans when dealing with strangers, because you never know what they're going to want or what they like.

First recordings

Imagine this: you just did your make-up for two hours, you leave the house, and suddenly... Everybody is looking at you, your hayfever is spiking, making your make-up run down your face, and you are too self-aware to continue being yourself in the park. That was me when I first went in public in Glorb form, and I was experiencing a lot of anxiety. I had also discovered that I am horrible at staying in character who wasn't me. I will still insert the recording I did for the promotion of the campaign, because I still did it and it was still fun whilst it lasted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ze33hSwjVk

I wanted this to be as if a stranger was recording Glorb from afar, like a wild sighting of the first alien on Earth, ending with Glorb running towards the camera person, scaring them off and dropping the phone, and Glorb picking it up questioning the "strange device" (my phone). I think this would have potential in terms of marketing, but just something about it did not sit right with me. Perhaps it was the time of day, maybe I should have recorded earlier in the day for the lighting, or maybe my outfit just wasn't right.

Due to my anxiety around staying in character, I have decided to move on from Glorb and start thinking of how to adapt this project to work more effectively. I do not want to put myself in a situation where I am forced to do something I really do not comprehend, because the final product will not be at its greatest. I think if I had a team of people working with me on this, Glorb could have exceeded my expectations and been something really great for people everywhere around the world, but as a one-person team all of this was too much to handle, and I do not want to misrepresent the people who I am targetting this project towards.

To still be able to use all the resources I have collected so far, I have decided to stick with the project being called CreatureOnStreet and to still create content, but I am going to make it about myself and hope that someone will find it and relate to it. All of my future work will be included in the upcoming blogs. Glorb out.