Tutorial Three:

During today's tutorial we discussed how our ideas had furthered since last talking it through with Andy and Peter. We raised our idea of using print and highlighting the hoax in one of London's free newspapers. Instead of trying to gather together all the Metro's at a station and trying to re-distribute them before commuters appear for their journey to work, we are going to attempt to print just one paper with our covering story, and have one of us sit on a bench near a busy crowd reading it whilst the other two group members video the event from a hidden location. This seemed to be an easy but relatively effective method of capturing a reaction. Although this was moving away from our initial large scale reaction, it would be an interesting experiment, illustrating how an individual would react.

Before this would be possible we would have to make the paper, so replicate the format of the metro paper, adapt pictures so that they are suitable, then get it printed onto news paper in the right dimensions.

Different Types of Paper

We have looked at different types of paper to use for our preliminary experiment, and found that most companies would print onto a minimum of 180gsm. We phoned many companies using the Yellow pages and found that if we wanted to print onto a paper of around 60-90gsm it would only be in black and white, although relatively cheap. However, we want to use colour and the price then rises dramatically, as does the weight of the paper. We eentually found a place near Covent Garden which would print for us onto newspaper weight paper and in colour, but due to the price, we feel we are only able to get a couple of copies so need our stories in the paper to be as immaculate as possible.

The Metro

The Metro is given away in the morning rush hour, this was the first paper that we made a mock-up of, the results that we gained from this paper was very successful, and led to us creating the other five front covers.

Newspaper Format

The Metro was the chosen format of paper to use in the end. We mocked up a version on Photoshop, taking into account all of the dimensions of the paper, the colours and page numbers etc. Little mistakes on each copy led to problems in that if people studied the papers too closely, spelling mistakes or wrong news (i.e. sports, not the faked explosion) would stand out and cause them to disbelieve in the paper. This caused us to create a third copy which was probably the best of the three, except a big football match was on the night before we were planning on printing it, causing us to have to guess who would win the match, and unfortunately we guessed wrong leaving the paper stating how Chelsea had won, when in actual fact Tottenham had. However, when we film with the paper, people hopefully will be too interested in the front page to notice the back page- which is not our priority anway.

Obviously there is a lot to do in order to get the paper looking authentic. We will need to copy the same formatting as the metro, keeping everything similar to how the metro would publish the piece. We need to get authentic photos of the instance, print onto realistic news paper, keeping the same weighting, colouring etc.
People read the Metro everyday so will have a good understanding of exactly how it looks, and if we don't manage to make it look authentic enough, the story will be instantly dismissed. On the other hand, because the story is so attention grabbing, it may detract from the paper meaning it may not have to be identical, however we want it to be as close as possible to the real thing in order to maintain the realism.

Internet Campaign:

Something that had developed within our idea, and how we would generate interest into the at of terrorism would be a gradual internet campaign, something similar to the recent campaign for Matt Reeves' "Cloverfield", which instead of using the normal trailer process to entice the public instead released small clips on the web that acted as clues to final piece, thus making the audience more and more intrigued about what all the clues meant.

However, we would have to be extremely careful about how we went about this, due to the nature of the project hoaxing terrorism. Such clues would not be taken lightly by the authorities, and we really wouldn't our laptops to be taken away from us. However, we remained adamant that an ongoing internet campaign would be extremely effective, and would work help raise a lot of awareness and speculation.

Utilizing London's Free Newspapers

It was highlighted in the tutorial that we should be more subtle when it comes to showing the public the hoaxed footage. Whilst talking about about how we could depict our hoaxed event, we liked the idea of utilizing London's free newspapers, especially the Metro which is issued in the early morning in underground stations. We were thinking that we would be able to make our own version of the first two pages of the paper, replace them and as a result it would appear to be real. We would then record the user's reaction. We also discussed the idea that one of us could be sat reading the paper in a public location. Whilst walking around people tend to notice the headlines on a newspaper, and will be keen to take more notice regarding the content of our fake front page.