The Dollarama Campaign

To originally promote the Moral Meter project, our class was split up into groups of 4 people. We were then given a $100 budget and asked to get as many people to the Moral Meter website as possible. Being that $100 is a limited budget, we came up with the Dollarama Campaign. We registered a website (findoutwhy.ca) in order to redirect people easier. We chose that website name because of its ambiguous connotation which tied into the ambiguity and randomness of the other aspects of our campaign-- not too mention the Moral Meter project was nowhere near finished and we had received very little information on it as it was.

Another small portion of the budget was spent printing up stickers with the website name on it. With these, we used guerilla-style marketing tactics and posted them all over the University of Waterloo campus, as well as various places in Toronto.







The remainder of the budget was dedicated to purchasing random, eye-catching items from Dollarama, writing the website on them, and placing them around campus. These proved to attract a lot of attention and resulted in a large amount of hits. Some of the items are depicted below:













The campaign was a total success and generated one of the largest amounts of hits out of the entire class.

Before The Circles

Before the project became known as the Blue Circle/Red Square project, the original incarnation was the Moral Meter. In my "Discourse of Advertising" class, we were given a short amount of time, roughly 30 minutes, to conceptualize and create a logo for the project. Here is what I came up with:

The idea behind this is that there is always a test to someone's morals, and despite peoples' attempts for conformity and structure, morals are always bendable and people are susceptible to moments of anarchism.

Are You A Blue Circle?

Check out an interesting new project I'm helping with in conjunction with Render @ the University of Waterloo, the CRIME (CRItical MEdia) lab, and UK artist Dane Watkins:

www.bluecircles.org

I highly recommend taking an introspective look at it. The work relies heavily on the perception of surveys, and how people react and participate in them. The main idea to market the website was by passing out fairly ambiguous business cards around the Waterloo campus asking the recipient whether or not they were a blue circle, and pointing them to the site's URL.

Some of the other ways we have come up with marketing the site are:

1. Hold events in conjunction with Frosh Week whereby there are "actors" participating in events as either members of the "Blue Circle" or "Red Square" teams. These events will tie in with the already competitive nature of Frosh Week, and will lead the audience to the site.
2. Once the website has a buzz, to display the ranking chart on the newsfeed TVs around campus.
3. Create viral videos of people giving testaments to how being a blue circle or red square has changed their outlook on life, etc.

English 408B: The Discourse of Advertising

This course comprised of the analysis and discussion of various forms of advertising as well as subvertising. One of the major projects was to take a product that we like, and develop a print ad, and then subvertise the product.

The product I chose was Diet Pepsi. My initial advertisement draws influence from the work of Roy Lichtenstein and the irresistible nature of Diet Pepsi.

There are several things I wish I could've done to this ad, that I wasn't able to do simply due to time constraints. I wish I had have designed the can myself instead of using a photo. That would've given the advertisement a more cohesive feel. Additionally, I wish I had have added a lipstick stain around the rim of the can to insinuate that there was a woman drinking from the can. I feel that those 2 elements would've really tied the ad together.

The next portion of the project involved subvertising an aspect of the product. Because I'm clearly obsessed with Diet Pepsi, this was hard for me; however, I decided to pinpoint and criticize the use of the artificial sweetener aspartame and its link to brain tumors. The ad was completely made from scratch, and is meant to simulate an MRI scan.

English 204: Designing Digital Sound & Video

In this class we were given access to a base-model miniDV camcorder and editing software (Sony Vegas). With these basic tools we were given the opportunity to create three videos throughout the duration of the course. The first video was to be a 30-second advertisement, the second a 1-minute instructional video, and the final video was a 5-minute narrative video. During class hours, we spent time analyzing the rhetoric of film. Components such as angle, lighting, sound, etc. were all discussed, and how any alteration of these can produce a differing effect on the audience. 

For the final project, my group and I decided to create a Rocky-esque montage. This is not the final edit of the video, unfortunately I lost that when one of my hard drives crashed. However, this version is fairly close to what the final edit would've been.

GIVE ME A JOB!

For your consideration, I have attached my resume in .jpg form. If you would like a copy in Word or PDF format, feel free to contact me.