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| Alternative media | |
my scary picture!' It looks like one of those old-fashion photo booths Oct 15, 2009
What's different is that this one is advertising free photos. Why not? You pull open the black curtain and step inside, slide the curtain shut again and sit on the red stool facing the screen, striking your pose as the countdown begins for the first photo. Then the screaming starts. It's loud and high-pitched. A woman's face, frozen in the midst of a terrified shriek, appears on the screen. Your eyes widen in surprise, and maybe you even let out a scream of your own as the photo booth camera clicks away. Gotcha! It's not a photo booth at all. You've entered the Photo Booth of Doom, a promotion for "Scream! The Science of Fear," a traveling exhibit at Science World, a British Columbia museum. The booth dispenses free passes to the exhibit but you also get pictures of yourself reacting to the screams as a bonus. Out they come, and written at the bottom of the photo sheet is the caption: "A photo of a scared person is enough to spread fear. We can explain." "With this stunt they hoped to raise awareness for the exhibit, as well as pass on a little scientific knowledge," say Rob Tarry and Chad Kabigting, who worked on the campaign for the Vancouver agency Rethink. "This is keeping with the work we’ve done for them in years past, where everything starts with a cool science fact and builds from there." The cool fact, of course, was that a photo of a scared person spreads fear. At first Rethink wanted to use that fact as part of a TV ad. But that proved cost-prohibitive, so the agency decided to use the idea in a stunt instead, and the creative team's thoughts turned to the old-school photo booths they'd frequented as kids. The stunt still wasn't cheap to pull off. Rethink custom-built the entire photo booth -- "the real photo booths are almost nonexistent these days," Tarry and Kabigting note. It cost $4,000 for the electronics, software and hardware, plus another $5,800 for the construction, transportation, set up and maintenance. "That’s a total of $9,800 -- still a lot less expensive than a TV shoot. And who watches TV commercials these days?" Tarry and Kabigting joke. One bright summer morning, Rethink brought the booth to Vancouver's Robson Street, a busy shopping destination. It only took 11 seconds for the first "victim" to approach. The booth shook with screams for the rest of the day, from both the lady on the screen and the shoppers getting their pictures taken. "The reaction we were going for was a bit of delicate balancing act — we didn’t want any heart attacks, and really, Science World is still a fun kids' museum, not a haunted horror house," Tarry and Kabigting say. The stunt worked on two levels. It was a real attention-getter, what with the screams attracting people and the booth itself evoking nostalgia. But it also gave photo seekers a tangible reminder about the product being promoted, the science exhibit, in the form of the pictures. As soon as they came out of the booth, people showed their "scared" portraits to their shopping companions. The stunt was picked up on advertising blogs across the world, as well as a few social networks. And Science World was thrilled with the stunt, so thrilled, in fact, that the booth has been added to the Scream! exhibit.
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