Communication is a Virus

For this brief we were in pairs and I was paired with Will Skane-Davis.
We had a choice of 10 different tasks to choose from and we decided to choose "Tell a lie convincingly"
To start off the project we talked about the different areas of research that we needed to focus on and split them evenly between us so that we both had enough work to be getting on with:

Will Duffy:

• April Fools jokes/ tricks (large scale)
• Famous cons/cheats
• Forms of deception
• Misrepresenting information
• Statistics about lying

Will Skane-Davis:

• Exaggeration
• World Leaders lying
• Terms and conditions (small print and confusing language)
• Body language while lying (how to lie)

To start the research I looked into April Fools and how it originated. There are a few theories about where it came from and the term goes back hundreds of years. One theory which is accepted by some people is that Noah was a fool for sending the dove from his arc to check if the waters had subsided because he sent it too early. This would make sense because the timing ties in with April in the equivalent Hebrew calendar.

I then looked into the biggest/ greatest april fools day hoaxes as regarded by 'The Museum of Hoaxes' website. I found that the best hoaxes worked when there was a level of trust built in with the audience before they could be tricked into believing something which wasn't true. In fact the number 1 rated hoax was on the BBC show Panorama which is well known as being trusted and objectively truthful.

As primary research we conducted this quick survey.

We wrote 2 statements, making one of them completely true and one of them completely false. 

The true statement is "Every day 20 banks are robbed with an average of $2500 being stolen" and the false statement is "Air Conditioning can increase the chances of developing lung cancer".

We then asked 25 people which statement they thought was true and which they thought was false.

18/25 people thought that the false statement was true leaving only 7 thinking that it was actually false.

That means that we successfully lied to %72 of people and they believed us.

After looking through all of our research together we decided that the best format to lie successfully with was disguising ourselves as a news network and creating a website packed full of lies in every story.

To get started we worked on the name for the news company and decided on TINN as an acronym for the 'The International News Network'. We chose to use international because we wanted to include the whole world and not just the UK. 

After deciding all this we came up with a basic layout and some images to work with and decided on some different pages to feature on the website: Home, Sport, Travel, Environment, Money and Lifestyle.

We split the pages so that I got Home, Travel and Money and other Will got Sport, Environment and Lifestyle. We kept the colour scheme to blue, white and black with varied shades between them. We thought that this created a quite professional look and kept within the brief parameters.

With all this decided and the layout roughly generated, we went away and got on with designing the pages. 

I wanted to see if we could make an actual working website so I tried to code the index page myself as I have some experience in HTML from making my own website years ago.

I created an HTML page with CSS attributes to position some of the aspects:

 

The above code creates this:

After this I knew I could continue to create more pages but during a crit with John he pointed out that it wasn't really necessary to create a fully working website if we could just design them on photoshop and pretend that they were real.
So I ditched this idea and focussed on working with photoshop to create the pages as though they were real.


I started by making the Money page and then the Travel, then I took stories from all of the other pages and put them together on the Home page.

I tried to make the lies outrageous and interesting while keeping the corporate, formal tone and I think it worked quite well. 

For the crits we also created these boards:

They show a pie chart which references all the types of research that we did and how we got to the idea of an April Fools style hoax. It also shows all of the 6 pages of the website complete and some ideas for billboards advertising the International News Network. 

Overall I think that this worked really well. In all honesty we could have created much more convincing lies but they would not have been as interesting at all. I think we have found a good balance between believability and entertainment. Even people who do not believe the lies would still find them funny and would be interested to read the website stories.