living the dream...

For two weeks I was paid to take part in a guerrilla marketing promo set in the streets of downtown Toronto for Bit defender.
How it was suppose to go: At some busy intersection downtown a man holding a laptop would be stopped by a man in a hazmat suit via megaphone, being told his computer was infected with a virus. The gentleman holding the laptop anxiously frets out loud that all his movies, music and photo files are in this computer. That's when 2 other hazmat suits take his computer and "disinfect" it with silly string. Then cue the sigh of relief from the crowd , because THAT and only then is when they realize that it was all just a stunt and YES these folks are just actors and a virus had not really plagued the poor mans computer. The crowd cheers, we take pictures with the people that are interested to see later on Bit Defender live website and hand out flyers that everyone is too eager to recieve.

How it REALLY went down: People treated us like we had the plague. The leaflets being given out akin to us giving out AIDs. People taking pictures with us only after being bribed to give them a free 1 yr trial. Mac users cutting us down with mean words and giving the crowd the alternative of buying a Mac instead of buying Bitdefender for their PC. People staring us down because we were wearing plastic suits in 30 degree weather rather than for our performance.

Though, I'm not going to lie... I was the sub-rep, pretty much exempting me from the humiliation of wearing a hazmat suit for most of the two weeks, with the exception of a couple hours where one of my co-workers came in late, forcing me to suit up. and for those two hours, I WAS A LEPER. But don't worry, I got paid at the end of the week and I was left with our Ad-libed versions of the skit we were suppose to follow through with. No it wasn't part of the job, but we needed something to keep us sane. Our cool Skits vs. their Original skit

I did most of the taping for our quaint little vids. And yeah I totally feel our mini-films trump the original video with or without the pro camera... Anyhow, here are a couple of my faves: