Great Social Media Idea: Roommates Draw Each Other By Memory

Happy Wednesday, readers! (Shout out to the fabulous Holly Westerfield. She's the queen of Happy Wednesday, and she's rad.)

Quick post today about a video I helped produce for UP. We actually shot it way back in November, but only got around to putting it together a month or so ago. (I could get into a very snarky diatribe about why it took so long, but suffice it to say that sometimes - most of the time, tbh - my boss and I are on different wavelengths about lots of stuff.)

Inspired by this great Buzzfeed video where couples drew each other by memory, we decided to do the same thing, but with roommates!

It's a silly little thing, but it's pretty charming and cute, and it turned out to be pretty popular - several thousand views on FB and YouTube combined. We also encouraged students and alumni to tag their current/former roommates in the comments, which worked pretty well to help drum up some interest and interactivity.

For those interested in how it got made, we set up shop in the study rooms in one of the dorms, and we had someone from the dorm staff recruit four pairs of roommates for us - two sets of girls and two sets of boys. (If I had to do it all over again, I would have probably cast it myself... all the kids did great, but a few were definitely not comfortable on camera. Though, of course, that means we might not have ended up with Tristan and Jefferson, clearly the stars of the show.)

We did a two camera set-up... one shooting a wide shot, and another shooting details. Sadly, we underestimated the amount of space having the two students sitting back-to-back with easels would take, so our white backdrop wasn't quite sufficient to cover all shot. Whoops! 

There was a lot of footage to go through and we wanted to keep it really quick - always a challenge with lots to work with - but I think it turned out pretty well in the end, and I have to believe that it resulted in lots of smiles and good feelings from alumni, parents, and students. Whatever it takes to help me sleep at night, right? Right!  :)

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