VIRAL: Survival In a Fallen Singapore (Short Film)
2018
Team
Director — Mirza Mas'od
Producer — Aaron Sim
Sound Design — Nigel Kong & Nasyitah Kamsani
Editor — Mirza Mas'od
Marketing & Campaign Design — Mirza Mas'od
Film Branding, Identity Design, Campaign Design, Speculative Narrative Film Direction
VIRAL is a silent horror short set in a dystopian Singapore in 2027, accompanied by a complete theatrical release identity that treats the fiction as unassailable fact. Directed, edited, and fully marketed under the Thirdeye Pictures banner, the project refuses the conventional boundary between cinematic narrative and physical reality. Instead, its comprehensive campaign—posters, cinema tickets, popcorn boxes, and sticker packs—deploys a unified visual language of neon green, black, and white-cream to infect every artifact with the film’s central anxiety. The marketing does not merely announce the screening; it ensures dread is physically seated in the audience's lap before a single frame is ever projected upon the screen.
The film’s true horror is not found in gore or jump scares, but in the silent, wrong emptiness of recognizable HDB pathways and the subtle ambiguity of human connection. The project intimately asks: if the line between helping and infecting is drawn with the exact same hand, then how do we ever truly know who is safe to approach? The campaign successfully extends this dreadful uncertainty into the physical ritual of cinema-going. The popcorn box, the ticket, the sticker pack—each is a reminder that survival is not passive; it is an active, suspicious, and deeply isolating condition.
The Narrative & The City
Set within the eerily deserted HDB estates, parklands, and pedestrian walkways of an unrecognizable Singapore, the film tracks two young protagonists—Darren and Diana. A catastrophic "Walker Epidemic" has decimated the metropolis, and the familiar routes of everyday life become avenues of existential threat. This is not an abstract apocalyptic setting; it is an intimately local one, leveraging Singapore’s extreme urban density to amplify the horror of vast, inhabited spaces suddenly rendered hollow. The fiction extends into diegetic reality through a meticulously crafted prop: a fictional edition of The Straits Times, precisely emulating the real broadsheet's layout, typography, and visual register, carrying harrowing headlines like "STATE OF EMERGENCY" and "ANDROMEDA EXPERIMENT SCANDAL."The Poster & The Gaze
The central campaign identity is built around a single, enigmatic gesture: a human hand bathed in fluorescent green light. Two posters present the same image, yet one is structurally flipped. From the aerial perspective, the hand reaches downward—the protagonist grasping for salvation, connection, or survival. Viewed from the opposing perspective, the hand reaches upward from a sheer abyss of darkness—signaling infection, threat, and the terrifying unknown. The image's central, brilliant conceptual gambit is that you cannot morphologically differentiate the two. The same anatomy, the same fingers, the same alien green glow. This visual ambiguity poses the film’s central philosophical query: where is the boundary between the survivor and the infected, and how terrifyingly swiftly does it dissolve?The Campaign & Artifacts
The physical campaign extends the visual unease into tangible, consumable cinema objects. Tickets are printed in four distinct colorways—neon green, stark white-cream, and deep black—ensuring even the entry pass harbors a chilling, bureaucratic weight. The popcorn boxes are perhaps the campaign’s most unsettling infiltration; they are wrapped in the same reaching hand imagery, meaning the infected grip physically manifests in the lap of the audience as they eat. A silver foil sticker pack, stamped with a subtle biohazard symbol, carries the blunt directive: SURVIVAL IS YOUR ONLY OPTION. The complete system functions as a quarantine notice, treating the audience not as passive spectators, but as subjects directly implicated in the epidemic's containment protocols.
Context
Myrick, D. & Sánchez, E. — The Blair Witch Project (Artisan Entertainment, 1999)
Abrams, J. J. & Reeves, M. — Cloverfield (Bad Robot/Paramount Pictures, 2008)
Blomkamp, N. — District 9 (TriStar Pictures, 2009)
Scott, R. — Prometheus (20th Century Fox, 2012)
Fallon, F. — Subterranean Singapore 2065 (Bartlett School of Architecture, 2016)
Quak, A. W. C. & Tan, J. M. — PROGRESS (Nanyang Technological University, 2019)
Ziemann, S. — Accidental Utopia (Media Installation, 2024)
Near Future Laboratory — The Cost of Being Connected (Design Fiction, 2024)
Focus Features — Obsession (Film Marketing Campaign, 2026)
Cineverse — Return to Silent Hill Alternate Reality Game (Film Marketing Campaign, 2026)
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