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
A silent horror short set in a dystopian Singapore, 2027, accompanied by a complete theatrical release identity that treats the fiction as fact. The campaign deploys VIRAL as though for a real commercial opening — poster campaign, cinema tickets, popcorn boxes, sticker packs — executing a unified visual language of neon green, black, and white-cream across every artifact. The marketing materials do not merely announce the film; they extend its central anxiety — the ambiguity between infection and survival — into the physical space of cinema-going, seeding dread before a single frame is projected. Directed, edited, and marketed by me under Thirdeye Pictures, with Aaron Sim producing and sound by Nigel Kong and Nasyitah Kamsani.
The campaign is built around a hand. Two posters, same image, same hand — one flipped. From above, the hand is outstretched toward the viewer: the protagonist reaching for help, for connection, for survival. From below, the same hand reaches toward you from darkness: threat, infection, the other side of the same motion. Originally conceived as symmetrical — two characters, two positions — the discovery made during development was that you cannot tell which is which. The same anatomy, the same fingers, the same green light. The poster's central ambiguity is the film's central question: where is the line between survivor and infected, and how quickly does it move?
The campaign runs neon green, black, and white-cream across every cinema object: tickets printed in four colourways, popcorn boxes bearing the hand imagery — the infected hand reaching through the very container the audience holds in their lap — and a sticker pack stamped with biohazard symbols and the directive "SURVIVAL IS YOUR ONLY OPTION," designed to read as a quarantine notice.
Singapore is not a neutral backdrop. The film is set in HDB estate paths and parkland — one of the densest cities in the world rendered deserted, which is its own register of wrongness. The characters are Darren and Diana, young Singaporeans moving through a city that looks exactly like theirs.
The Straits Times newspaper that appears in frame was designed by me — a fictional edition built to emulate the actual broadsheet's layout, typography, and visual register, carrying the headlines: "STATE OF EMERGENCY / ANDROMEDA EXPERIMENT SCANDAL / WALKER EPIDEMIC." The crisis has its own press coverage.
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