On the 24th of November, I found myself stood behind a camera filming Bristol students who had never met each other before, kissing. A week before, the Head of Features for UBTV- Gemma Wilson, suggested that we do a re-make of the famous ’20 strangers kissing’ video as our next project for the department. After a week of persuading students to take part (with the promise of free donuts) we found ourselves filming what has turned out to be, a huge Internet frenzy. It required some careful planning to make sure we paired people together who had never met before and whose actual first meeting was captured on camera. Despite a few last minute dropouts we managed to capture 18 students and their giggly, awkward, sober, first kiss on camera for the whole world to see.
From a producing point of view, we were so pleased with how the video turned out. For a group of people who are meant to be at their peak stage of confidence and extremely comfortable with kissing strangers in clubs on a regular basis, it was extremely interesting to see how these students responded to the experiment. At one point we had a guy waiting to do his kiss but the girl we had paired him with didn’t turn up, so in the true spirit of spontaneity I stepped forward from behind the camera and took part. It was certainly an extremely awkward situation as in the cold light of day and in front of a camera you quickly start to over-think all of your movements and forget your basic instincts on how to do something which should be a fairly simple manoeuvre.
After a few days of editing, adding a black and white filter and a fitting song, we released it to YouTube, unaware of the reaction that would follow. The video has reached about 45,000 views already, been featured on The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror, Epigram and various other sites. Gemma, Will and I are extremely proud of the response to the video and the excitement it has brought to UBTV, and are very grateful to all those that took part.