So you want to make a viral video?
Australian studio The Woolshed Co. has revealed it's behind eight of the biggest viral video hits of the past two years.
The two-year experiment creating fake videos — part-funded by Screen Australia — aimed to figure out exactly what makes one go viral.
We asked The Woolshed Co. managing director Dave Christison to break down what went into making their videos international smash hits.
1. Production quality doesn't matter
But the premise of the video does.
Mr Christison explains:
"I think that the lion one is the fakest of all of the ones we made. You watch it and it just doesn't look right," he said
"[We thought] the concept behind it, [that] people have a lot of anger and resentment to these illegal poachers, would be strong enough."
After release, the studio noticed the usual arguments over whether the video was fake or not, but a third camp emerged in the comments.
"Then some people were going, this is clearly fake, but its not about whether its fake or not. It's about raising awareness," Mr Christison said.
2. You need to create debate
Any debate.
That was one of the key points Mr Christison and his team learned as they created hit after hit.
"It didn't matter if it was authenticity of the concept, the production value or something else all together. As long as there was a debate, that fuelled the fire," he said.
3. Keep it positive...and have a backup plan
Creating fake content came with considerable risk, but Mr Christison said his team was prepared if things took a turn for the worse.
"We always had strategies in place to be prepared that if something did take a negative turn, which would be very unlikely based on the subject matter of the videos, that we would be prepared to come out straight away and lay claim to it being fake and put a stop to it," he said.
"Very early on we culled quite few [concepts] that were really really strong but had that potential to go into a negative place and cause an issue and we immediately just binned them cause that's not what this was all about."
The Woolshed Co's biggest fake viral video hits
- Lightning almost strikes girl in Sydney!!! Boyfriend's reaction is priceless!!!!
Views: 58 million
Release date: February 2016
Behind the Scenes: This one was created in just 48 hours.
With the Sydney storms raging the team rushed to create a video to reflect the dominant story in the news cycle. It's all basic special effects, but before releasing the video, the team realised something was missing.
It wasn't until one of them ran into the garage and started shouting commentary over the video that Mr Christison knew they had a winner.
"No doubt that humour propelled the success of that one," he said.
- GoPro: Man Fights Off Great White Shark In Sydney Harbour
Views: 21 million
Release Date: July 2014
Behind the Scenes: The very first video in the series nearly de-railed the whole project.
"The guy in the video is one of our head creators and one of our senior editors. It was linked to his Facebook at the beginning, by accident. He had to change his name on Facebook so you couldn't track it to him," Mr Christison said.
The team found out what some of the biggest videos on YouTube were (animal attacks) and then filtered that further (shark attacks) to get their initial idea.
"We used integration of cutting techniques. So that was all editing," Mr Chrisitson said.
- Snowboarder Girl Chased By Bear - I Was Singing Rihanna Work And Didn't Know It Was Behind Me!
Views: 34 million
Release Date: April 2016
Behind the Scenes: The bear in the shot is just stock vision of a bear running.
Shot in Falls Creek in Victoria (on the most "un-Australian part of the mountain"), the team had a snowboarder film the footage herself on a selfie stick.
But again, there was a late ingredient to boost the video's chance of success.
"We added in her humming the lyrics to this Rihanna song because it was the top of the charts at the time," Mr Christison said.
- USA vs JAPAN - Ultimate Selfie Stick Fight
Views: 21 million
Release Date: July 2015
Behind the Scenes: With so many extras in this video, keeping the premise of the two-year experiment a secret was difficult.
So Mr Christison and his team didn't tell the actors the fight was going to happen.
"The first take that we did was actually the one we used. It was kind of real-ish reactions from the people because they didn't know the fight was going to break out," Mr Christison said.
"Some guy kind of tries to intervene and help, and he was genuinely trying to help because he thought something was going wrong."