For this assignment, the class was tasked with staging a hoax on campus. I don't have much media for this project besides the ransom note, so I'll just explain the project and how it all came to be.
This was the final assignment in the curriculum and up to this point every other project had been done independently. I did some early brainstorming for how to pull off a hoax by myself, including wearing colored contacts from day 2 until the end of the semester or making a video "exposing" Old Main, a building on CU's campus, for being a secret temple for the Illuminati or something overly-sensational like that.
Certainly our professor would walk into class on presentation day expecting some shenanigans, making it difficult to truly surprise him. However, somebody in the class suggested we all group up for a united effort instead of individual hoaxes. Since none of us had collaborated on a project in this course before, we decided this was the best way to subvert Professor Znerold's expectations. After a bit of brainstorming, we imagined a hoax involving a ransom note and a series of riddle-based clues.
I volunteered to craft a classic ransom note with our message written from letters cut from a magazine. At 2 minutes past the presentation session's start time, no one in the class had shown up and the professor was probably scratching his head at this. I slipped the note under the classroom door, knocked, and hustled to the UMC to join my classmates in wait. We got a text from him shortly after, which we responded to with vague clues leading him to various spots around campus. At each of these spots he would find a couple of our most recognizable physical projects from earlier in the semester, along with another clue sent to his phone.
He eventually made it to the final destination, where we all gave him a round of applause, went bowling and reminisced on our semester together.
Below is the ransom note I made from a note card and magazine cuttings.
