The past week has been an exciting week for Warhol: POP – Open Lab’s collaboration with Te Papa in response to Warhol: Immortal.

Tickets have gone on sale, the Facebook page has launched, and our hype video has been released! We’ve been busy finalising our designs for promoting the event and building the components for our POP installations, which will pop up around Massey and Victoria University campuses in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, the staff at Open Lab have found our custom-made promotional stand to be rather handy as a coat hanger for the rainy days.

Earlier in the week we were lucky enough to get to meet with Te Papa’s sound and lighting technicians to run over what we wanted from the event and how all the sound and lighting effects might be achieved on the night. This was exciting for the group as it really felt like the event was coming to life and it helped us to start planning the dress rehearsal night.

I’m not going to lie: we’ve had a bit of struggle finding drag queens and performers who will volunteer as hosts for POP. We’re still looking for more people but I would like to say a huge thanks to the lovely staff and students at Toi Whakaari who have been amazing in helping us spread the word to performers and offering us their best students to get involved. It’s great how people come together and help out to be part of such a grand event.

We’ve worked hard to put together the hype video and one of our spatial designers has turned into a mighty fine film maker.

We’ve all had lots of fun making it, painting people’s faces with UV paint and even painting our two musicians’ bodies white to be projected onto. The footage from the video will reveal the great shots we got through using the white paint. We’re excited to present you with the hype video and a taste of what to expect on the night.

Warhol: POP is also live on Facebook and we were overwhelmed to find it had reached 200 likes in a single day! The Facebook page will be a great way to keep up with all the latest antics around the event, so if you haven’t already liked it make sure you head there now and do so in order to stay in the loop.

Celeste Holmes, Student, Massey University

Designing POP: The Warhol Factory experience in the 21st Century – read part 1 of the Open Lab students’ blogging series to find out what POP is about.