It’s not every day that someone can claim to have paid a visit to a human meat butchery. This has now become a reality thanks to the folks at Full Fat. Dan Walsh, PR Director at Full Fat, took some time out of running the butchery to answer some questions about the experience.
Here’s the full interview for those that are brave enough to read it.
The idea for a human butcher shop is unique to say the least. What made you come up with such an original idea?
We basically decided that zombies had been done a million times before and we wanted to do something different with this campaign. The initial umbrella strapline for the campaign that the ad agency came up with was ‘No Hope Left’ so we wanted to play on this theme. Rather than staging the same old stunt with people dressed as zombies wandering around moaning, we wanted to look at it from the other angle. What happens when zombies attack humans? To do this we did two things:
1. We created a fictional butcher character based on characters within the game who was capitalising on the increase in human meat available due to the more powerful zombies created by the mutated C-Virus
2. We staged three lectures at St. Bartholomew Hospital’s Pathology Museum to really explore some of these ideas
It must have been hard to try and get Capcom on board with such an idea. What research did the team have to do in order to make sure the pitch was a success?
Actually, it wasn’t difficult at all. Capcom are well know for taking risks with their PR campaigns and they generally want as outrageous and controversial as possible. We actually pitched several ideas but had to tweak these as Capcom originally felt that the ideas weren’t controversial enough!
Some of the meat cuts are very unique. Did you have a tough time finding someone who would be willing to help shaping the meat into human shapes body parts?
Throughout the whole campaign we’ve worked with some amazing people and genuine experts in their field. Sharon Baker, the food artist we worked with, had never actually worked with meat as a medium before but she already had the limb moulds through her work baking body parts in bread. There was then a long process to try and make the meat limbs both edible and realistic. I think she did an amazing job of making the limbs look horrific but taste delicious.
Obviously the aim of this special butcher shop is to promote the excellent Resident Evil 6. Did you ever ask customers over the weekend what they expected from the game?
To be honest we didn’t. The butchers shop was more about the experience and generating buzz than anything else.
Was there anyone who shown interest in the game due to visiting the butcher shop?
There was a huge mixture of people that attended the shop over the two days we were open to the public. Some were die hard Resi fans that wanted to experience and see the shop and were well aware of the game. Some were people that had heard about it through a friend or via all the coverage and online buzz but didn’t necessarily know or care about Resi and then there were the people that came along and having experienced the shop wanted to know more about the game. So a real mixture.
Did you manage to sell of all stock? It seemed quite busy throughout the two days.
We sold almost everything yes. All the human limbs went, as did all the jars of red and green herb. All we were left with at the end of Saturday was a couple of packets of ‘J’Avo Caught Human Thigh Steaks’ and a couple of packets of ‘Peppered Human & Lemon Sausages’. We took over £300 over the counter that will be donated to the Limbless Association.
How on earth did you guys come up with some of the ideas for the butcher shop?
Don’t ask. I think the term may be “inside the mind of a mad man”!!
Why did you decide to name your shop after the badass villain that is Wesker? Weren’t you worried he would end up spiking the meat with a virus?
The nature of Wesker as a butcher leant itself perfectly to Wesker from the game. Spiking the meat was the least of our worries surely? The guy was selling human flesh!! Haha
Would you consider running the butcher shop again or perhaps even partner up with Capcom for projects in the future?
We certainly hope to be working with Capcom on future projects and game releases yes, and I hope that the work we did with the pop-up human butchery has gone some way to securing that. As for the shop, never say never. Keep watching @weskerson 
Was it difficult to run a human butcher shop? You must have gotten a lot of questions from the general public.
We kept the whole thing under wraps for a long time because there was several stages to the campaign that lead up to the human butchery. For example, we staged five murder scenes across London outside major media offices and then posted them completely unbranded autopsy reports with accompanying “crime scene” images. We then distributed press packs that included the human sausages and human thigh steaks along with various other bits and bobs. It wasn’t until this point that we revealed to the media what we were planning and even then we didn’t publicly tell people. We had a big campaign on Twitter that saw us reveal different bits of information as more people followed us. It worked incredibly well.
Finally, Resident Evil 6 is nearly out. Will you guys at the office be playing it? Preferably while eating a good human hand steak?
You betcha ass we will. We have an HD projector, 5.1 surround sound system and a debug PS3 and Xbox in the office. We’ve been playing it for a while but we’re really looking forward to the full game landing on our desks! And yes, we’ll be tucking into a hand or two while we’re playing!
Thank you very much for your time. It was a pleasure to visit the butcher shop on Thursday.
Thank you. I’m really pleased you enjoyed it and thanks for coming.
Dan Walsh, PR Director, Resident Evil 6
Resident Evil 6 is out now on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Ve3tro had the privilege of reviewing it recently. Have a look at what our reviewer thought of it here.
