After an enormous 9 month engagement, the curtain has finally risen on DreamWorks’ latest animated feature and our unusual project creating a live action story of comic conspiracies and extraterrestrial mayhem to tie-in directly to the animated film. Juggling live action, animation, and comedy all at once proved to be extremely challenging, but I think we acquitted ourselves nicely. Here’s a scene I directed towards the end of the campaign spoofing a certain recent monster flick with the help of the animated cast of “Monster vs. Aliens.”
In this project, we wanted to help encapsulate the offbeat comic sensibility of the characters in the movie and reach out to the 18-25 year old demographic in way few animated films can. Because this movie took a satirical swipe at B-movies and science fiction classics, we needed an ongoing tale that was just a tongue-in-cheek and funny. So we invented a paranoid blogger named “Jeffrey Freedman.” A kook who lives in his mom’s basement and rants about the government using science fiction movies and books to disguise the truth from the American public. One of the videos even had him accusing real scifi enthusiasts at the World Science Fiction convention of being part of the conspiracy.
Freedman eventually became so enraged by the government cover-up that he “crashed the movie premiere” and confronted stars like Reese Witherspoon, Will Arnett, and Hugh Laurie about their role in the conspiracy:
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
The rest of the tale involving 80s workout tapes, flying dogs, and the New World Order can be found at Jeffrey Freedman’s blog: TopSecretConspiracy.com. The Top Secret Conspiracy project got rave reviews from scifi sites, movie fans, and forums as well as racked up hundreds of thousands of viewers. But the best part of this whole project? When it finally concluded I received a very gracious email praising our fine work from none other than the CEO of Weekly World News journalistic home of Bat boy and the alien who met with Ross Perot. Now that’s an endorsement.
Fun Trivia: If you watch the opening scene of “Monsters vs. Aliens,” you might spot an homage to Top Secret Conspiracy in the film’s sequence with the Artic Defense station.
Coming with the creative for this space last year was a pretty exciting proposition. Guitar Hero is one of the few major gaming franchises that doesn’t revolve around a super soldier blasting stuff in a post apocalyptic future. Instead the style evokes the grunge and grit of a rock concert venue somewhere in America. Coming up with the concept for the Home space was the easier part… “backstage” at the type of venues you play in the game. But the trickier challenge was coming up with gameplay that felt like Guitar Hero without just mimicking the legendary video game mechanics. What resulted was a kind of simon says type rock challenge where players compete against each other to land the longest string of notes in their rock solo. Check out this video:
A very cool honor for all of us involved in “Terminator” from this year’s Webby Awards!
It is my pleasure to inform you that Terminator: Dark Discovery has been selected as an Official Honoree for the Online Guerilla & Innovation category in The 13th Annual Webby Awards.
As a result of the exceptional quality of submissions this year, the Academy has recognized outstanding entries as Official Honorees alongside our Nominees and Winners. The Official Honoree distinction is awarded to the top 15% of all work entered that exhibits remarkable achievement. With nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 states and over 60 countries, this is an outstanding accomplishment for you and your team.
This is my new unofficial social media work promoting The Dark Knight for this year’s Academy Awards. Why? Because it’s an amazing film and it faces an extremely tough road ahead. It’s a masterpiece and yet it has to challenge 81 years of Academy history that has never once awarded the prize to a film like it.
Created a video to make my case. I’m leveraging my past experience supporting Children of Men but in some ways this campaign will be the complete opposite. There the studio was ignoring the film and audiences had never heard of it and we started the campaign late. Here, the studio thinks they have a shot, audiences know the film, and I’m starting the campaign early. Hopefully some of the online audience will push this thing hard enough to make the long odds of an oscar for the Dark Knight more possible.
Creating this space was a pretty long and evolving process that went through quite a few iterations and different hands on its way to release. Happily though, I think the vision of Ubisoft’s gritty, war-torn African country mired in conflict is projected throughout the space.
Here’s the announcement from the official Playstation blog:
Far Cry 2 comes Home today
Posted by Bertrand Helias // Senior Producer, Far Cry 2
Hi All, the Far Cry 2 Space is launching in PlayStation Home’s closed beta as we speak!
The space will invite players to dig deeper into the game’s vast African landscape. Users will have the opportunity to investigate in-game environments, including a bombed-out train station that has been converted into the ad hoc office of Reuben Oluwagembi, a journalist caught in the middle of the propaganda conflict between the warring UFLL and APR factions.
In Reuben’s office, you’ll be able to analyze an interactive map of the game world to strengthen your knowledge of the Far Cry 2 environment to develop your strategy for future missions. Locate guard posts, safe houses to save the progress of your game, weapon shops to buy new weapons, and bus stations to expedite your travel across the expansive land.
Players will have access to Reuben’s files containing various pictures, articles, and dossiers that will delve deeper into the background of The Jackal, as well as that of the other warlords and opposing factions. And finally, multiplayer game of Mancala that uses bullets as game pieces will be fully playable.
Hope you enjoy it and be sure to look out for new features as we’ll be updating the space regularly.
Explaining these long complex story narratives that stretch over the course of months can be tricky so here’s a quick 5 minute video summary of our work on “Terminator: Dark Discovery”:
In addition to that, here’s a video clip of me on a panel at ARGfest in which I explain a bit more about the concepts and execution of the WWE and Terminator alternate reality experiences here’s a clip from our panel at ARGfest after the jump… [Read more →]
UPDATE: Video of the panel (that’s me on the far right of the frame ):
DIY DAYS SF – The Art and Science of Crowdsourcing
—–
I’ll be part of a panel “The Art & Science of Crowdsourcing” at DIY Days this Sunday.
Lance Weiler, the film director behind The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma, has organized an interesting discussion series across the US that is called “DIY Days” (Do-it-Yourself Days). The series of live conferences / discussions known as DIY DAYS is happening in LA, SF, Boston, NYC and London. According to Lance, their goal is to explore filmmakers and storytellers in this day of shifting film distribution systems. [Read more →]
During development of Playstation Home, our company has created some pretty amazing experiences in this exciting new entertainment medium. I was lucky enough to play a creative director role in all three of the spaces on display in this video from Game Trailers, the main Home Square (US), Warhawk, and Uncharted which was my main focus (because it is my beloved baby). Check it out:
Jack Buser, the Director of Playstation home posted this message to let those of you curious to check out Home take a peek early. Obviously we’re all very excited to share it with you and thrilled to see some of our work on display at this early stage.
Today we’re announcing the expansion of our closed beta test for PlayStation Home to begin at the end of the month. Later today, the PLAYSTATION Store will be updated with a PlayStation Home theme. By downloading the theme, users are submitting an application to join the PlayStation Home Beta test community. We will be using a variety of criteria including activity on the PLAYSTATION Network to determine eligibility for the Beta community. Existing beta testers have automatically qualified to be part of the expanded beta.
Several current MoU employees and alumni including myself, Lauren Lamonica, and Adrian Herbez studied “Building Virtual Worlds” and did research work and independent studies for Stage 3 under Randy Pausch at Carnegie-Mellon University. Though he’s now famous for his celebrated speech and autobiographical bestseller “The Last Lecture” about his battle with cancer, he should also be remembered and cheered for his pioneering work in virtual reality and 3-D social experience research.
I believe it’s no coincidence that so many of my colleagues in that class went on to become leaders in our industries of creating bold new virtual experiences and innovations in entertainment. It is my strong belief that they will carry on Randy’s legacy.
):
