Great Works Absolut I’m here
10.03.29 – Together with Great Works and ABSOLUT VODKA we have produced a Facebook Connect experience that leads to an exclusive online screening of Spike Jonze’s short movie “I’m Here.” The experience was shot by Anders Hallberg for B-Reel Films in Florida.
Watching movies online is an easy way to enjoy movies, but hasn’t it taken away a lot of the actual experience of going to the cinema? Great Works asked us if we could build the same kind of feeling online and really add something to the whole experience?
A theater experience. You need a ticket booth, a theater and, last but not least, your friends. So we built an online movie theatre with a live feel. For instance, if you went to a screening during the day, there would be people passing by on the street in daylight with their takeaway lattes. If you went for an evening show, you would find the theater sparkling with lights and people on the street heading home from dinner.
We wanted to build a truly enjoyable and realistic cinema experience online.
One of the most challenging points in this project was to make the theatre come alive, to get as close as possible to a live streaming experience. We shot the exterior scene with a locked down camera giving us throughout the day video assets that gave a convincing sensation of entering the site during morning, day, afternoon and night. To build from this seamless loops and sequences that could play for long times without being repetitive proved to be a challenge, due to all the little changes that take place on a lively street in a single hour, let alone a full day.
The theater was shot in downtown Miami, on a busy street. For interiors we found another location that helped create the perfect mood for a night at the movies.
We incorporated visitors’ friends’ personal profile pictures, extracting them through Facebook Connect. Then placed them onto badges worn by the other moviegoers.
The actual slots for watching the short film were limited to 5000 tickets a day.
The aim was to make the whole experience as seamless and strong as possible without impacting the experience of the main feature. We really wanted it to create the special feeling of going to the cinema and forgetting about the office and the everyday world for a while.