Flash Thunder

Interesting concept for a new coffee bean brand ‘Black Sunshine’. Based from a FPS perspective you go underground the meet a ‘drug’ dealer, look at the product, and order online your favourite morning ‘drug’. All shot from your perspective looking around the shady underground dealings of ‘the dealer’. Love the perspective panning with the video, they make it a little bigger than the screen so you can slightly pan around to see the scene – brings a really in depth feeling. Love the art direction and the how the buttons float around following your view. They have made these coffee beans very desirable by just making it very cool and very funny…

Created by Extreme Group and Lollipop.

Website here…

Simple, elegant site promoting the launch of ‘The White Ribbon’, a new film directed by Michael Haneke. A slideshow introduces the film via a few stills nicely animated along with quotes from the media. Overall a simple site that gives a nice ambience that suits the film well.

Created by Halo.

Website here…

The Puma Index, very simple and fun, promoting Puma’s body wear. Linked to the stock exchanges, DOW for USA, DAX for Germany, and ASX for Australia, with each market a different male or female model. The premise is when the stock market goes down the models on show more of the Puma body wear, i.e. they take more clothes off. When the stock market is doing well they wear winter clothes and so on. Really fun and simple, with lots of clever touches, for example, the videos loop and occasionally crop to give the impression there is a lot more footage. They have managed to keep the design so clean and simple, love the touches on the icons and buttons. Overall a really nice site, very clever and nice way to see a range of Puma products, with loads of options to embed, download iPhone app, and so on.

Created by Perfect Fools.

Website here…

A set of interactive music videos for French singer Emilie Simon. Very similar to the Arcade Fire interactive video which was also shot by the same director – Vincent Morriset. Each video has some simple interactivity which changes your experience of the music video, for example, in the Rocket to the Moon video you can change the playback of the video by clicking on the clock in the video, in the Chinatown video by clicking around coloured smoke goes in the direction of your cursor.

Rocket to the Moon video

Chinatown video

Fantastic site promoting HBO and it’s new project, much like the HBO Voyeur, HBO Imagine. Presenting a series of short films all shot from 4 different angles. The mechanism for viewing is a large 3d cube which you drag around to see the 4 different sides. There are several films to explore all through a floaty 3d interface. It is all highly polished with great transitions and animation, love the way you can explore the different videos. All very slick interactivity with interesting films, all directed by Noam Murro, complete a really cool online experience.

Created by BBDO NY and The Barbarian Group.

Website here…

Interesting portfolio of French movie poster studio and marketing agency Silenzio. What makes this so accomplished is the animation and the 3d thumbnails of the posters, visually it is attractive and the animation really brings it to life. Nicely structured the posters can also be organised by alphabetical order, or explored through a 3d wall. Very cool…

Created by Creaktif, Unity, and Lab9.

Website here…

Site promoting the Watchmen motion comic, an animated version of the seminal Watchmen graphic novel. The various sections within the site have a nice 3d movement to them, with objects at various depth and your mouse controlling your viewpoint, giving a nice sense of depth.

Created by The Visionaire Group.

Website here…

Pretty cool website of the movie ‘Wanted’. What I like about this site is the smooth slick navigation and the full screen layout, and the way the camera moves in and out to reveal the sections for each character. Might have been even better if the interface was not pre-rendered and more dynamic.

Made by projectc.net.

Website here…

Having recently seen the movie ‘Cloverfield’, it reminded me of the viral campaign that preceded it last year at some point. I love the idea – even though its all of course manufactured – of the whole enigmatic backstory. I think as humans, well i am, we are drawn into the ‘code of enigma’ that is generated by such marketing techniques. We ‘need’ to know the answer and we hunt down and investigate until we know the answer – well sometimes!

The suite of websites created for the movie is not spectacular – but include the inevitable myspace character pages, a Japanese corporate website, and Flash microsites amongst others. This is the great aspect of interactive work, a web of mystery can be created, sent around, and talked about – you don’t get this to the same extent in print or tv. Other campaigns have also been interesting – I remember a pretty cool NIN trail of websites http://www.securebroadcastinformatics.com/, try and find the hidden login box (also read: this post).

List of known Cloverfield websites:
http://www.1-18-08.com
Example character
http://www.slusho.jp
http://www.tagruato.jp
http://www.tidowave.com
http://www.jamieandteddy.com (password: jllovesth)

know that its all pretty cheesy and tacky and transparent, however I just believe that its a great way of involving your audience and makes it all seem that little more interesting…