Idea IS the format

We made this.

I’ve seen a lot of different responses I’d like to quote, but the one that sticks out comes from Ain’t It Cool News, where this is, and has been for several hours, the top story:

The actual movie seems almost like it’s going to be a foot note to what’s really interesting about this whole project: a blueprint on how to use all media as a way of heightening the entire experience of a film. Not just in a phony buzz ‘Blair Witch’ style. More about using other medium to flesh out the movie in the way that just can’t be done by sitting in a theater for about two hours. Very cool.

Very cool indeed.

[UPDATED 13:30 22/01/09] That’s me selling hot dogs in the first of the vox pops btw. Technically I believe was exec producer on this project, and I probably shade a co-writing credit, but I’ll always think of myself as the hot dog salesman ≠)

[UPDATED 14:11 22/01/09] We just found someone selling Better Blue Than Red tees online. We printed up one for the kid in the clip and a few for the crew,but we never really thought about mass-producing them.  Looks like we don’t need to.

We also received word that an impromptu fan-led Better Blue Than Red A.R.G. has sprung up in one of the major forums devoted to this movie, invented and rolled out by the Watchmen superfans who make it their home, and use it to pour out their hopes and fears for this movie.  They are hardcore, and I salute them (and also fear them, just a little bit).

[UPDATED 17:00 22/01/09]We’ve been working with Annie Ok as a consultant on this project.  She really opened my eyes to what powerful community ttools Youtube and Flickr are, as well as being ok places to store photographs and video clips.

She just pinged me and pointed me in the direction of this:

It’s the top 20 most popular clips on Youtube today, in the category of News, into which we felt compelled to insert the Manhattan piece, in the name of maximum realism.  This is for the UK, but I gather the US looks much the same – a whole load of Obamas, and one Ted Philips.

At 91,000 views, with three and a half hours to go, it’s definitely looks like we’ll make six figures within the first 24 hours. If you’d offered me that this time yesterday, I’d have torn your arm off.

[UPDATE 19:15 22/01/09] Found: “New footage from the comic book movie that makes Daredevil look like a film that is somehow worse than Daredevil.”  We just hit 110,000 views, with time to spare.

This is one of the first few images to be released through The New Frontiersman.

Here’s another:

The clock is well and truly ticking ≠)

It’s been a pretty frantic first working week of 2009. Normally it can take a week or two into January before the studio is at capacity and everybody’s up to speed. This time around I think most of us already feel like we’ve worked at least a couple of weeks, and a few of us will be at our desks for most of the weekend.

This is why. www.TheNewFrontiersman.net. It’s a site we’re producing as part of the online campaign for a certain film I might have mentioned around here once or twice before.

The New Frontiersman is a right-wing extremist publication read by the character who feels like the cold heart of Watchmen – Rorschach.

At the moment the dossier remains sealed – we’re aiming to open it up some time early next week. I’m not going to talk about the contents. I – and our client, Paramount – would much prefer to keep people guessing.

And guessing they are.

Since launching on Thursday the site has received a HUGE amount of exposure on all sorts of different movie blogs and fan sites, and is being discussed in forums all over the wilds of the web. 15,000 unique visitors in the first 24 hours isn’t bad at all from a standing start, especially for a site without any actual content.

We’re already feeling the attention. One tech-savvy fanboy went to the trouble of decompiling the flash movie and found a path to a test XML feed, referencing some random media on Flickr and Youtube – a touch careless on our part maybe, but I’m prepared to admit that even we have been caught slightly off-guard by the level of interest in what we’re doing.

I also came across speculation on one blog that the ink blot on the front of the dossier is intended to look like an evil fox, and is a deliberate dig at 20th Century Fox, who currently have Warner Bros in the courts over the question of who owns the rights to distribute this movie.

I’m happy to confirm that it’s nothing of the sort. Apart from anything else, Warner Bros and Fox are both valued clients of ours, and we’re not about to start picking sides. I guess ultimately we’re on the side of the movie, and our job is just to bring it to as large an audience as possible.

It’s also worth noting that our client on this project is actually Paramount, who are distributing the film outside the US, even though some bloggers seem to be assuming that it’s being driven by the Warner Bros team behind the campaign for The Dark Knight. That’s pretty high praise, especially considering we haven’t really done anything yet.

For anybody still in any doubt, you might be interested (as I was) to learn that the Rorschach test is actually a set of ten very specific inkblots, of which this is the first. Wikipedia reports that it’s commonly interpreted as a bat, a badge and a coat of arms.

If people are seeing an evil foxes, I guess that gives you a sense of where many of the fans and bloggers stand on the whole legal issue. Producer Lloyd Levin recently made an eloquent appeal for the studios to resolve the issue so that the release of the film could proceed unobstructed, but I’ve also seen some more incendiary analysis, reflecting how serious Watchmen fans are about seeing this movie.

So they should be.