Idea IS the format

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.

Tags: the new frontiersman, watchmen

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 2:36 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.