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There's been movie hype on the
internet before. In the mid-90s, when the internet was taking hesitant
steps...
The Blair Witch Project was one of the first films to come up with an innovative idea for the web site n in this case, to fill it with background material that hooked you into the idea before going to the cinema. The Blair Witch site (www.blairwitch.com) provided just enough of a taste of the plot, without giving too much away. It was integrated into the story, rather than just acting as a shallow marketing effort. Now, the online marketing surrounding this summer's sci-fi epic, AI, hastaken everything much, much further than anyone could have predicted. In an operation that must have taken months of careful, secretive preparation, the people behind AI have created not one web site, but dozens of them. Each one relates in some way to some character or plotline in the movie. Some of them are in different languages. Some of them offer phone numbers or e-mail addresses for people to contact n and when they do, they get strange messages or e-mails in reply. The whole thing has emerged as some incredibly addictive online game, involving the mysterious death of a man named Evan Chan. Clues are littered around the internet. A web site, www.familychan.com, purports to be that of Evan and his wife and children. It contains typically normal pictures of ordinary people doing ordinary things. Another name is Jeanine Salla, mentioned on posters advertising the film as a Sentient machine therapist. It didn't take long for someone to put her name into the Google search engine and come up with a fictional web site for Bangalore World University, and a pro-robot campaign group at www.inourimage.org. People have spent extraordinary amounts of time and effort exploring the wealth of information relating to these sites. One of the most impressive aspects of the game is the way it has involved and interacted with people from all over the world. One of the game sites has even mentioned one of the non-game fan sites, to the great delight of the fans. What is more extraordinary is the way the film-makers have devoted such a lot of thought and planning to this project. In order to get Google tolist the right sites when people search for Jeanine Salla, they must have constructed the sites months ago, to allow time for Google's software to index them. A lot of thought has also gone into the style of the collected web sites. Familychan.com looks and feels just like a lot of other personal web sites. Inourimage.org looks like a lot of campaign sites. And the Bangalore World University site (bangaloreworldu-in.co.nz) looks just like any other academic university site, even down to its unwieldy domain. While all this has become a kind of online game for people with the time to investigate it all, it has also become one of the fastest-growing internet ideas ever. People have been gossiping about it in mailing lists, newsgroups and web sites. The Cloudmakers mailing has been inundated with over 4,200 messages in a single month. Some jokers have even started putting up fake web sites, packed with cryptic mentions of known clues, that are not actually connected with thefilm at all. The Evan Chan mystery is one of the most popular and innovative applications of so-called 'viral marketing' ever, and will continue to generate interest in the movie for a long time yet. Unlike the movie, the web sites can be edited and added-to for many years to come. Even if the movie is a total flop when released this summer (although let's face it, that's pretty unlikely), the web sites will be remembered for a long time as something new and innovative that caught the jaded eyes of internet users. Just to add to the confusion surrounding everything, there is an official AI movie site (www.aimovie.com) which maintains a respectful distance from the interactive game. Even so, it has a lot of original and unusual content and background material that marks it out as something a bit different. BROWSING AROUND... :: Fed up with your job? Maybe you need some help with tricky things like handing in your notice (www.i-resign.com):: If you should see a small yellow plastic duck in the street, pick itup and log on to www.ifoundaduck.com:: Microsoft has finally seen the funny side of its annoying paperclip helper, and set up an online home for it at www.officeclippy.com:: The British are notoriously reluctant when it comes to complaining, so get some valuable help from www.howtocomplain.com Giles Turnbull has a web site at gilest.org end. (c) Western Morning News, 2001.
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