Technology giant Samsung has entered the branded entertainment field with an innovative, interactive film project. Available at www.anyfilms.net, the series is a spy film with 10 different characters, one event, 10 possible endings, and 11,000 ways to play out.
Created by agency Margeotes Fertitta Powell (MFP), New York, the film operates on a grid created by The Barbarian Group, the Boston-headquartered interactive services shop behind projects like “The Subservient Chicken” online experience for Burger King and Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Miami. (The Barbarian Group also has an office in New York.) Users who go to the anyfilms site select four icons (the choices are a martini glass, a cell phone, a gun, a flower, a pair of underwear, and a toilet bowl), and drag them onto a grid; depending on where they are placed within the grid, the action will play in different ways. Once the icons are in place, the story begins–the action is set in a crowded, trendy bar, and involves a pink suitcase, a stolen experimental fuel source, gun play, strangulation, and a lot of presumably unmarked bills. To get the full scope of the story arc, users need to create more than one film (an easy task, given the intrigue level); each film is a minute or two long. And while Samsung phones are featured in some of the sequences, it’s a very organic placement–a character will receive a text message that the suitcase is in hand, or a bar patron receives a call from her date, as an example. (Director Terry Rietta of bicoastal Villains shot the segments over three days at Hiro in The Maritime Hotel in New York; he also served as a writer on the project.)
“Samsung wanted to be seen as an innovator and a leader in the electronics/technology space, and they basically came to us and asked us to develop a campaign, preferably online, that would enhance that idea in the minds of generation Y,” explains Josh Rogers, concept director at MFP, referring to the 18-25 demographic, adding that the company had been looking into producing films for the online world. “The way to succeed with Generation Y, as we saw with Subservient Chicken before us, is to give them control of the experience, not dictate what the experience should be.”
To that end, the agency and the client sought to create an entertainment channel that would showcase the brand’s technological prowess. “We weren’t necessarily talking just about Samsung as being an innovative technology company, one that would bring all the innovative technology of the future [to consumers],” notes Rogers, “but also as a company that would bring innovative content and entertainment that would actually exist on that technology as well.”
MFP partnered with The Barbarian Group, who created the grid concept. Chris Bradley, creative director of interactive and emerging media at MFP, notes that the agency developed the storylines and the overall concept of the film project, while The Barbarian Group “came in and really contributed a ton in terms of helping realize this idea, and even inventing this grid.” In addition to Bradley and Rogers, agency credit goes to chief creative officer Neil Powell, writers Dan Shefelman and Jenny Lee, head of production Annette Suarez and producer Stacey Suplizio.
Rogers relates that while Samsung phones were featured in the project, there was no mandate for a hard sell. “It was really about developing the idea, and promoting the idea that [Samsung] is really, truly innovative by discovering/inventing this new medium where entertainment can live,” he explains. “The actual phones very naturally factor into the story.”
“Our goal,” state Bradley, “was not to go out and pound people over the head and tell them how cool Samsung was. It was more about showing them how cool Samsung is.”
THE PROCESS MFP was called upon to work on the project by Drill, an offshoot of Japanese agency Dentsu, about eight months ago. About a month later, the initial concept was hammered out, and MFP approached The Barbarian Group. At that point, the grid concept was developed, and scripts and a story arc were created. The shoot that produced all the permutations of the project took three days; the films were edited by Steve Evans and Doug Madden of Outside Editorial, New York. “It was a pretty ambitious thing for them to do for the amount of time and money they had,” says Evans of the project. “It was really fun–it was a different set of challenges and problems instead of just trying to get as much information [as possible] into thirty seconds. It was much more about solving narrative problems, and story line problems, and also figuring out how all these pieces go together.”
There was an extensive testing period to make sure the grid operated seamlessly, and the site quietly went live on Christmas Eve. Bradley reports that traffic has increased over the past month or so. The agency contacted a few blogs about the new site, but expects interest to be generated virally.
The anyfilm.net site will live beyond the interactive spy series. “We imagine this particular film experience will last another couple of months,” notes Rogers. “The idea was to develop this site as something that was much more lasting. If you look at it as a channel experience, we will add and create new interactive films and experience in the future.” And MFP and Samsung don’t expect that the content will only live online. “The real challenge was in creating a new medium,” says Bradley, “and how now can we expand what we’ve done, using this as a first step to creating really unique content that will end up on people’s hand-held devices. There’s a giant push for content to be pushed out to devices with screens on them.”
As for what the next iteration will, the agency is still mulling options. “This particular experience is very mysterious, so we’ve been playing with developing other genres, but also other ways to actually experience the interactive film–maybe it’s not going to be a grid the next time.”
“The medium itself can mutate and change,” adds Rogers. “It’s not held to being just this grid. The interactive portion of it, the storytelling portion of it, can go hand-in-hand with what ever goes up on screen.”
