Silver Screen #5: Monsters vs. Aliens

The last site for the week throws a helping hand to evolving A.D.D to brand new heights.

On the surface it's a full-screen beauty. You use the arrows on the left and right to take you to new scenes, and each scene has it's own clip of the movie. I think i've seen at least 20 minutes of the movie by now.

Once you start clicking around...remember Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson, where he plays the Russian defector? There's a scene where he's trying to buy toilet paper, and when faced with a whole isle full of choices he goes into an almost epileptic fit. That would be me as a kid, on this site. It's big, it's bad, and it baby-sits your kids for two days.

Games! Monsters Creator! Trading Card Creator! Activities! Secret ID badges! Download and create Cootie Catchers, Cards, Stickers, Party Favors.....whew..that's about half of it.

No longer does Mom and Dad have to go to Walmart, or Burger King to get all the fixins for turning their kids life into the current cartoon o' the day. This is a one-stop shop. It's actually quite impressive.

Most of it was created for quantity vs. quality, but then again thinking of the target -
This probably works just fine.

Or this:

Yea i've got one. It works at all the hot clubs around town.

The Monster Creator is interesting once you download the "Unity plug-in" and install it. Seems like an odd disruption of flow, and unneeded with all the Flash creators we've seen around lately.

I think you can get the same style of cel shading with flash, but maybe there were other reasons for using this plug-in. The way your build your monster is a bit different, and more contextual as far as their target "creator". The machine asks you questions like "What did you eat for breakfast" and "what's your favorite school subject", and gives you funny or real options depending on the question. It takes your answers and builds your monster. Then you can add color, or a bowtie (my personal preference).

Yesterday I was talking about ARGs extending the movie experience, and this site does that in one big treasure box way.

/.what would an arg be like for kids?.\

Silver Screen #4: Terminator Salvation

It seems like only the geek's get cool stuff online when it comes to movies. Yay for us.

Full-screen video seems to be the weapon of choice. The scrub bar is neat, it's worked into the design - you can see it above the video in red.

Like Star Trek and Wolverine there's a lot going on here. There are two web games, one your more traditional "game" and the other is an Alternate Reality Game. The traditional one had some troubles connecting right away, and I was too interested in the ARG, so I can't report much about it.

The Alternate Reality Game asks you to choose between:

The Resistance

Or Skynet:

There's a strategy game connected to this that has the two communities building resources until they have enough to go to battle. I didn't dive in too deep, but you can check out more here. A quick stop over at unforums.com leads me to believe there's an undercurrent of complexity going on here, more so then what you see on the website.

ARGs completely fascinate me. At their heart, they're just a game. But there's something about them that falls beyond your "Advertainment" genre. When an ARG is created for a true "creative" product, like a Film or TV show, it not only promotes that product, but extends the entertainment. I would say it's actually more of an extension than it is a promotion. An ARG takes a 2 hour movie, and makes a 20-100 hour "experience" depending on the depth at which they take the story. That's a helluvah lot of value for a 8 dollar movie ticket (if you even go to the movie).

I missed this the other day, but there seems to be a Star Trek ARG as well. I think it started off with this photo:

No joke. There's a really odd URL on the wall to the right of..the...hot green lady. You can see more on this here.

/.arg means i love you in pirate.\

Silver Screen #3: The Multiplex

Today is tough, I'm working late so I don't have too much. However, it was designs and some nice flash-use that stuck out today while I was quick-surfing movie sites. Here's a few of what I found:

HA. Did you think I was kidding yesterday! This site was very true to it's chick-flick roots. Light and fluffy. The use of large individual shots in the foreground, and side-scrolling was something i might steal some other day.

Next up:

This site is both Fast and Furious. Faked full-screen video rages while zooming you to each section of content. There's not much loading time that I could tell, which is probably why they made the half -screen video look like it was full-screen. Nice trick.

The navigation for the site was worth mentioning as well:

Menus are the new pre-loaders.

And to finish us off today:

I liked this because it's got a Saul Bass kinda feel to it.

/.and run.\