One of our latest projects for Screen Australia was a high-tech interactive campaign to promote the Australian comedy thriller Kill Me Three Time (KM3X); a perverse transmedia experience featuring characters from the film – Charlie Wolfe (Simon Pegg), Bruce Jones (Bryan Brown) and Sam (Steve Le Marquand).
Over three-days characters from the film immerse participants into the underworld via phone, email, social media and video – delivering a thrilling experience of being chased by a hitman – Simon Pegg’s character from the film, Charlie Wolfe.
We had the choice of creating something disposable, or pushing for something truly immersive. We hooked into the idea that the user would need to feel like they were being followed, and that the hitman was closing in. To create impact, this needed to develop over a period of time, with each escalation in the experience feeling more authentic than the last. The KM3X experience, it feels like the characters from the film have entered your world. One by one, they inject themselves in to your everyday life.
Throughout the experience, users are getting contacted via Twitter, SMS, email and phone calls, and the content they receive is personalised every step of the way.
One of the highlights of the experience is the impact of personalised content. We have an algorithm that analyses each user’s Facebook albums; these photos form the backbone of much of the content. One of the videos features the hitman addressing the user in front of a wall of evidence, featuring their real-life family and friends. Later in the experience, the user receives an email from a close friend, with a realistic snapshot of a newspaper front page.
Nexmo’s API, better known as the phone verification tool behind a number of popular startups, is used to deliver personalised prerecorded calls to users. Users report being taken aback to receive a call from the police asking what they know about the murder. All of this is part of making the user feel like they’re a little bit under siege.
Producing this campaign didn’t come without it’s technical nightmares. Personalised phone calls proved to be one of the more complex challenges to solve. With the experience rolling out across the world in line with the film, we have to take user’s time-zones into account. No-one wants to get a phone call at 2am, so we’ve put a lot of work into making sure the campaign is immersive and fun, without being disruptive or annoying.
We’ve enjoyed using the tools we deploy everyday for serious enterprise applications, and put them to work to deliver a death threat from Simon Pegg.
Take the experience.
http://killmethreetimes.com/experience
The post How to engineer a death-threat from Simon Pegg. appeared first on Loud & Clear Creative.
