In the movie Pan’s Labyrinth, director Guillermo Del Toro tells an imaginative tale set against the backdrop of a fascist regime in 1944 rural Spain. The film centers on Ofelia, a lonely and dreamy child living with her mother and adoptive father, a military officer tasked with ridding the area of rebels. In her loneliness, Ofelia creates a world filled with fantastical creatures and secret destinies.
During the development of the film, Del Toro recorded his thoughts, dreams and sketches in a leather bound book, which provided the inspiration for an interactive website, www.panslabyrinth.com/mysketchbook, created by bicoastal Deep Focus.
Called “Journals of the Imagination,” the site invites fans to create an interactive sketchbook featuring up to 10 of their own artistic creations inspired by the motion picture. Del Toro was slated to select five winners this week from all the submissions. While no new submissions will be received once the winners are announced, the site will not be taken down. The winners will receive a Pan’s Labyrinth poster signed by Del Toro. In addition there will be a web link to the winning entries featured in the Pan Labyrinth’s DVD.
“The film is really rich and beautiful and imaginative. Del Toro has a fabulous and creative mind. We wanted to give his fans something engaging and interactive and really let them be as creative and as experimental as he is,” said Sabrina Caluori, Deep Focus account director.
On the movie’s main site developed by Nevlon Shalit and Chad Ossman from New Line Cinema, visitors can see how creative Del Toro is by flipping through pages of his sketchbook and listening to his audio commentary. Deep Focus used that site as a starting point and then worked with New Line Cinema to create a promotion that would target his key fan base and appeal to their sensibilities.
Jim Marsh, account executive, explained that they wanted to push the envelope as far as the actual interface in the way that people would be able to create their own interactive book rather than just uploading photos to a page. They can customize their sketchbook with music, colors and borders.
Works of art
Visitors can also see everyone else’s sketchbooks in the gallery and comment on each other’s work. They can sort the sketchbooks by most recently added or highest rated. “Above and beyond what started out as a contest, it turned into this really artistic and imaginative community,” Caluori said. “We were even surprised by the amount of time they spent on the site and the kind of comments they made to one another.”
One visitor wrote, “Wow, I love the technique you used. And the emotion is wonderful, very moving. I love how none of your people have any features really, I think the features would have taken away from the emotions of the pictures.”
“We set it up so people can sign in and come back and I think that was really helpful in creating this community and keeping it a circular motion. People actually came back after they uploaded their work to see what people had said about their work,” said Caluori.
Marsh pointed out that if visitors wanted to just comment and look, they didn’t have to go through as many steps as they would if they were creating a sketchbook. “As of now we have more than 4,000 comments. So people were really having fun participating in this,” said Marsh.
The strategy for the film’s release relied heavily on word of mouth. “Journals of the Imagination” was launched in a similar manner. Picturehouse, a joint venture between New Line Cinema and HBO, reached out to the art community and Guillermo’s fan base first. The film has its own MySpace page where the contest is mentioned, and it also was featured in banner ads.
The biggest technical challenge for the Deep Focus team was figuring out what the right flow of information should be for users in the upload process when building their sketchbooks and making it easy for them to save, log out and come back into the site experience.
“It was figuring out the proper architecture and the proper places in which to do the data capture,” Caluori said. “When we were building this log-in and interface we had to make sure that when you’re uploading your sketchbook you are having a seamless experience.”
Another challenge, in a good way, was the project and film excited the Deep Focus team creatively. “One of the biggest challenges was keeping them reigned in creatively so that we could get this up and live in just a few weeks. There was a real love of this project. They really wanted to push the limit,” Caluori said.
