Verizon believes that broadband can entertain in ways people never dreamed possible and that entertainment in general is no longer about watching what someone else created. To prove it the company tapped its creative digital agency R/GA, New York, to help launch actionhero.verizon.com, a site where everyday consumers can direct their own action movie and cast themselves as the CG hero that saves the world from killer bugs, mad scientists or insane robots.
Verizon wants to increase awareness as a broadband and entertainment company, now that the company has launched FiOS TV and FiOS Internet at speeds of up to 50 Mbps,” explained Chris Hinkle, technical creative director at R/GA. “In order to accomplish this, we developed a strategy to create a series of highly entertaining projects at the cutting edge of what is possible online–ideas that have broadband at their core. The Action Hero is one of these projects. This project features CG animation movie studio and video game production values, a reflection of the forward-looking qualities of the Verizon brand.”
To create a movie, visitors begin by choosing one of the previously mentioned action movie scenarios. Then they cast the movie either by creating a character using their headshot and selecting a personality type (like laid back dude or tough guy) and body types (slim or athletic); or they choose from the library of characters. Next comes the opportunity to direct the movie. There are three scenes to each movie–the opening, the chase and the ending scene. Users are given choices for each of these scenes and the chance to select from a variety of dialogue choices, which differ depending on the character personality selections (a “Femme Fatale” character’s dialogue is much different from the “Cutesy/Brainy” character). Finally, visitors can pick the soundtrack (from rock, hip-hop or orchestral) and title the movie.
“Interactive storytelling is complicated, because for every choice you give the user (even just letting them choose to be male or female), you exponentially expand the number of scenes that need to be created. Our in-house CG team had to create more than a 1,000 scenes to support the choices we offered the user,” Hinkle said.
After completing their movie, “directors” can share it with friends or invite them to cameo in the film. Once the film is rendered, users are e-mailed a link to the “screening room” to view the film. If they did choose to “be the star,” they are added to the library of characters, ready to be cast in other peoples’ films.
At this point, users can also download the file to post to their blog and aspiring movie-makers/creative types can download the hi-res raw files, put it into their own movie editor and customize further if they wish.
Hinkle pointed out that this is the first time Hollywood studio quality special effects and movie making has been made available to the public over the web. He added that having the web-based modeling, texture mapping and lighting perform to Hollywood and R/GA’s standards was a huge challenge.
“3D rendering is always a finicky and complicated process. Even when you have just one or two computers set up to do this–there are still lots of things that can go wrong every minute. Multiply that by the 20-plus servers running behind the Action Hero website and you can imagine the challenges we faced. Each film made has to go through these servers so to get them to work harmoniously together, we had to develop a lot of custom software,” he related.
In addition, creating an automated 3D rendering tool had never been done before.
“This was probably the most complex project we have ever worked on–at one point, the software team had 150 plus years of combined development experience working on the project. It was very exciting,” Hinkle said.
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