FOX Television
Terminator “Sarah Connor Chronicles”
Dark Discovery ARG
Overview:
Fox asked Millions of Us to create an online game to build buzz around their new science-fiction series Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles. Extending the franchise to television for the first time, the client was anxious about alienating the hardcore and fanboys and -girls that make up the Terminator core audience. They were looking for something unique with the potential to go viral but wanted to retain authenticity with the scifi audience.
Campaign Results:
Over 2 million people touched some part of the Terminator: Dark Discovery project. Blogs and forums around the world reported on the saga of the researchers, including prominent coverage in Wired, Ain't it Cool News, BoingBoingTV, Gawker Media, and more.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles scored the highest opening-night ratings of any new TV show in three years and was described by industry publication Multichannel News as the "number one new show" of the season.
I was Executive Producer on the project and heavily involved in development of the original concepts, organizing shoots, edits, creating CG graphics, seeding the project on the web and dealing with the clients at FOX. I even played a minor character (one of the Enitech researchers who was unfortunately the first one to be killed off by the Terminators!)
In the end, one of the campaign’s viral videos attracted 1.2 million views and the campaign was noted for special mention by the Webbys.
Story:
We built a complete website and online identity (supporting websites, social media profiles, alumni pages) for a fictional Silicon Valley startup called Enitech Labs doing research into Tachyon physics. Tachyon particles are a real phenomenon - since they travel faster the speed of light, physicist R.C. Tolman speculated in a famous scientific paper that if one could build a phone using tachyon particles instead of electrons it might be possible to speak to someone in the future.
Our fictional company, Enitech Labs, claimed to have built a camera based on tachyon physics which could capture images approximately 3 years into the future. They document their findings and experiments via a series of webcam videos asking for input from the internet audience. Their published findings set off a storm of controversy online as users submitted photographs from all over the world to be “processed”. After much online debate over whether the company was real,
the images in the processed pictures began to take a dark turn - images of a post-nuclear apocalypse, giant machines hunting human survivors. Even more mysteriously, the Enitech researchers began to be stalked by strange beings. As the story progressed, viewers had to crack codes and use GPS systems to locate modified digital cameras which had been buried all over the US. The final episode featured a 30 foot hunter-gatherer robot attacking the researchers in the parking lot of the Enitech offices.
