Jumper

Today I will be reviewing the movie site for the film Jumper. The film looks cool and the trailer looks very exciting and makes me want to see it, so I was excited to see the website. Sadly the website is not as slick as the trailer. Since the film is about jumping from one place to another (as in across the globe) I thought it would have a site that mimics this narrative from the film, but it doest. Instead, the site is limited to what seems to be a hideout that one of the characters is posting all his findings about the jumpers. Not really sure whose room it is though, although I don't really feel inclined to find out. The navigation is the rather common sliding image with various items hot linked. However it becomes obvious all they did was use a production still and photo shopped elements into the scene. The stills are extremely cluttered and makes for finding click-able objects rather difficult. Although I like the idea of searching for clues users should never have to search for film info. Even the cast section doesn't list the cast by name. If this an underground site and not intended to have this info that is fine too but then they need to build a separate EPK site or an "About the Film" section to provide that important information that people still look for.

The sections are typical for the most part. The mythology section does a nice job explaining the concept of the film a bit deeper, but only after you figure out which paper on the wall is click-able. The case history and jumper files are interesting but rather poorly executed. It uses the common legal papers from a file folder but lacks the ability to read anything but the top pages. Making it impossible and frustrating to read the articles and evidence in these folders. As a visitor I really wanted to explore these documents and read them but the site denies this desire. Also I have to add the sound design is rather monotonous. Every item when you roll over has the same sound and someone needs to fix the ambient loop, it times out too frequently. I would have preferred a much more subtle sound effect for the items and menu.

Overall a site for a really cool movie that could be made into a much cooler site, its still early as the movie is about 4 months away so I will check back and see if they are updates.

Rating : 5
http://www.jumperthemovie.com/

"I Am Legend" inspires iPhone campaign

Saw this on the Movie Marketing Madness news site. Decided to check it out.

First off seems you can only visit the site on an iPhone, tried my blackjack, no go, matter of fact I got a 404, since it ran a script and determined my phone wasn't an iPhone. Not so smart. They should at least offer a synopsis. Just for fun I plugged in the iPhone site URL http://iamlegend.warnerbros.com/iphone/index.html to a PC and my Blackjack. You can almost see how the site works using the PC, try it out. My blackjack however could only pull the text content and wallpapers. The rest seems to be iPhone or safari proprietary code, such as the photo gallery and daylight countdown.

Borrowed my friends iPhone and checked it out. First off for an iPhone dedicated site it’s very heavy in size. Browsing on the standard AT&T edge network is painfully slow. Also the navigation doesn't always respond to the first click, also sometimes the data doesn't populate.

Content of the site is pretty cool though, feature synopsis, iPhone sized wallpaper, link to itunes trailer (although too slow to download via edge), photos (with a very smart interface for going forward and back)

Daylight countdown is a smart application, it counts down the days and hours left of daylight. Its pretty impressive that even on the iPhone the countdown functions and is not static.

Overall props to Warner Brothers and Crew Creative for creating such a site, but I think targeting iPhone users only is really missing a lot of potential users and they should have taken the extra hour or two to create a WAP friendly version or at the very least create a hand held style sheet, so mobile users aren't greeted with a page not found error. I think the average consumer wont realize that the mobile site they heard about is for iPhones only and consequently might feel alienated since they don't have an iPhone.

iamlegend.com - iPhone site