Press release from Well Above
Award winning visual effects, animation and digital creative convergence studio Oktobor today gave details of the unique interactive music video it recently created for New Zealand based rock band Shihad.
Oktobor Digital design Director Matt von Trott said, “The director of the music video, Sam Peacocke, came to us with this clever concept involving a shoot at the Homegrown music festival and from there Mark Zeman (Oktobor Creative Technologist), Jeff Nusz (Lead Developer) and I helped mould this into a working and uniquely interactive website experience.”
For the music video Peacocke set up a video booth at Wellington's Homegrown music festival in February this year, shooting fans enjoying the new Shihad single Sleepeater on a Phantom camera at 1000 frames per second. The shoot included blasting the fans with air and spraying them with water for effect. On the site, each fan has their own video where visitors can click to view their movies in full screen. Each of the participants was also given an individual link to their video so they could view it and share it with friends creating an effective viral campaign.
The website which went live a week before Warner Music released the single, also recently featured on New Zealand national broadcaster TVNZ’s One News entertainment section due to its unique interactive nature and the fact that it was the only place fans could listen to the track ahead of the official release.
The website was also hosted on a streaming Flash server for efficiencies. Von Trott explained, “The streaming Flash server dynamically picks the correct streams based on the user’s connection making it quicker and more efficient. We also compressed the footage, compiled the site and managed the streams and sharing functionality so it all worked in the most effective way possible.”
Commenting on the success of the music video and the review on TVNZ One News director Sam Peacocke said, “Oktobor know digital, online and video better than most. This is fantastic! What a coup! Over a million people will have seen that! Nice work Oktobor!”
In addition, everyone who took part in the shoot received a free download of the street track ‘Cold Heart’, a preview from the upcoming Shihad album to be released later this year.
Oktobor Digital design Director Matt von Trott said, “As is more and more common these days ‘Sleepeater’ was launched online. The video for the single is an inspired use of an interactive aspect. It really is very clever and engaging, using a grid of 100 fans dancing and enjoying the song and you can click on any one of them to bring them up to full screen. Sam did a great job shooting it and it was great to see it was an immediate hit as soon as it went live.”
Shihad Analytics for day one include thousands of hits from unique visitors who started several thousand streams. The grid/track was played all the way to the end the majority of the time and people also clicked the ‘Play Again’ button in most cases.
Von Trott added, “Half of the traffic was from people typing in the web address, which means there's good word of mouth viral uptake and the rest was from other websites. The TVNZ One News item really helped word of mouth as well. The whole concept was based on fans interacting with other fans.”
Top referring sites included Facebook, Shihad.com, TVNZ, Antville.org and Nzguitars. The ‘share’ feature on the site was widely used with 83% of those shares on Facebook and 76% of people sharing the main website address rather than the individuals’ e-mail links.
Matt von Trott concluded, “This website is a very good use of the online and digital mediums to help launch a single and spread the word of its launch. It has proved very effective in both cases. We had a very good collaboration with Sam who is a talented young director who understands the digital domain and is always looking for innovative ways to utilise it.”
To experience the interactive music video created by Oktobor for Shihad’s new single Sleepeater go to:
http://sleepeater.co.nz/#/grid