Between movies being funded on Kickstarter, a critically acclaimed movie about Facebook, and Twitter basically serving as a backchannel for the Oscars, Hollywood increasingly has to reconcile itself with the Internet’s influence on storytelling as well its power as a distribution mechanism.
Directed by Duncan Jones, Source Code is a movie about a soldier who finds himself as part of a strange military project. The source code is literally a computer program which allows him to take over another man’s identity during the last few minutes of his life, in order to um, not blow up a train.
What’s more interesting than the story line is the fact that the Summit Entertainment has built the Facebook game “The Source Code Mission” in order to promote the film, the first “cross-platform, trans-media campaign that transports audiences into the movie narrative using social media game play.”
Okay but what does this buzzwordgasm mean? Well that fans can scan in Microsoft Tag codes they find on Source Code movie posters and other sundry swag, or visit Facebook or the movie’s actual site (http://mission.enterthesourcecode.com/) in order to complete “social media tasks” which basically amount to posting thinly veiled promotion about the movie onto their Facebook walls. If a user completes all five tasks, their profile image becomes part of a “movie poster” on the Enter The Source Code website, Influencer Project style.
While the actual “The Source Code Mission” game is not particularly engaging, it definitely an early sign of the new digital direction. And we took some time to speak with Director Duncan Jones (who has 40,000 Twitter followers!) and star Jake Gyllenhaal (who apparently is sneaking onto Twitter under an alias) about what they thought about the film’s hardcore interactive marketing push and the Internet’s effect on moviemaking in general.