UGC… Now Showing, Only at the Grindhouse

Last month, we launched the final phase of our Grindhouse movie website.* The basic idea behind the site was to create the virtual Grindhouse movie theater where these films might play….the same sort of sordid cinema you might step into off of Manhattan’s 42^nd street in the 70s. Stylistically, we took our inspiration from classic Grindhouse posters, so that entering the site is like stepping into the world of these images.

One of the big questions for us was how best to engage users – giving them a creative outlet and fun way to interact with the brand. In other words, what sort of user-generated content should we be looking for? Because the movie is a celebration of Grindhouse in all its aspects, we wanted users to create a trailer for the Grindhouse movie they would make. But how should we go about doing that? Our basic decision came down to two options:

1. Ask production-savvy users to film the trailers themselves and then compete for prizing.
2. Give users the tools and assets to quickly and easily edit together their ideal trailer.

Option 1 obviously allows users the most free-form creativity – they can do just about whatever they like. The problem is, how many people can actually take advantage of that opportunity? We’d be lucky to get a handful of high quality trailers; more importantly, we’d be leaving the vast majority of fans out of the fun. Furthermore, as the long-time reader of this blog knows, we’re big proponents of actually giving our users tools, instead of just asking them to create free content for us. Ultimately, we chose to create a trailer-maker that lets users play with video images, titles, and sountracks – and send the completed creation on to their friends and enemies. We tried to hypercharge it with enough assets and features to keep it as functionally open-ended as possible.

Check out the Grindhouse site to make your own trailer – or try some of our other tools, like a tool to make a Grindhouse movie poster that you can save as your desktop background. Also, our designers over at Motherboard have some great process art from the site, including zombie shots and blood designs.

* I’m sorry this post is so late in coming. I’ve been out of town, and also we’ve been in a production crunch for a few weeks over here. Which means more fun stuff – coming soon….only from Big Spaceship.