Hail the Villain
Creativity and technology collide in the latest web project out of interactive studio GRAND, as rock act Hail the Villain go online to promote their forthcoming release, Population: Declining.
Set in the repressive Metal City, HailTheVillain.com is the first chapter in a story where everything is not as it seems. As the city’s residents go about their daily lives, Villains, imposters from the Dead Dimension, are roaming their streets undetected, feeding on the innocent as they plan for world domination.
The website opens with family man and steel factory worker Drake Carter ending his affair with seductive co-worker Thea Landa, sparking a chain of events that leads to Drake's murder at the hands of his former lover and secret Villain as she moves to claim his soul for herself.
Freezing time in that brutal and savage moment, the website allows users to navigate through the scene to unlock character back-stories, clues, downloads and to participate in the story by becoming Villains and sharing messages with the band.
The concept for the website grew out of a series of sketches the band had created as a rough draft for a comic book inspired by the sounds of their new album, Population: Declining. Developing the site's narrative in conjunction with partnering company Rune, GRAND set out to design a website with a difference, building a range of engaging features to plug into and enhance a story crafted to showcase the band’s music.
"When we met the group they told us that they were looking for an atypical band website and essentially gave us carte blanche to go off and create something unique," explains GRAND co-partner and Creative Director Luke Canning. Taking that brief as their starting point, the challenge for GRAND was to build a site that would set Hail the Villain apart from the cacophony of acts populating the pages of MySpace and Facebook.
"From the outset we set our sights high on this project," says Canning. "The creative and tech teams worked closely with one another to figure out how far we could move the boundaries and build a really impressive website that incorporated 3D, Flash animation and programming, graphic design and an intuitive user interface."
Pushing GRAND to develop a range of game-changing technical solutions, the resulting site deploys multiple layers of near-HD resolution interactive videos with intelligent preload to disguise renders and streamline the user experience. As GRAND co-partner and Technical Director Matthew Quinn reveals, the process turned up some unexpected insights.
"Testing Flash to its limits revealed some interesting things," says Quinn. "We were mindful of balancing the trade off between adding extra content with the impact that it would have on the site's performance. To help tackle the potential for mass amounts of user created content we combined an open source media recording and streaming service called Red5 with our own proprietary CMS. That was backed up by a strong site engine capable of delivering the full range of pre-rendered video sequences and real-time Papervision 3D as seamlessly as possible."
Taking the point and click concept to a whole new level, HailTheVillain.com presents a series of artfully illustrated environments to explore, with clues and hints, character bios and easter eggs hidden at every turn. Numbers scrawled in matchbooks unlock audio content when punched into a phone booth, while a map hidden in the glove compartment foreshadows a darker plot twist that will be revealed in one of the upcoming comics.
To drive audience participation, users are invited to activate their webcam at the start of the experience. As they journey through the site, visitors will uncover various opportunities to upload and modify pictures of themselves, record and share videos with the band and other fans, as well stumbling across several other surprises.
"This website is a huge departure from the traditional micro-sites we've worked on in the past," reveals Canning. "Working with masters of story telling like the folks at Rune really made it possible for us to conceptualize, design and develop a genuinely original web experience for Hail the Villain. While more and more companies are capable of pushing out some pretty impressive tech-driven sites these days, there are very few capable of bringing solid and unique narrative into their work. At GRAND we strive to marry style and substance with the aim of raising the bar for our clients by providing users with genuinely engaging content."
About GRAND
GRAND is an interactive company based in Toronto. We are designers, technologists and producers who share a passion for creating strong ideas with meaning and purpose for a digital world. We are driven by an insatiable desire to deliver the best in everything we create: websites, online ads, content management systems, games and more.
Project: Hail the Villain
- Client:
- RUNE Entertainment, Coalition Entertainment & Warner Music
- URL:
- hailthevillain.com
- Interactive studio:
- GRAND
- Creative Director:
- Luke Canning
- Technical Director:
- Matthew Quinn
- Flash Developers:
- Stuart Evans, Tony Pilger
- Software Developer:
- Joel Kronenberg
- Interactive Designer:
- Luke Canning
- Graffiti:
- Flying Fortress, 6:10
- Original Story & Character Development By:
- RUNE Entertainment & Hail the Villain
- Production Studio:
- RUNE Entertainment
- Director:
- Paul Wollenzien
- Producer:
- Nancy Nor
- Story:
- Peter Nalli, Paul Wollenzien
- Copywriters:
- Peter Nalli, Graham Perkins
- 3D Artists:
- Ricardo Gomez, Javier Castellanos, Tim Dormady, Martin Krol, David Young, Matt Pierce, Aaron Barr and Clayton Manson-Hing.
- 2D Artists:
- Matthew Lau, Peter Nalli, Kay Huang, Trevor Spencer
- Animation:
- Rob Gennings, Javier Castellanos
- Sound Design:
- Mike Headford
