Big Spaceship: All Fun and Games
The website transports players to an environment as cryptic as it is hazardous. As the site loads, an inky cloud descends, transforming the view from winter whiteout to dead of night. “To create that effect, we put a digital HD camera behind a fish tank, then injected the fish tank with dye,” Lebowitz recalls. Scrolling to the left or right reveals multilayered images of a near-deserted town, with small, clickable details that provide further hints about the film’s tone and narrative.
The game reflects the same edgy, immersive darkness. An age gate of 18 and over allowed designers to include a level of vampiric violence that reflects the film’s action. Players can choose sides — vampire or human — and have access to an armory that includes hatchets and bear traps.
Big Spaceship developed a proprietary multiplayer game engine for the project. “And Ben Templesmith, the artist for the graphic novel, did concept art for the game,” says Lebowitz. “That was such a win, because we could really make a playable graphic novel. We brought his drawings of the characters into 3D and developed them from there.”
Both the site and the game required Big Spaceship to solve some complex technical issues. “One of the challenges of working in digital is bandwidth,” Lebowitz notes. “We can have amazing ideas, but if they only play on the most elite Mac Pros, we’re not serving our audience correctly. We do a lot of rapid prototyping to see if the processor will choke. For example, if we’re doing a full screen of video when that dye comes down, can we have anything else onscreen moving at all?”
All told, the 30 Days of Night site and game took three months to complete, with two teams working concurrently. “It was always part of the overall plan to have them feed each other,” says Lebowitz. “There are certain audiences that pay attention to free online games, so they might arrive at the movie via the game. And others might arrive at the game through the film site. It’s really about building an ecosystem of goodwill. We’re not hiding the fact that we’re marketing, but we provide a legitimate trade of value, and that elicits goodwill from people.”
The Mac-Powered Spaceship
From the beginning, Big Spaceship has relied on Macs to propel their work past conventional design and technical boundaries. The studio is currently powered by more than 50 Mac Pros, iMacs, Mac minis, Power Mac G5s, and various Mac laptops.
“We’re pretty serious Apple fanboys here,” says Lebowitz. “We’re an all-Mac office, although we do run Windows for testing. But now that the Intel architecture gives us so much flexibility with operating systems, we can virtualize Windows, so we don’t even need PCs anymore.”
A Mac enthusiast since his teens, when he ran MacPaint on a Mac 512K, Lebowitz now uses a MacBook Pro with OS X Leopard. “I’m attached to it at all times,” he laughs. “I have a flat-screen monitor and an external Apple keyboard, and there’s a FireWire drive on a shelf by my desk for Time Machine backups — it’s seamless.”
But Lebowitz’s appreciation for Apple is more than screen-deep. “I reference Apple’s design in client pitches to get certain points across,” he says. “The Mac is the only platform that understands one of our key principles: How you engage with something has a direct impact on the results. I truly believe that working with thoughtful, human-oriented, creative technology makes you create more, and better, work. Innovations to the user interface don’t just make processes faster — they actually change the way you interact.”
In addition to their many Macs, Big Spaceship handles asset management, backups, and a client extranet with an Xserve and Xserve RAID configured as two RAID 5 arrays — one 2TB and one 1TB — connected to a Power Mac running Mac OS X Server. They also use an Airport Extreme for their wireless network. “And I don’t know how many iPhones there are in our office, but it’s a lot!” Lebowitz adds.
Make Them Laugh
When the Big Spaceship staff isn’t busy creating the future of interactive media, you may find them posting on one of several company blogs — which cover topics from programming to growing mustaches — or vying for supremacy at the office foosball table, which has been wired with sensors to enable live scoring online. “We had this whole Frankenstein thing coming out of the foosball table, where it pinged a web server every time a goal was scored,” Lebowitz says. “It was hilarious.”
In their client work as in their office environment, this kind of attitude makes a difference. “We’ve always believed that we need to provide value and give something in order to get something,” Lebowitz explains. “In a world with an unlimited number of channels, all of which are easily changed, just hammering someone over the head with a tagline is not going to get them to do anything.”
Big Spaceship has succeeded largely because they make interactive marketing fun. “We like making people laugh, and we like making people scared,” says Lebowitz. “Evoking emotion is high on the list. And we love the ‘aha’ moment. If you can make somebody say, ‘Oh! I’ve never seen anything like this before,’ or ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’ We thrive on that. That’s the best kind of impact we can have.”
