Mobile Promo Helps iPhone Users Get into “The Spirit”

A promotional campaign for the Lionsgate movie “The Spirit” is the latest to field a buzz promo specifically for the iPhone mobile user crowd.

In advance of the Christmas Day opening for the movie, a film version of the old ‘40s detective comic strip drawn by Will Eisner, digital media company Big Stage Entertainment is rolling out a mobile app that will let iPhone users upload their photos and substitute their faces in stills and video scenes from the movie, replacing stars such as Gabriel Macht, Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes and Scarlett Johansson.

Users download the application free from the iPhone App Store, then snap a picture of themselves with their iPhone and send it to the app. Big Stage’s proprietary software uses this data to create a 3-D avatar clone, male or female, that it calls an “@ctor.” Once that’s done, users either click or just shake the iPhone to insert the avatar into the stills or the clips.

Big Stage has provided six animated video clips and 20 stills for the Spirit iPhone app, which also works with Apple’s iPod Touch.

Users without either device can still get into “The Spirit” by going to the movie’s main Web site and installing the Big Stage media player. Once that’s done, they can create their own @ctor avatar (no PC shaking required) and insert themselves into different, longer video clips from the movie.

Although this is the first application it has generated specifically for the iPhone, Big Stage has a registered user list for its “Digital You” avatar-generating platform. In fact the company built attention for the “Spirit” iPhone app and Web site by mentioning them in newsletters directed to that tech-literate group.

 Directed by Frank Miller, a graphic artist who made his name by writing and drawing the novels that became the movies “Sin City” and “300”, “The Spirit” is expected to be a strong holiday draw for both comic-book lovers and fans of those earlier highly stylized movies. “Sin City,” for example, was altered to appear largely in black and white with intermittent bursts of color.

The promotional efforts for “The Spirit” have tapped into those two audiences, designers and tech-oriented socializers. In March and April of this year Lionsgate generated buzz with a Spirit widget—a “spidget”—that lets users solve an online murder mystery and view early movie trailers.

Users who put the widget on their social profiles or Web pages also got to enter an online sweepstakes. In exchange for racking up the largest number of trailer views via the widget, one winner was awarded the prize of an expense-paid trip to Comic-Con San Diego in July 2008, to hear Miller address the convention and to see new first-release footage from the movie.

On the design side, Lionsgate announced in early 2008 that it was partnering with nine well-known art schools to produce materials for the movie’s advertising campaigns. The first product of this studio/student collaboration, from the Art Institute of California San Diego, was a set of four drink cups, each with a different color lipstick smudge for the movie’s four female roles, that was used at the Comic-Con concession stands.

Other creative executions included “Spirit” Neighborhood Watch signs in San Diego, a “Spirit” tor press kit in San Francisco, “Spirit” Christmas cards and wrapping paper in Boston and Philadelphia, and in September some eye-catching flash mob stunts in New York involving crowds of people wearing black shirts and red ties—the Spirit’s wardrobe signature.