Fans Join “Thriller” Anniversary, in Life and Online
Fans of the Michael Jackson “Thriller” album, 25 years old this year, can recapture some of that thrill by pasting themselves into the title song’s famous video as a lurching, dancing 3-D zombie.
As part of an extended anniversary celebration of the world’s best-selling album, Sony BMG and the Epic Recordings/ Legacy label have mounted a Web site that will use an innovative photo upload platform to let registered fans transform into 3-D avatars. Those avatars can then be inserted into the “Thriller” video and the clip saved to a computer, posted to a profile page or shared with friends.
The technology, licensed to Big Stage Media, produces a much more realistic effect than the usual “pasted head” 2-D animation—appropriate in a video that broke records for cost ($800,000) and special effects (monster makeup and prosthetics) when it was released in December 1983.
Visitors to www.michaeljackson.com/mythrillervideo/ can also join a community that lets them create profiles pages, send text messages to Jackson, download mobile phone ringtones and broadcast their location and messages in a Twitter-style presence application.
The site is part of a campaign to promote a 25th anniversary edition of the Thriller album, including remixes done with contemporary artists such as Kanye West, Fergie and Will.i.am. The album, released in February, is Jackson’s first since 2005. The singer hasn’t released an album of studio material since “Invincible” in 2001, instead reissuing collections of hits.
Sony BMG has taken other steps to promote the Thriller anniversary, including staging ambush “zombie dances” by professional dancers in public spaces in Europe and Australia. Regional divisions of Sony BMG used the events to publicize contests offering two branded “Thriller” iPods for the best user-generated zombie dance videos uploaded to the new album’s YouTube channel.
“Thriller” has already received the user-generated treatment in a video homage showing more than a thousand Filipino prison inmates performing the dance routine as their morning workout. Since its upload to YouTube in July 2007, that video has been viewed more than 12 million times.
Sources differ on worldwide sales figures for Thriller, often cited as the best-selling album of all time. But the Guinness Book of World Records reports that the album, released in November 1982, had sold 65 million copies worldwide by the end of 2007.
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