Everyone and their grandma can’t wait to get a glimpse of what the third installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy “The Dark Knight Rises” will be like. A couple of days ago, its campaign started with a simple website, that only contained a strange soundfile of chanting chaps. Weird, but not weird enough for true fans to do some research. And research they did. As notes Wired’s* Underwire*:
Within hours, a helpful fan on SuperHeroHype.com figured out that running that strange chant through an audio program showed that the sound spectrum spelled out the hashtag #TheFireRises.
With that, Dark Knight fans went to Twitter and discovered a @thefirerises Twitter account, which was posting a series of links to another part of the movie’s promo site, where a mosaic image was being compiled. Clicking “Add Me” above that image allows users to log in through Twitter or Facebook and unlock another piece of the image by posting a message with the #TheFireRises hashtag.
It reminds me of course of the campaign launched for Spielberg’s/Kubrick’s “AI” which happened a long time before anything like Twitter or Facebook existed but still managed to get people madly excited. You can read a summary of the campaign here and learn about its complexity and scope at Cloudmakers (a site created solely by fans who collaborated to solve the puzzle).