Last night, before going to bed, I brushed Twitter and was suddenly frightened by a video: two small red and blue pills on the cover, clicked in and saw the familiar "code waterfall" / green rain.
Isn't this The Matrix?
Yes, after nearly 20 years, the "Matrix" trilogy, a science fiction film series that is enough to be enshrined in the hearts of many fans, is finally going to have a sequel:
Distributor Warner Bros. announced that "The Matrix: Resurrection" is officially scheduled for December 22 this year, and the trailer for the new film will be officially released on Thursday, September 9, 2019 (September 9 evening, Beijing time).
And the short 45-second video we saw above is actually the lead trailer for this film - that is, the trailer for the trailer...
In order to stir up netizen emotions and attract public attention, Producer Village Roadshow Pictures and Warner Bros. jointly produced a promotional website: The Choice is Yours.
The page shows the small red and blue pills that fans are very familiar with, and the small print On it is Yours (Chinese version: the choice belongs to you).
Just tap a pill to activate the pilot trailer.
<h2>Magical teaser trailer, there are 180,000 versions?? </h2>
The coolest part of the current film's publicity plan is on this teaser trailer: everyone sees a different version.
The narration at the beginning of the film goes something like this:
Red pills
Right now
You show us what is true
You thought it was 1:23 p.m
But nothing gets farther from the truth than that
Blue Pills
Remember how you got here?
You have lost the ability to distinguish between the real and the imaginary
Only this moment, 1:23 p.m., is true
Everything else, it's the consciousness that's playing tricks on you
Obviously, the different version of the video narration obtained by clicking on different pills is a word game played by the producer with two different internal concepts corresponding to the red and blue pills in the "Matrix" story:
The red pill represents an uncertain future, and the virtual person who takes it will get rid of the slave control of the mother and let him escape the illusory space and return to the real world, but living in the "reality truth" is more difficult and difficult; the blue pill represents a beautiful prison, which will make the virtual person return to ignorance and continue the fairyland-like comfortable and "normal" life in the "virtual reality" simulated by the mother.
In the first Film The Matrix, the male protagonist Neo eventually chooses the Red Pill and becomes part of the resistance against the Matrix/Robot Army.
But what's even more interesting is that if you watch the pilot trailer a few more times (you can rewatch it by switching or refreshing the window on a web page), you'll find that:
The time mentioned in the third sentence of each film and the number displayed on the screen are different. This time is exactly the system time of the device you are currently using!
In the replayed version of the video, except for the different time every time, you will also find that the trailer screen that is quickly cut in the video is not exactly the same.
For example, in one version, you might see the following screen:
And in the next playback, you will see this picture again:
Or a picture like this:
The picture is different every time it plays, which makes fans can't get more excited. For example, the Silicon Star Man spent a full half an hour this morning, playing it in a loop again and again, saving new pictures that he hadn't seen before... Although the official trailer will be released in a day, Silicon Star people still can't help but try to restore the plot, characters and settings of the new work from these pictures.
According to Warner Bros., the pilot trailer has a total of 180,000 versions.
With so many versions, how did they come up with them? In this regard, Warner Bros. is silent...
However, we can still find some clues from the web page where this teaser trailer was released.
A developer friend told Silicon Star that he did some debugging of the front-end code of this web page and studied the way the filmmakers played: users opened the video at different times and could see their current time in the video - this is because the website will play the corresponding video according to the user's current system time.
(A similar technical implementation is not a particularly difficult thing.) Some netizens mentioned that the technology used by the "Matrix 4" film party this time has also been used by Rolex's official website before. The watch displayed on the web page, whose hands move exactly coincide with the user's local time, see the figure below. )
Back to The Matrix. That is to say, according to the calculation of 24 hours a day x 60 minutes = 1440 minutes, the filmmakers have prepared at least 1440 minutes of the pilot trailer...
As for the 180,000 versions that Warner Bros. said, let's do a simple calculation: 180000/1440=125. That is to say, at different times of the pilot trailer, different screens are inserted, and such a version should be prepared by the filmmakers.
Of course, this is just a guess by the silicon star people about the way Warner Bros. plays this pilot film, the real technical implementation, may not be so troublesome, or it may be far more complicated than our brain supplement method.
In any case, such a classic film series with supreme status in the minds of science fiction fans, the launch of the sequel has also played a "new trick" in the promotion, which is quite interactive and interesting, or let the fans want to give the filmmakers a thumbs up!
<h2>Old website, new gameplay, the ancestor of viral marketing</h2>
If you're old enough to surf the web by the end of the last century, you might remember that Whatisthematrix.com site (and related domains) was already in use in 1999 when Warner Bros. launched its first Matrix.
At that time, the Internet was still a relatively avant-garde and not a popular activity. Warner Bros. has built this marketing website to promote this super novel science fiction movie.
After the release of the first part of "The Matrix", it immediately became a science fiction god in the minds of fans. The director and screenwriter group Wachowski sisters (who were brothers at the time) immediately threw themselves into the development of a sequel, and in 2003 released two sequels to Reloaded and The Matrix Revolution;
Warner Bros., meanwhile, has kept the site running, turning it into an information portal for the Matrix trilogy.
In 1999, the site looked like this:
The "Matrix" trilogy is one of the earliest Hollywood film and television works to dig deeper and interpret technological topics such as computers, the Internet, virtual reality, and (computer) viruses.
The world it constructs is highly integrated with human society, as well as the philosophical ideas such as "brain in the vat" contained in the film, and social issues such as the confrontation between humans and AI, which provide a steady stream of inspiration and guidance for many science fiction film and television works (such as "Black Mirror", "Westworld", etc.) in later generations (of course, "The Matrix" itself has also been greatly influenced by the works of predecessors such as "Ghost in the Shell").
At the same time, warner bros. built the Whatisthematrix.com at that time, this website is definitely the originator of interactive network marketing, and single-handedly created a precedent for viral marketing of film and television works.
On this site, fans can find a variety of materials related to the Matrix trilogy, including cast list, plot introduction, digital version of the poster, soundtrack, DVD purchase links, and more.
However, for Nerds who are truly avid about The Matrix, the site also holds a lot of digital treasure.
The first is that there will be a Flash mini-game on the website. Players play as Neo in it, smashing as many red pills as possible, while avoiding blue pills (which will lose points). For every 10 points earned, the system rewards the user with a hidden code, and when the maximum score of 50 points is reached, all the codes will be displayed to the user, and a new page will pop up:
Entering the code-behind code on this new page will unlock valuable materials such as the original Matrix concept art, comics, sketches, storyboards, and other materials that have never been made public in other channels:
And that's not all.
The official website of The Matrix, DVDs, and the packaging of merchandise often contain some strange code. These codes are binary, hexadecimal, and word formats.
For example, in addition to the official website Whatisthematrix.com, there are also netizens who found another page hackthematrix.com, and the registrant is also Warner Bros. There is not much content on this page, only a few lines of small print, and a keyboard for the spaceship "Operator" (the liaison between the virtual person in the matrix and the real world). If the user moves the mouse over the computer keyboard, they will find that some words appear on the screen from time to time, such as "wrong number", "deja vu", "reload", "trinity" and so on.
Die-hard fans have entered these characters scavenged everywhere into the hidden page on the official website, and actually unlocked more hidden precious materials:
11011011: a 360° panoramic photograph of the interior of the Spaceship Nebuchadnezzar (the ship of the protagonist Morpheus);
EC306071: Panoramic photo of the kitchen where the Prophet makes cookies;
A3B1A428: A hidden Flash mini-game where players can assemble a spaceship in the movie with a mouse;
neobullettime: A classic "bullet time" clip on the roof of a government building after Neo's initial "awakening";
Tokyo: The crew came to Japan to promote it, and found that fans waited in line outside the theater all night in advance in order to be able to meet the crew members. Enter this code to see the scene at that time.
darrow: Click the mouse to watch the storyboard of Neo and Agent Smith in the classic showdown at the subway station.
redpill: Directs to Redpill Production's website. This is an agency that specializes in the interactive promotion of the ancient and early network, and it is also a contributor to the entire "Matrix" virus marketing, and has also served movies such as "The Lord of the Rings", as well as brands such as Atari, Heineken, and Samsung.
Seeing this, I can't help but marvel: these old people on the Internet, when they really could play ah...
At the end of the article, Silicon Star people will not make more spoilers (after all, the trailer will be out tomorrow, everyone can watch it for themselves).
However, you can still put a few more pictures in the "Matrix 4" pilot trailer, and briefly talk about some interesting elements found in it.
For example, this one, the middle-aged version of Neo walks down the street toward a café. Here, he will meet an acquaintance. Interestingly, the café has a compound word name, Simulatte, which takes the double meaning of "simulation" and "latte", and even the Logo alludes to "code waterfall" (that is, the code that runs in the parent virtual environment).
In one version of the trailer, a picture of Neo looking up at a foreign object in the sky appears. Next to it there is a massage parlor sign "Corky's Massage". This is an Easter egg that corresponds to the protagonist of the Wachowski sisters' big-screen debut, "Crazy Flowers.".
For example, the following scene is obviously a tribute to the bridge section in the first film of "The Matrix" in which Morpheus teaches Neo Kung Fu in the dojo. However, it is worth noting that in this scene, Neo calmly copes with the arrival of the newcomer, and the roles of "master" and "apprentice" seem to be reversed.
As for the identity of this newcomer, the outside world speculates that he may be a youth version of Morpheus who "travels through time", and this time it may be Neo's turn to save Morpheus. The cast for the character is Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, played by Black Manta, the nemesis of Aquaman in the DC Comics universe:
Do you like the viral marketing of The Matrix 4 this time? What other images in the teaser trailer impressed you? Welcome to share through the message!
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