DESCRIPTION:
It's a pretty exciting morning when the first email in your inbox is from Grammy award-winning musician John Mayer (well, from his management team) asking for your technical, creative and strategic savvy. On that note, John's team contacted BLITZ directly to help launch his new album, Battle Studies, with an interactive concept. The caveat? He wanted something big and innovative, and wanted to take advantage of the newest technology trends as a means of growing his audience base to include people who may like John Mayer's music, but not enough to go out and buy (or download) the album. He wanted to be "disruptive." A word we like.

After chatting with his team and presenting some initial thoughts, it was clear that an Augmented Reality music video was definitely the way to go—something that has never been done since AR's inception. From a marketing perspective, it will not only be included with the album art, but also through additional forms of media, such as merchandise and editorial content, that will help drive sales. From a technical standpoint, this is a massive undertaking, especially given the quick timeline; it involves Papervision stacked on AR, stacked on video streaming. We immediately contacted our partners at Adobe to see if they wanted to get in on the project and turn it into a CS4/FLARToolKit case study to include in the Adobe MAX '09 Keynote. "Heck yeah!" we think was their immediate response. Plus, we knew that Adobe's FLARToolKit was the most intelligent way given its ubiquity; all other solutions call for plug-ins and additional software.

In a collaborative effort, between BLITZ and Adobe, we came up with a concept for the music video—John's team loved it and was ready to start production. During the shoot, we cast our lead crooner against a green screen and had to visualize, on-the-fly, how to best use the video content within Papervision's 2D plane. Once we had the video captured, we began creating the 2D and 3D swf objects that would make up the environment; we then put it all together through some long and sleepless nights.

While the piece has only recently launched, we can't be more excited about the outcome of all the work the Adobe, BLITZ and John Mayer teams put it. And we're proud to deliver such an exceptional experience for John's fans throughout world—one that pushes technology and opens up the possibilities of the awesome, yet adolescent, technology.