The Internet is ablaze suddenly with the arrival of , a mysterious video on YouTube that is being conjectured as everything from a viral video promoting the next edition of the video game Half Life (said to be 18 months away from release) to a fan film by Dutch film students to something related to the TV show Lost. Whatever it may be, it has game fans talking in forums all over the net, even as Valve, the company behind Half Life, has unsurprisingly denied any connection to the flick.
An extensive rundown of clues can be found HERE, and most of it points to a pair of student filmmakers who are vaguely tied to the TV show Mythbusters (fun fact: I went to high school with Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage—you’d see him unicycling all over town back in the day).
I’m inclined to say it’s viral marketing, simply due to the extensive production effort—it’s hard for students to get their hands on a bus, plus there’s additional clues to be found at their website that seem to indicate this is a larger effort. Now someone is posting fake magazine covers on various forums, adding to the mystery.
The movie draws from a variety of sources—music from Lost and Jurassic Park, visuals from Half Life, various cell phones being I.D.’d by brand (note that only the Samsung phones work), and so forth—and if it’s viral marketing, the mysterious makers had to clear a batch of copyrighted material. If they were going to do that, it would all have to be related somehow or why bother? Accordingly, I’d wager that it’s viral marketing for an Apple TV/X-Box-type device that will deliver games, TV shows and movies to your home theater, and that it ties into mobile computing/phone stuff, perhaps downloading to your phone for viewing on the go.
Or I could be completely out of my mind. What do you think—spill it below in the comments!
Seems to be more closely related to Half-Life than something terrible like Lost. Combine voices are straight from Half-Life, Helicopter gun ships, the tower etc.
It maybe a little crazy but its not that impossible for a low budget film maker to get his hands on a bus, maybe they have a friend or parent who works for the bus company…?
Anyway, the text tracking on the phones is very impressive, along with all the visuals.
Don’t get me wrong–I think the visuals are very good, and there’s a lot of pluses to this flick. I just suspect it’s backed by some commercial entity, is all.