To access the app, visit the show’s Facebook Page, “Like” it, and navigate to the “Immortalize” tab. When you click on “Make Your Video,” the app will pull in info about you and your Facebook friends to make a personalized, Flash-based teaser in which you are the star. Your friends’ photos are integrated into missing persons’ files, as well as applications for exotic dancers, etc., and you become a mysterious assassin whose services the vampires decide to enlist.
After watching a version featuring random Facebook friends, you can create your own iteration of the teaser, including any friends you like. Check out mine here; I think you’ll recognize some faces and names. (Note: you have to “Like” True Blood on Facebook before you get to see the video.)
“Every time a video is viewed it essentially gets created and assembled in real time,” says Paul Hernacki, CTO of Definition 6, who worked with HBO on the project. “Behind the scenes we are using Facebook APIs, Google APIs, Bit.ly APIs, different forms of tagging, and a lot of thought into how it performs: cloud farms, CDN's, and SaaS providers combined. It's really chock full of Flash, After Effects, PHP and some open source goodness under the covers.”
Gil Wolchock, Definition 6‘s director of client services, says the project was inspired by a video promotion that came out last year titled “Lost in Val Sinestra”, an interactive trailer that pulls in your Facebook friends.
Wolchock says that the teaser itself was written by the True Blood team, and picks up where season three left off. Still, the teaser will live on Facebook...
