Getting The Word Out
Now that the viral action has died down to a few thousand hits a day (of course, more still in one day than the 10 months previous), I’m working hard on leveraging the exposure for the film. I got some PR/Marketing friends to help with a press release to send out to the giant screen and indie film industry. I want to thank David Horne, Deborah Bryant and Laurie Brackett for helping out.
The press release went out this morning and already is on the Giant Screen Cinema Association Site here.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 29th, 2011
FIRST FOOTAGE FROM BASEMENT IMAX FILM “OUTSIDE IN” GOES VIRAL WITH 2.5 MILLION HITS
Sixty seconds can be powerful. Just ask Stephen van Vuuren, creator of the “IMAX in a Basement” film, Outside In, currently in production. The first minute of footage has seen over 2.5 million views and 800,000 plays in the last two weeks. The viral video has gone global.
With views in more than 200 countries, it is catching the attention of news outlets in Germany, France, Spain, Brazil, Italy, Greece Turkey, Japan and more. Major media outlets covering the clip include Wired, Gizmodo, Discovery Channel Canada, Slashdot, News.Com (AU), and MSNBC.com. The Daily Mail (UK) commented on the footage, comparing Outside In’s artfulness to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“It has been an amazing, exciting, and humbling couple of weeks,” says filmmaker Stephen van Vuuren. “To know that people around the world are as moved by these beautiful images as I am and that they are also thrilled to know they will see them on the giant-screen soon – it’s all been an incredible experience.”
The clip (www.vimeo.com/11386048) features a brief recap of Stephen van Vuuren’s years of ground-breaking work in creating full motion animation at IMAX resolution using real images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission. Saturn and its moons and rings are brought to life by van Vuuren’s advanced photographic animation techniques — all without the use of 3D models or 3D CGI. Around the world, viewers have been awe-struck by the beautiful images of the ringed planet.
Bloggers and space science news feeds picked up the video on March 7th from io9.com, a leading science-fiction/ futurism site, which served as the viral catalyst. By March 11th, the footage had received several hundred thousand hits and aired on Discovery Canada’s “The Daily Planet. “
The worldwide attention caught NASA’s eye and the video clip became NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day” (APOD) on March 15th, a tremendous honor for an art film by a non-scientist. The APOD exposure not only led to a huge spike in views, but van Vuuren was approached by leading scientists from global space agencies seeking permission to use the ground-breaking footage.
Thousands of fans on blogs, email, Facebook, and Twitter expressed their enthusiasm for seeing “Outside In” on the giant screen. One such fan, a man from the Czech Republic, tracked down van Vuuren on Facebook and wrote him this simple note:
Dear Mr. van Vuuren, I have just seen the first footage of the Outside-In Project on your website and it is probably the most beautiful thing I have seen in my entire life.
About Outside In: “Outside In” is a feature-length, giant screen/IMAX film that artistically brings stunning real photographs of space exploration to life using ground-breaking techniques in creating full motion picture footage from still images. Accompanied by powerful music, immersive sound design and key quotes from Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, T.S. Eliot and more, “Outside In” takes audiences on a 14 billion light journey of the mind, heart and spirit from the big bang to the near future via the Cassini-Huygens Mission at Saturn. For more information, visit www.outsideinthemovie.com or find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/insaturnsringsfilm Twitter @outsideinmovie