Barbie… a one-named icon of the toy world. For over five decades, she's been the ultimate role model to millions of little girls. When it came time to build Barbie a website, our task was to pay tribute to her heritage, while allowing users to connect, or sometimes re-connect with her, on a highly personal level.
To encapsulate 50 years, we built an interactive diorama, composed of 5 sets, each representing a specific era in Barbie's life. These sets were completely original, custom fabricated from scratch. The goal was to create a world that breaks the flat plane of the computer monitor, seamlessly transporting the user into Barbie's world.
A crew of over 200 people came together for a five-day, 35mm motion control shoot. With the shoot completed, we replaced the backdrop with a CG sky, color corrected, rotoscoped, and computer enhanced the transitions between each decade. "We treated each model like a real person, providing them with their own wardrobe and stylist."
The result is a totally immersive experience. Just as every girl is in control of her fantasy world, the same goes for the website. Users don't just passively watch the video, they can actively scrub it, traveling forward or backwards in time. They can pause the movie to explore hot spots, photos and close-ups of their favorite Barbies. At any point, users can write stories about specific dolls and accessories, allowing them to share memories about the role of Barbie in their life. They can even click on links that send them directly to purchase sites.
The Barbie site was a momentous accomplishment on both an aesthetic and technical level. The entire site is XML data driven. Thus, the websites content is infinitely expandable. To ensure the video looks great yet loads quickly, we ran the video footage through countless video encoding profiles to find the proper balance. Last but not least, the flash video module loads discrete music and sound effects according to queue points in the XML. So For you ladies, this means the sound design will not lose sync with the video even if you are using a pink Barbie computer on a dial-up modem.
Not even the 'Halo Believe' website can boast such experimental breakthroughs. Sorry, Master Chief, you may have conquered the Covenant, but you still got beat by a girl.