X Planet is live!!

We (Soap Creative) have just launched X Planet to promote the release of Xmen 3 (or X-men: The Last Stand if we want to be specific)

This is our most ambitious project yet, not only due to the complexity of the task but the fact this site is a global promotion. It's not just a local Australian site it's being promoted throughout the world by Fox to promote the film.

We created the concept and a prepared a mockup to be presented in the US at the Fox Global X-Men Summit. Which is every region of Fox in a big conference hall talking about how they will promote X-Men 3?

The initial idea was to have much more content from the first 2 films ie locations, the actual mutants from the movies with their locations and key events marked on the map but this was scaled back to concentrate on the community aspect of the site.

I still feel the site would be stronger with all that auxiliary content as it would allow users to really immerse themselves into the X-Men universe. But we’re just happy we’ve been able to push a risky but interesting idea. Another game, puzzle or competition would have just fallen into the “forgettable” bin which most things do.

Shane, Brett and Ron have been working feverishly over the last month getting this MOFO live, again I’m humbled to work with such a great bunch of people. The best advice I’ve heard is to always hire people smarter than you.

We expected more involvement from Google as we're using their Google Maps technology but they were understandably busy with other stuff. It’s funny as Google Maps kept going down for us in the office but was OK for everyone else.

Here is a grab form the initial flash mockup we did exactly 2 months ago. You can see it’s changed quite a bit. The only thing we were told late in the game was that that Xplanet had to match the official site’s looks and feel.

We’ve already had 1000 signups in the first 24hrs so I’m hoping this is a good indication that this will snowball.
Oh and we fianlly got a substantial piece of press in a trade publication for this project. No more media snubs or Soap it seems. We'll have to have a jumbo media BBQ at our office to ensure we don't fall into obscurity in the future.

Bannerblog is still to receive any press locally besides being linked up on every major international advertising blog. But hey I'm blaming Ashadi for that as maybe he's bad karma :)