More than skin deep
One of the challenges to delivering custom rich format ads such as this one for Life of Pi was to deliver a reusable set of components to offset the effort and cost associate with build. The Cinemascape was envisioned as a beautiful, full screen experience that could easily be adapted for other films by updating the presentation layer with new visuals and accommodating content types that are common to all modern movie marketing (trailers, stills, cast bios, storylines).
Bringing it to the big screen
Adapting the horizontal Windows scrolling experience for the Xbox was an additional challenge. Cinemascape needed to allow flexible options to all the screens Microsoft’s customers access and delight them at every touch point.
Life of Pi was an excellent production to highlight new features of a gesture-based interactive entertainment showcase. Though initially designed for deployment in a widescreen Windows 8 environment, this product was also realigned to work in a vertical orientation for users on the Xbox, with simplified navigation employed to accommodate the limited scope of control the Xbox wireless controllers provide.