Stealing A Play Right Out Of Pixar's Book

Some time ago I had a random burst of inspiration for the website component of our portfolio project. I constantly regard the Monsters University marketing campaign by Disney’s PIXAR as one of the best creative film advertising campaigns the industry has seen, especially in their digital media components; so I thought we could take a few notes from it and make our site a fully functioning Stok High School website. You see, for the 2013 Monsters University film, Disney created an interactive website that mimicked the common tropes of college websites; going as far as to present it as hacked by MU’s rival school on April fool’s day. The website was effective because it allowed the audience to truly be immersed in the universe that the movie was portraying and gave viewers the opportunity to become personally invested in the story by letting them feel like they too could be part of Monsters University, just based on its website.

I texted Jake to tell him about my idea, and before I could even finish explaining my idea and where I was inspired for it Jake became excited about it because he knew exactly where my train of thought was heading. Like I mentioned before, there are many benefits to making our website the school’s website (with a link/page to the short film of course). We believe our decision will help immerse the audience into the world we're presenting, help develop the story through specific details/Easter eggs, and it will provide an opportunity for viewers to become personally invested in the story and its characters. But making a website means creating virtual content for it as well, and the first piece of the puzzle we needed was to figure out what the aesthetic of Stok High School is like, for that we made its logo. We decided to go with a modern design style because even when the school is set in a non-specific place in time, we want to be able to assign it a modern aesthetic that is representative of what we believe Stok High School would be like. Purple is a symbol for mysticism and royalty, representing the elitist nature of the school; and the gold is traditionally used to indicate first place winners (like in the competition for valedictorian) and it also represents the “gold standard” that students are expected to be at academically in order to truly succeed. I can’t wait to get started on this site! The critical path analysis gives Jake and me time to work this as we do other tasks which are really helpful because building the website with the vision I have could be problematic if we just procrastinate on it until the end.

Tomorrow is senior skip day at my school, which I’m really looking forward to, but it’s also the start of a weekend of work and productivity towards the project! Until then!