The official website served up content that kept audiences coming back for seconds
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is an animated movie about a quirky young scientist whose half-baked experiment results in giant food falling from the sky. The official website needed to convey the movie's scope and high concept while still maintaining the family-friendly tone of the story. We used a combination of Flash and alpha channel animation to engineer an immersive website which introduces users to the fanciful town of Chew and Swallow. The site employed a simple, clean interface to lower the barrier of entry and accommodate users of all ages. The design, games and features were all aimed at enticing kids to spend time on the site and drive repeat visits.
OFFICIAL WEBSITE
Upon entry, fans are encouraged to create "food weather" by choosing from a selection of foods that rain down while exploring the site's comprehensive collection of video, character, story and game content. Throughout the site, emphasis was placed on colorful design, motion and video assets to engage our target demographic. Kids loved discovering interactive activities like the Sticker Studio, that allowed fans to stick assets featuring main characters and food items on backgrounds from the movie to create their own scene which could be printed or saved as decorative wallpapers.
Games
Key elements of the site were story and character-based games for all ages, complete with visuals and sound bites from the movie. The stickiness of these games was made evident through fan response.
-
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
Food Catcher
Players scrolled side to side to avoid raining sardines and rat birds while helping Flint catch edible items for the Food Bank. For every golden apple players caught, Sony Pictures donated the equivalent number of meals to Feeding America, a hunger-relief charity.
-
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
Weekly Forecast Match Game
Sam tests players' forecasting skills by asking them to memorize a weather forecast and recreate it from memory. Players are congratulated for successful gameplay with a personalized reward, featuring a printable scene from the movie.
3D FOOD FIGHT
To entice fans to see the movie in 3D, we created 3D Food Fight, a feature that invites players to join in on a pick-up-and-play food fight against Steve the Monkey. When played in 2D, the food items hurled by Steve are splattered against the computer screen and players must employ a digital squeegee to scrub off the residue. When played in 3D, players don a pair of anaglyph, red and blue, 3D glasses to experience the fight as food items fly past them.
GAMEPLAY RESULTS REFLECTED THE SUCCESS OF THIS FEATURE AS 85% OF ALL PLAYERS ENGAGED FOR 1-3 MINUTES OF PLAYTIME OR MORE
Its slick interface and engaging experience made the official website a successful cornerstone of the movie's campaign, and the site was recognized as FWA's "Site of the Day."