The Walking Dead, Left Behind

After the hugely successful Season One of ‘The Walking Dead’, FOX challenged Red Bee Media to help broaden the audience beyond the comic fanboys who love the show and drive the ratings even higher for Season Two. The challenge was to create something new, digitally-led which gets the show talked about as much as the nature of the promotion as the actual show itself.

Red Bee created an innovative personalised Facebook app, centred on a specially shot first person POV film, that immerses the viewer into the show’s premise – what it’s like to be ‘Left Behind’ by the Walking Dead. The innovative use of Facebook Connect and users’ own webcams seamlessly create a personalised survivor experience.

Heavy post‐production work in After Effects ensured we achieved the required dark, claustrophobic look of a horror film. A custom tracking plug‐in was authored for After Effects to extract frame‐by‐frame tracking data, which was then fed into the Flash application. The user’s personalised data was tracked on seamlessly into the original footage without the need for locked‐off shots or hard edit cuts. A live feed from the user’s webcam added a real‐time element to the final scene, which helped to enrich the fear factor.

We believe that we have established a new benchmark in what’s possible within a personalised video experience.

The app launched early October and is running across FOX Facebook pages in over 20 global markets. It is also integrated onto the FX UK website.

After the first few weeks there have been over 290,000 page views and 73,000 unique visits, with an average dwell time of 3 minutes, so users engaged for the duration of the experience.

It has recently won a GOLD award at the Promax UK awards, for Best app or game. It also featured in Campaign Magazine and Campaign Live.