Once again, I would have like to have discovered the first film and television show to actually use the Internet as a means of marketing and communication, alas the Internet is so full of information that I am still sifting through piles of information to get anywhere close. What I can however establish that one of the biggest leaps in Movie-Internet relations was the release of the 1999 Blair Witch Project. The film in itself is an innovation as on a budget of little more then $30,000, and produced by a bunch of amateurs, this film went onto make millions, thanks partly to its web based advertisement campaign. Before the film was released a website appeared entitled the Blair Witch which established that a young group of documentary film makers had gone missing in the woods. Since then, there had been police searches for them but to no avail. Later in the next year one of the filmmaker’s bags is found with footage of what happened to them. The whole website was set up as if this had really happened and people actually bought into it. The fact that people believed this actually happened and there was footage to prove it made the whole thing much more scarier then a normal fictitious horror movie.What the Internet had provided was a way of setting the ground for a film far better then any trailer could, and as it had never been done before it was new, fresh and people really did believe in it. As a result of this and of the online boom, every film that now arrives on our screens has money plunged into marketing it on the Internet whether a full blown page or a single page with iconic images and music. Even television shows have bought into the same medium, writing up synopsis of episodes, character profiles, images and so forth, the kind of interactive input you would find on a DVD with added platforms such as online forums and special downloads. The initial Blair Witch page is quite haunting even today, and played on one of humans greatest fears, the unknown. Today, just as poster blindness prevents us from noticing an event in our neighbourhood or an advertisement for something we really love, we often neglect the fact that amongst the enormous numbers of webpages out there, some are actually really informative, useful and entertaining. It’s no wonder though that hundreds of thousands of new pages are created every day. I believe the Internet is an important medium to use in some way or another is it is the extension to the television. Most households own or have access to a computer with the Internet and browsing is just as easy as channel surfing on an idle day. Therefore, just as with the Blair Witch project, a well placed webpage, with the right stigma attached to it, released at the appropriate time can be very affective. Its use there after can develop as your film of show develops to accommodate for its growth and its audiences needs. Ultimately it is the interactive tool between the film and the audience.
