Viral? Student Project? What is it?

Viral - What's in the Box

certainly heard a lot the past few weeks of a project called: What’s in the box. Unfortunately I forget that title for a while and only discovered the fantastically made movie on YouTube and on the website www.whatsinthebox.nl this week.

My first impression was….hmmm, Half Life. But after some searching on the net I found out it was a project of Dutch students. With only a budget of € 150,- they made this incredible movie! I mean they aren’t even design or art students. They’re doing it just for the fun of it.
I can imagine the amount of time that went in this project so in my opinion this is far more then a escalated hobby. I can only say they did a very good job at it.

Then we also have the main website. You can see a X-box style red ring on it. When you click on the above one you’ll get to see the movie. The right one shows some newspaper pieces. The left one shows the news from all over the world. And of course the one at the bottom of the ring…what does that button do.I don’t know what to type in their it’s always wrong.

In my curiosity I googled on the website and find numerous forums with discussions about this website and movie. There I found out the mystery even goes deeper and deeper. For example: go and view te source of the website and you’ll find a link to an image called anti.gif in the style sheet. And when you click around some people are getting strange red question marks in the credits of the website. The discussion is readable in the comment section of the YouTube movie here.

There are so much theories around this website that in my opinion its almost like the Cloverfield viral. They also used websites to create a story around the movie. Maybe the same thing is happening here! Who knows, I think we just need to wait around a bit. I will try and keep you posted on other things that are happening to this website.

Click to see the movie…

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 19:06 and is filed under Design & Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

http://www.gerbenvanerkelens.com Admin

Think I might have got another update!

When you are on http://www.babel-research.eu at the right bottom of the page there is a logo of the Hanso corporation.
When clicking on the logo you will see the website: http://www.thehansofoundation.org/.
When googling on the website you’ll see it has to do something about the lost series.

When looking at that page I couldn’t find a whole lot at the moment, however at the bottom there is some strange text / formula.
I used Photoshop to get me more contrast but even then I couldn’t get a good result. I see something like:
LEP ER\ iGA WWP DP fi EOi

When looking in the source of the Hanso website you’ll find the website http://www.rachelblake.com which is a blog. When searching for Rachel Blake you’ll get a lot of hits also
linking to lost (stophanso.rachelblake.com).

That websites first post has only 0 and 1′s as content. It looks like a computer program or some sort of similar thing.
Then I found out that on the used background image (the topographic map) there are some lines on it pointing to different places in Europe and one line towards north america.
Maybe it doesn’t have to do anything to it, but I just want to mention it.

The first post ever made on that blog (bottom of the page) let you know who rachel is (24 years old) and that she worked for a evil megalithic corporation, I Qoute:
“Silly me, I sold out and got a real-life job with an evil megalithic corporation.” Below the photo you’ll find out that she no longer has a job there.
The other posts describe where Rachel went on her European trip.

The second post on the website shows an image with the text:
xigz2y10s2
When clicking the image you’ll go to the website http://www.hansoexposed.com/. Unfortunately this website is currently blocked from where I am right now.

But after finding out this it seems to me that we are entering another viral.
Like I said, maybe it doesn’t relate to Whats in the box. Who knows.