The AMD/DreamWorks/HP partnership generated a lot of fun projects. The third of the four films of the partnership was Shrek The Third. As with the other films, we were creating templatized designs that could be easily translated and produced with minimal need of an outside agency within each global region.

When Shrek the Third came along, we had already launched the Over the Hedge and Flushed Away campaigns and were starting to get a feel for dealing with the demands of, essentially, three different clients. In the initial design stages, I was intent on creating a look that felt distinctly AMD, as they were our actual client, and they were paying us. We still had to use approved assets from DreamWorks, but instead of creating a campaign and a site that looked like the official movie site with AMD logos on it, I wanted to push the design as far away from DreamWorks guidelines as possible (but still be able to win their approval). The client had also gotten feedback from the first two campaigns that we should push the design and concept to be a little more edgy. Thus the first site design came to be something like this:

This wasn’t actually the FIRST design. The first design was WAY out there, but knowing the client pretty well, I decided to pull it back to where I felt their definition of “edgy” was. This was the first presented to the client.

The navigation was a nod to the locations of the film, but the content on those pages would be AMD-related. Being the third movie partnership between AMD and DreamWorks, the tag seemed right, but the client wanted us to pull back some in the design and the message to a more straightforward interface and direct partnership message. The second iteration went here:

I was still pretty happy with this design, and the client was feeling good about it as well. We even rocked a poster design that went along with the theme:

So it was right about here that word came down that a different agency had created a tag line and look that we were now going to have to mirror in our designs. The new look was not “edgy” and I still had the instructions to push things, so I worked out a Frankendesign that was somewhere between the two:

I was reasonably happy with this, and thought it might get approved, but the feedback this time was essentially “make it look exactly like the other design.” Bummer:

So that is what went live. I’ve seen worse of course, but I don’t think this lived up to what the client was wanting when we first started, and it certainly wasn’t what I would have guessed we’d end up with. The other pages of the site utilized a different color for the monochrome palette:

I did create a pretty interesting, if simple, screensaverthat randomly reveals one of twenty characters slowly over time (wait for it to load):

The other cool thing we did, as in the other film sites, is create games. This one featured a pinball game and a Pac-Man-like pursuit game.

The other elements of the campaign were numerous online banner ads, including a 15 second video for an expandable ad, downloadables, etc.

After Shrek the Third, the partnership between AMD and DreamWorks started to sour. There was one more film underway though: Bee Movie. We did the same type of thing for that film, but greatly reduced in scope. Meaning: no games.

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