Audience Entertainment (AE) ̶  co-owned by YDreams  ̶  and NCM Media Networks are bringing audiences’ favorite brands to life on the big screen in select movie theaters across the U.S. this holiday season.

AE and NCM Media Networks worked together with a top travel industry brand to create a new interactive cinema audience game. The game, powered by a proprietary platform that enhances human-computer interactions and create engaging and robust applications, will be used for the first time in a national cinema ad campaign across the United States.

In the game, moviegoers are able to join a classic cartoon character in a 90-second interactive, big screen version of a wild water ride from the comfort of their movie theater seats. By moving their arms and acting together as a group, the audience creates a virtual “human joystick” to control the videogame action onscreen – zipping down the slide and retrieving objects along the way. The score will be posted at the end of the game, but no matter what the tally, the audience always wins by being among the first in the U.S. to experience the future of cinema advertising.

The new AudienceGame is being presented exclusively during NCM’s FirstLook pre-feature program in select movie theaters in major markets including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Knoxville, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washing-ton, DC.

This exciting new campaign features Audience Entertainment Group’s first-ever use of the combi-nation of live video and animated overlays in an AudienceGame.

To view the game, CLICK HERE.

We’re embarking on yet another global adventure, this time with the NY-based Brand Experience Lab (BEL), by creating Audience Entertainment - a joint-venture to deliver interactive videogames for theaters, stadiums, music venues and others, all over the world.

BEL’s work with AudienceGames is pretty well known, especially since they won a Cannes Lion with their work for Volvo which also created the “Human Joysticks” buzzword. We’ve also been busy in the last year and a half developing projects for Vodafone in Portugal, and Dove, Ades, Sony Ericsson and Coca-Cola in Brazil, which made the headlines and captured clients’ attention.

The public announcement was made some days ago, you can check the press release here.

And here is a video created by tv show Imagens de Marca which features some past projects by YDreams and BEL:

‘Lumière meets Turing’ was the theme YDreamer Fernando Nabais chose to address at one of the company’s in-house ‘Close Encounters’ – informal sessions where folks present topics that are of special interest to them but also connected to what we do here at the company.

The title of the talk evoked “What happens when you merge the vision machine (the camera) with the Turing machine (the computer)?”, an introduction to Narrative filmmaking for computational media, a class by Michael Lew at USC School of Cinema-Television | Interactive Media Division, and serves as a basis to analyse a series of art pieces and artistic motivations that emerged from this dual approach to Cinematic Art.

In Peter Greenaway´s, article “Towards a re-invention of Cinema”, the director and now New Media Artist, presents what he considers the four “tyrannies” from which Cinema will have to be released in order for a new cinema to emerge: the tyranny of the frame, of the text, of the actor and of the camera. In the same text, Greenaway, states that cinema “died on the 31st September 1983 when the zapper, or the remote control, was introduced into the living-rooms of the world”. He is, of course, referring to cinema as a passive medium and opening up new venues for the effect of the introduction of interactivity, recombination and all the new characteristics that a medium in digital format can inherit.

The ‘Close Encounter’ served as an intro to YCinema, sessions where we will watch and analyze works by Abel Gance, Josef Svoboda, Peter Greenaway, Michael Naimark, Jeffrey Shaw, Lev Manovich and Brendan Dawes, among others, to trace the result of these concerns throughout the history of Cinema.