Id is now home to JibJab (animation) and the Haxans (film) as well as the UK Web artists (led by Florian Schmitt and Alexandra Jugovic). All three groups will be involved in putting together interactive elements that will go hand-in-hand with broadcast advertising campaigns.

hi-res! developed the constantly mutating Web site for Darren Aronofsky's second film, Requiem For A Dream, earning the team acclaim in the entertainment industry. The site takes hold of the content and themes (such as addiction, only instead of drugs, the site refers viewers to net addiction self-help and online gambling) of the film and applies them to the site, which masquerades as a number of other URLs before eventually coming to a jarring crash.

"For us the whole thing about doing these fake sites was to take things from the film that would work on the Web," says Schmitt. "It doesn't always make sense to translate one to one. There is no drug addiction on the Web so we had to find another addiction. We did research and found out net addiction is massive and becoming a major problem. And the whole gambling aspect within the film [ties in with] the huge number of gambling sites online. That was the idea behind it, and of course it was also to shake you up, especially because they all crash at one point. It was something to keep you awake in a broader sense and make you see that not everything is as it seems."

This site and some others created by hi-res! were encoded in Flash to appear as HTML sites, especially useful it seems in stealthily engaging page viewers, and convincing them something has gone quite wrong with their browsers. It remains to be seen what sorts of advertising applications the hi-res! approach will garner.

"Anything that stays away from the traditional way of marketing and advertising and that we would enjoy working on for a large amount of time would be great," says Schmitt. "We like to do quite experimental stuff. The unusual involves the viewer and manages to be cross media, not just on the Web or billboards, but everything at once, essentially becoming part of your life and a second reality. That's the type of ads we'd be interested in."

Webfiles>

Requiem For A Dream> www.requiemforadream.com

Get Back> www.thebeatles.com/getback/index.html

Mind the Banner> www.shift.jp.org/banner

soulbath> www.soulbath.com

hi-res!> www.hi-res.net