A video cube in New York's Gansevoort Square displays a four-sided sex farce, part of HBO's Imagine campaign.

A drowning mime, a Japanese businessman and a pile of teddy bears feature in a new branding campaign for HBO that will launch Thursday with a video cube installation in New York's Meatpacking District.

The Imagine campaign is BBDO, New York's follow-up to its award-winning 2007 Voyeur campaign for the cable network. Like Voyeur, the new campaign will feature outdoor, digital and television elements focused around a dramatic multi-part storyline viewers can uncover in bits and pieces.

On Sept. 17, the video cube will begin projecting two two-minute short films shot from four different angles by Biscuit Filmworks director Noam Murro. The installation will run for three days before moving on to Philadelphia on Oct. 1 and Washington, DC on Oct. 8.

The displays are intended to draw viewers into a complex, 41-part story full of misdirects and shifting perspectives inspired by the tagline, "It's more than you imagined. It's HBO."

The campaign site HBOImagine.com, created by The Barbarian Group, houses more than 40 minutes of film content in a fragmented constellation. Vieiwers can click on an image to activate short and long clips, audio, photos and newspaper clippings. Each time a viewer watches a clip, new footage is unlocked and linked together. Ultimately the goal is to piece together the non-linear story to realize the complete plotline.

One of the lessons BBDO's creative team learned on Voyeur was that viewers will breeze through content if it's easily accessible.

"We were naïve in how much digging and time people would spend with something that they really liked," says David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO North America. "We thought it would take weeks and they were done in an hour and a half."

The website is structured like a videogame, keeping a running tab of the amount of footage "unlocked" by viewers.

"[Voyeur] was linear - it had a beginning, middle and end," adds Lubars. "With this campaign you can come in anywhere. It's almost like a game or a real life investigation where there's a bunch of facts and you can go back, you can go forward or you can go sideways."

BBDO and The Barbarian Group began talking about the campaign during the Cannes Lions and the production took place over several months. As the website development progressed, so too did the campaign storyline.

"We did prototypes of the web experience and once we realized we were on to something really interesting, the gang at BBDO went back and made more content," says Benjamin Palmer, co-founder and CEO of The Barbarian Group. "We could see where the story holes might be. It was pretty cool to see how the user experience prototypes stimulated the story and the storytelling."

All the clips on the Imagine microsite will be shareable and viewers will be able upload their own clips inspired by the story. The campaign will also roll out via HBO's branded social media channels, such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Lubars adds that in order to succeed, the campaign had to meet the high-quality production values in HBO's programming. Veteran commercial director Murro was recruited to direct and a variety of composers, including David Shire (The Conversation, Zodiac) and Nico Muhly (The Reader), scored the various components.

"This stuff has to live up to the product. It has to be as in-depth and interesting to truly convey what HBO is doing," says Lubars. "If you don't have HBO, you don't know what's going on in popular culture. So the whole idea was to create something that nobody would want to miss either."

www.hboimagine.com
www.bbdo.com
www.barbariangroup.com
www.biscuitfilmworks.com