You know when that handful of corporate voicemail greetings you recorded turn out to be part of a major Hollywood movie viral promotional campaign? Well, that.
I couldn’t quite tick the box marked, “voice of a spaceship computer” but it came very close.
I thought the script didn’t look quite right. The messages seemed… a bit scifi, to be honest. One of them directed callers to a website, so I thought I’d take a look. There, I found and watched a video of a vaguely-familiar man giving a presentation, Steve Jobs style, to a huge arena, filmed by floating cameras. Still not entirely sure what was going on, I turned to Google.
Oh…
The man giving the talk is Peter Weyland (played by Guy Pearce, that’s why he looked so familiar, dammit) founder of Weyland Industries, and the company behind Project Prometheus. Prometheus is Ridley Scott’s latest film, an Alien prequel/reboot and one of the most hotly anticipated films due this summer, with a huge promotional campaign already running which includes interactive websites, videos, SMS and tantalisingly vague references sending the geek online communities into a frenzy.
The messages I recorded, as the voice on-hold for Weyland Industries, were part of this promotional onslaught. Excited? Just a bit. I couldn’t share or use the audio in my demos until the film was released; as it’s now out in the UK and released in the US on the 8th June, I can now include the audio in this post:
I think the message is still active in the States – If you are in the US, dial **WEYLAND from your mobile (sorry cell) and there I am. You’ll get a movie-related titbit in return for the call, too.
And in an actually mildly relevant bit of trivia: Like me, Ridley Scott grew up in Hartlepool. He attended the local Art College. I went to the Sixth Form. We’ve never met.