In the movie K-PAX, two-time Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey stars as Prot, a mental patient who is unusually convincing in his delusion that he is from the planet K-PAX, 1,000 light years from earth. Academy Award nominee Jeff Bridges plays Dr. Mark Powell, who tries to unravel the mystery behind Prot's identity, even as his patient challenges him to question his own ingrained beliefs and assumptions.

The challenge for Mogulsoft was to create an engaging, immersive site for a character-driven film that was unusual in its mix of drama, comedy, and a little science fiction, as well as in its ambiguity. Because of the film's central question — is he or isn't he from the planet K-PAX? — we had to be careful not to give too much away.

Flash Intro Trailer

Using the raw dialog tracks from the film, we edited together a one minute audio trailer, and mixed it to music. We then brought it to life in Flash, animating stills, and tying everything together with contrasting pairs of words taken from the dialog, which build to an emotional finish. (This presented a technical challenge: keeping things reasonably in sync, even though the frame rate in Flash can vary widely depending on processor speed.)

Look and Feel

Because Prot claims to travel on a beam of light, we used that as a motif, designing the site to be translucent and ethereal, as though etched in glass. We wanted to avoid it looking too "sci-fi," focusing instead on the movie's more human elements.

The design needed to be both sophisticated and a bit whimsical, while also reflecting the established key art. We went a little further in the reflecting department, taking the poster image and adding a moving sky reflection to Prot's sunglasses (which changes to a view of earth when you mouse over them).

Clicking on the sunglasses triggers an even more dramatic transition, taking you literally into the mind of the character: zooming into one of the lenses — and through it — to a special interactive section that features Prot's belongings. For this, we were able to photograph the actual props from the movie, which we used for such features as Prot's Journal and Patient Files.

(Prot's sunglasses were also the focus of a promotional idea we proposed, taking advantage of a relationship we had with Dita Eyewear to create a sweepstakes giveaway.)

... And Sound

We knew from the start that sound would play a vital role in the site. We edited dozens of dialog cues from the film and used them liberally to communicate more of the story. In fact, one of our first interactive ideas was a working microcassette recorder that could play back excerpts from Prot's therapy sessions. On a more subtle level, we used the sound of various taps on glass for buttons and other elements, to tie in with our translucent interface.

Where No Site Has Gone Before...

In addition to the working voice recorder, we created a Flash-based e-cards solution that displays handwritten postcards, designed wallpaper and screensavers, wrote and edited copy, compiled related links, and — in one of our most ambitious efforts to date — we created an interactive Star Chart that shows the constellations in the night sky— as well as the supposed location of the planet K-PAX!

K-PAX represents our most ambitious work technically (taking advantage of features requiring Flash 5), but more importantly, it shows how we were able to team with Universal to successfully translate a challenging, mixed-genre, character-driven movie into an immersive Web site experience. As in our work for Shadow of the Vampire, we accomplished this by immersing ourselves in the material, reading both the script and the novel, and viewing early cuts of the film. Having fallen in love with these characters and the story, we felt an obligation to really communicate that experience to the audience.

Response to the K-PAX site has been exceptional. (Click here to read a few of the positive reviews from the K-PAX Message Forum.) More importantly, K-PAX was no. 1 at the box office in its debut -- with the best Halloween weekend opening ever!