The Hunger Games website – behind the scenes

So among the other, more serious stuff we do at Microsoft, we also get to play on some really cool projects too. Half the time I can’t talk about them (if I told you I’d have to kill you and all that) but now and then one surfaces that we have more free reign on. And this is one of those times.

The Hunger Games is a new film directed by Gary Ross set in a not-too-distant future where teens fight to the death on live TV (as you would). The production company, Lionsgate, wanted to bring the world of the film to life on the web and turned to development house Ignition Creative, HTML5 specialists at The Nerdery and the Microsoft Internet Explorer team to make it happen.

You can check out the site here.

Trust me, there is some very cool stuff going on under the hood. We have actually produced a full developer tear-down which goes into details about how it was all done. The first instalments can bee seen here which looks into how they dynamically displayed skewed 2D images on a 3D surface.

Over the coming weeks the site will discuss a number of other topics too so make sure you head back and dig into the details.

• Part 2 – Leveraging Developer Tools
• Part 3 – Event Model
• Part 4 – Sprite Animations
• Part 5 – Text Curvature

Plus there’s a bunch of other stuff too. If you want to geek out, you can find the details (plus some code examples) on the tear-down itself. And please do check out the site. I’d love to know what you think.