Candyman Say His Name

AR jump scare trailer teaser

Universal Pictures came to us to develop an innovative site to feature the trailer release of the 2021 Candyman sequel before it was widely available. Drawing on a key superstition from the film's story, we proposed to prompt visitors to say "Candyman" 5 times to unlock and view the trailer.

As users say "Candyman", bees begin to buzz around and land on their face, rapidly increasing each time. Upon completing the sequence of 5, Candyman's figure flashes in the background while he smashes the screen with a crowbar. After the jump scare, the trailer is unlocked.

We used 8th Walls face tracking feature to track the bees to users' faces. For speech recognition, we initially developed a custom vocal trigger ML model which ran on-device, but later switched to Google's speech-to-text cloud service.

I contributed to early research and development for the vocal trigger detection system. I also executed the initial front-end build which included the face-tracked bees and jump scare effects. This project was a first of its kind, integrating voice detection into an immersive face filter experience.