November 4, 2007
Film in Shanghai subway blends art, ads
A feel-good film about a girl from the Chinese countryside who moves to the big city to discover love, blogging and Starbucks will premiere this month in an unusual venue: Shanghai's subway. The Wall Street Journal reports.
"A Sunny Day" is scheduled to play exclusively on thousands of high-tech flat screen monitors on Shanghai's subway cars and station platforms.
Tailored for an audience of 2.2 million who cram onto China's biggest underground railway each day, the full-length feature film will be shown in daily segments of a few minutes each over 40 weekdays, soap-opera style.
Subtitles in Chinese will help commuters follow the dialogue over the subway noise, and multiple daily rebroadcasts and tie-ins on the Internet are designed to ensure no one misses any of the cliffhangers.
Instead of an ordinary film, the so-called "subopera" is a blend of drama and advertising. A venture between Starbucks Coffee and PepsiCo financed and helped produce the drama as part of a campaign that kicked off Thursday in Shanghai to introduce bottled frappuccino drinks to the Chinese market.
... The film has a clear commercial bent. In some shots, the mermaid from the Starbucks logo gets as much face-time as the movie's big turnstile draw, Huang Xiao Ming, a 29-year-old pop star who is so well known he is sometimes called China's Justin Timberlake."
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