While GMD Studios has more typically been involved with commercial services as part of "special project" and "special needs" teams, our experience with developing, incubating and publishing online brands has made us sought after by other companies to take broader project management roles as "contract publishers." These are brands that receive as much TLC as we give our own brands ... and that we're just as proud of as our own.
As an experimental development firm, we're not afraid to stick our necks out on the line in the name innovation. Sometimes the results are fantastic. Sometimes aspects work well, but the project fails anyway. Sometimes the ideas have a "season" that passes. Some of our projects that are no longer active or even available on the Web include:
Freaky Links
One of the most bizarrely experimental of these efforts was Freakylinks.com, the online half of the dual television/Web story of webmaster Derek Barnes and his explorations into the strange and bizarre. Far different from "marketing a television show on the Web," Freakylinks.com was a storytelling experience of its own which preceeds and interacts with the Fox Television series "Freakylinks" conceived by Haxan Films (The Blair Witch Project) producer Gregg Hale. The site mixed together real accounts of the paranormal with stories inspired by Fortean events and legends, all told through the personal voice and experiences of Derek.
Launched in Jaunary 2000, more then eight months before the television series itself debuted in October 2000, Freakylinks.com brought a rich interactive environment to the Web audience, including an extremely active community experience, downloadable toys & gizmos and real interactions with Derek, Lan and the crew. More than just Freakylinks.com, the Freakylinks web universe included such sites as Occultresearch.com, Gunter Mahlberg's Acquire-GM.com, Derek's competitor Stu Carmichael and his Creepyclicks.com site, and the email enigma of Who.ky.
Left without an obvious connection between Fox Television and Derek Barnes (the television series referenced the website, but not vice versa), it was easier for most of Freakylinks.com fans to assume that Fox developed a series based upon Derek because of the popularity of his website, rather than recognize that the two represent a synchronistic storytelling experience.
The peer-to-peer interactivity and personalized storytelling of Freakylinks.com, coupled with a depth of content that assures hours of poking and exploration by the Web audience, produced performance metrics that show this new kind of Web storytelling works. Three months before the series debuted on television, Freakylinks.com had already appeared above the 3,000-spot on PC Data's rankings of the most popular sites on the Web, reaching over 325,000 unique people in July of 2000 while still maintaining amazing "stick times" of nearly 32 minutes per session.
When Fox Television canceled the series (and thus, the website) in February 2001, the Freakylinks community was an amazingly vibrant alternate universe. Some fans described the closing of the website as "the death of a friend," while others organized fan efforts to save the show and the website.
