Phone Dream – An Interactive Cinema Experience

The Challenge: A PSA That People Actually Wanted to Watch

Movie theater courtesy messages are forgettable at best, annoying at worst. Every audience member has seen the same message: Please silence your phone. But they still check their notifications.

Sprint wanted to break the cycle. Instead of telling people what to do, what if we made them curious?

What if, when a phone was turned off… it started dreaming?

Enter Phone Dream—an interactive cinema experience that transformed a simple PSA into a story, powered by real-time personalization and mobile technology.

The Experience: A Dreamscape You Could Step Into
More than 1,000 theaters, 18,000 screens—but the experience didn’t end when the film started.

It started with a thought-provoking question:
"If your phone could dream, what would it see?"

📱 Moviegoers were prompted to text “DREAM” to 60602, triggering a journey into a surreal world where phones had dreams of their own.
🎥 A visually stunning PSA unfolded—a mesmerizing dreamscape filled with abstract imagery, created entirely in-camera, without CGI.
🔗 After the movie, participants received a personalized video, built in real-time from their own Facebook activity, photos, and interactions.

Sprint wasn’t just reminding people to turn off their phones. They were giving them a reason to.

My Role: Turning a Story into an Experience
A concept like Phone Dream only works if technology and storytelling function seamlessly together. As part of Team Sprint at Digitas, I ensured that the experience wasn’t just creative—it was flawlessly executed across every touchpoint.

💡 Bringing Emerging Technology to Life
🔹 End-to-End Testing – Ensured seamless integration between SMS, Facebook Open Graph, and video generation.
🔹 Real-Time Video Personalization – Verified that unique, data-driven dream sequences were correctly compiled and delivered to each user post-movie.
🔹 Device Compatibility – Ensured smooth playback across different mobile devices and carriers, preventing lag, buffering, or broken experiences.
🔹 Performance & Load Testing – Simulated thousands of simultaneous requests to confirm Sprint’s infrastructure could handle real-time content generation without delays.

🎭 Balancing Art & Functionality
One of the biggest challenges was ensuring artistic vision didn’t break technical feasibility. As a liaison between the creative and development teams, I:
✅ Translated creative ideas into functional, testable components.
✅ Ensured the interactive experience worked as beautifully as it looked.
✅ Problem-solved last-minute conflicts between video rendering and mobile delivery, preventing delays.

The Impact: A PSA That Became an Experience
📽️ 1,000+ theaters, 18,000+ screens featured the Phone Dream experience.
📱 Real engagement—users opted in via SMS and interacted post-movie through personalized videos.
🚀 Flawless execution—validated and integrated new real-time video technologies for a seamless user experience.
🎬 Bridged the gap between creative storytelling and digital technology, setting a new benchmark for interactive cinema.
📈 Elevated Sprint’s brand perception—transforming an everyday theater message into a memorable, interactive moment.

Why This Was One of My Favorite Projects
Phone Dream wasn’t just a campaign. It was a new way of thinking about audience engagement. Instead of disrupting the movie experience, it became part of it. Instead of a corporate message, it was a question that sparked curiosity.

And instead of just testing for bugs, I got to ensure that technology became invisible, allowing the story to shine.

Because in the end, that’s what the best interactive experiences do.