Brand marketers and advertisers are always looking for new ways to engage consumers and keep them interested. How better to do this than to make the consumer the star of the campaign? Big Stage Entertainment has come out with a solution that does just that.

The company's new iStage application for the iPhone creates an animated 3D model out of a digital photo, and inserts this 3D "@ctor" into branded content, making the consumer the star.

Big Stage offers applications on its Web site that lets users project themselves into licensed digital content. They just need to upload a photo and 90 seconds later they have a digital version that they can save to a Facebook or MySpace page or insert into licensed film clips available on the site.

More about how Big Stage ported this to the iPhone after the jump.

iStage is the company's first business application. According to Big Stage CEO Phil Ressler, Big Stage is licensing iStage to brands to use in promotional applications.

iStage made its debut in December as part of a Lionsgate campaign for The Spirit. The studio made 23 scenes available for consumers to populate. To view the next scene, consumers merely had to shake their iPhone.

iStage uses Big Stage's proprietary 3D facial modeling system to map the contours of the face from a single photo taken with the iPhone's camera. Rather than tax the device, all the rendering is done on the server side, and the user is notified via e-mail when he's able to log into the application and check out his @ctor starring in the film clip.

Ressler said that the application for the Lionsgate campaign was downloaded thousands of times in the first 10 days, and it's still up on the App Store for consumers to play with. Big Stage is currently in discussions with additional film and TV studios as well as consumer electronic brands, media outlets and dozens of ad agencies, he said.

Because of its incredible popularity and advanced features, the iPhone made sense as the first mobile platform for iStage. Ressler said that over time, Big Stage plans to port as much of the functionality as will work to other platforms such as Windows Mobile, Android and BlackBerry.