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Bold Beanies

I just put live a long overdue update to my sister’s company website boldbeanies.com. She makes and sells cotton beanies designed for people that have lost their hair, it’s a small and relatively successful business run from her home in North Wales, but until now has been severely held back by its static and out-of-date website.

Having finally got our acts together to do something about this my sister and I have made a new version – much the same visual design (although I think a facelift is definitely on the cards soon) but now sporting all the functionality she needs to grow her business online.

Bold Beanies now has a CMS, Social and e-Commerce functionality along with enhancements to SEO and Analytics. I’m not much of a developer so I can’t claim this is exactly the Rolls Royce of solutions, but it does make good use of the ever impressive WordPress to provide the basic CMS and the WP-Ecommerce plugin to handle the product side of things – which is much less impressive, but for the most part works. It was pretty straightforward to put together, although I do wonder how long it will be before the limited back-office becomes an issue, and there are some usability issues (mostly around the shopping plugin experience) that I’d like to tackle at some point.

But it must be a about 3 and a half times better than than the old site! so take a look: www.boldbeanies.com and while you’re there why not buy a beanie?

DoND not Live

I am a bit sad that Deal or No Deal Live is no longer with us, of course nothing stays live forever, but this one never really fulfilled its potential. It’s been taken down now, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the format itself is resurrected someday.

Before leaving Endemol however I did take some footage of it running, which i’ve posted here for posterity.. no sound for some reason, sorry about that, although I have to say the the music was a bit annoying..

[iframe https://player.vimeo.com/video/36587175?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0 370 300]

Deal Or No Deal Live Social Game from Luc Houselander on Vimeo.

The Million Pound Drop – Play-along game

The Million Pound Drop is one of those classic formats that only come around occasionally.  The show was invented by Remarkable TV’s MD David Flynn and it has a devilishly simple premise where contestants are given a million pounds in cash at the start of the show and simply asked to keep as much of it as it possible whilst gambling all of it on 8 multiple choice general knowledge questions. Four trapdoors provide the peril as they correspond to the answers of the questions – place your money on an incorrect answer and you could lose the lot!

The beauty of simple formats like this is their effortless flexibility to be turned into digital or other spin off formats and we realised early on that this format would lend itself perfectly to an online play-along game. Channel 4 loved the show and felt that the play-along aspect would complement it perfectly and help maintain their reputation for innovation, so they commissioned it without even a pilot.

Developing play-along games for prime time television would prove to be a considerable technical challenge, the main problems being ensuring you could deliver the game to so many concurrent users at the same time (one technical manager at C4 likened the game to organising a denial of service attack on your own website) and generating data about the players at home fast enough so that statistics could be fed back into the studio gallery and used editorially within the show.

These challenges were met with the help of developers Monterosa, a company with a technology platform called EnMasse which has been developed specifically to cater for mass online participation broadcast events like this.

Since the success of the first series we have redesigned and iterated the play-along game to improve the experience and to add new features such as an in-game players’ leaderboard of facebook friends, so now you players can track their progress in the game against their friends and family.

Client: Channel 4
Launched: April 2010
URL: www.channel4.com/drop

Million Pound Drop picks up New Media Age award

The very nice chaps at Channel 4 put the Million Pound Drop Play-along game up for three awards earlier this year and last Thursday it won the New Media Age award for Entertainment, meaning we have scored some kind of unholy awards trifecta in this area. To be honest I would have been happy with any one of these gongs (the others being a BAFTA and Broadcast Magazine award), but to pick up all three is obviously very cool indeed. The good news for anyone that reads this occasional blog (hi mum!) is that this should be the last time you read about TMPD winning anything on here.. should it be entered in for anything next year, then I, like you dear reader, shall be only an avid spectator. Obviously I’m very chuffed to have been part of something that has resonated so well with the digital industry back in Blighty, the challenge now is to do the same here in Australia, more on this soon I hope!

Million Pound Drop Play-along game wins Broadcast Digital Award.

The Million Pound Drop Live play-along game has picked up another award, this time from the UK’s leading TV biz magazine Broadcast’s Digital Awards for ‘Best use of Digital Technology’. It’s a shame I wasn’t there this time –  it’s slightly out of my way these days..  but great to see the chaps from Endemol, Monterosa and Channel 4 were there in force, and black tie, to scoop this one up, well done everybody!

BAFTA win for the Million Pound Drop Live

Last Sunday was my last night in the UK before setting off to my new home in Australia, so it’s hard to imagine a better send off than the one we had courtesy of BAFTA at the 2011 Television Craft awards. Channel 4 had put forward the Play-along game from the Million Pound Drop Live for the Digital Creativity award, and against some stiff competition (mostly from other Channel 4 shows!) ours won out. Of the four of us listed on the award there was myself and Nick Hall representing Endemol UK, Simon Brickle from Monterosa and Jody Smith, the cross-platform comissionner from Channel 4 responsible for the show. It was a great night both personally and for the team behind the show and winning the award the was as unexpected as it was welcome. It also provided me some interesting problems carrying the award back the following day.. it weighs 4kg and raised a few eyebrows at the security at Heathrow!Hopefully awarding The Million Pound Drop the BAFTA is a recognition that interactivity can be a successful and central part of new TV formats and hopefully this will encourage more shows like this to be developed and commissioned in future.

Big Brother Auditions website

My last project for Endemol UK was putting together this application website for the 2011 series of Big Brother. Built in a few days following the announcement that BB was to find a new home on Channel 5 and timed to launch along with official announcements in the Northern & Shell the site provides an online form enabling potential contestants an opportunity to apply for a chance to audition for the show. This site posed some interesting challenges, not least of which being the design, which needed to have an identity but not be too strong as the overall design of the show had not yet been started. If you fancy becoming a housemate on this years show then why not apply now? www.bigbrotherauditions.com

 

 

Down Under

So some big personal news: after six years at Endemol Digital Media I’m leaving and moving on.. quite a long way as it goes, to Melbourne, Australia!

It’s a move prompted by my Aussie partner’s wish to be closer to her family and to give our little girl the kind of outdoor life she would struggle to get in our particular patch of South East London. It’s an exciting time, and from a work perspective a sad one too as I’ll be leaving a great job and team here at Endemol.

But I’ll be leaving at a time when EDM is somewhat on a high (a testament to my boss Nick Hall and his work turning around the department over the last couple of years!). In a few weeks we’ll back in the OB truck pulling the levers on our Bafta nominated play-along game for series 4 Million Pound Drop Live, we’ll be launching an energetic new Facebook game based on our hit show Total Wipeout – (more on this soon!) and of course there’s the move of Big Brother to its new home on Channel 5 – expect a whole slew of new digital projects around this in the next few months.

As for me I’m currently putting my feelers out to the Australian television and digital media industries and looking for my next role. I plan to have a little holiday once I arrive Down Under, but will be ready for action towards the end of May – to that end if you want to find out more about me then check out my online CV here: cv.luc.me.uk and please keep checking back to this site for updates.

I Can Cook game

This game was built to support our new cooking show for kids (age 3-6) I Can Cook. The idea was to design a game that could demonstrate to children some of the activities found within cooking and to give them a sense of the steps required to complete different recipes. We used real recipes found in the show with a general guiding ambition to provide an experience that could, in some small way, replace actually getting message in the kitchen. In the game the recipes themselves are broken down to 5 of their basic actions and each of these has a small mini-game built around them – not unlike the seminal cooking mama series. Children are encouraged to move the moue or hit the spacebar at key times to enable animations to play.

We had great access to the I Can Cook production team in the making of the game and were able to get the show’s iconic presenter Katy Ashworth (@KatyAshworth) to provide voice over for the whole game – which really helped to make the game special.

I’m particuarly happy with the art direction of this game, which was provided by a long time Endemol collaborator Matt McFaul (@jambamatt). Something must have clicked with the online audience too as the game was a big success on the cbeebies website. The BBC commissioned us to produce games for a further 5 recipes, which went live in August 2010, the game remains a firm favourite on the Cbeebies site.

Client: BBC
Launched: V.1 Sept 2009, v.2 Aug 2010
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/icancook/

Dreamarena 2

 

18 months after its initial launch we decided to overhaul the design and scope of the Dreamarena portal site ( the walled garden content portal available only to Dreamcast owners – see Dreamarena )

The site had organically grown, in terms of content, but so had the pressure for real estate on the site’s homepage and so this was something that we needed to address, but the SEGA executives were also keen to do something daring and innovative with the design also, something that would connect with gamers’ imaginations.

In additiona the Dreamarena homepage had to provide direct links to every part of the site, it had to be quick to load and work in the same way in five different languages.

The solution we adopted was built around the user experience of using the Dreamcast controller as the input method. Unusually for a website we found that a scrolling horizontal

The adopted solution displays a world in isometric 3D, where content icons reveal their menus upon rollover. This environment scrolled left to right and revealed other content areas – this was proved to be an intuitive interface when browsing with the Dreamcast controller.

By the time of its re-design an important source of revenue for the Dreamarena was co-branding areas of content; allowing users to access non-gaming 3rd party content. This presented creative challenges in that the site was in danger of becoming ‘over-branded’.
I worked closely at this time with SEGA’s content partners to produce content that fulfilled a multitude of commercial imperitives. This work ultimately led to writing the Dreamarena Styleguide as a means of clarifying to all parties how the site should look and operate.

The Styleguide was born from a need to clarify how the Dreamarena look and feel was to be used as the scope of content provision started to widen. Co-branded areas and web-enabled games all needed to comply with the Dreamarena house style, plus more design agencies were being involved in creating content for Dreamcast promotions.

The Styleguide document outlined all the necessary design rules for making Dreamarena compliant pages and also included details of best practice for making pages to be displayed on TV and more specifically for the Dreamkey web browser.

Client: SEGA Europe
Launch: September 2001
URL: No longer live

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