Our latest project for Channel 4 has just gone live.

For the second year running we’ve worked with Company Pictures, the creators of Skins, to bring the characters to life online.

For Series 6 we took on a more challenging task—to extend the Skins experience into what jargon-lovers might call ‘transmedia storytelling.’

The core success of Skins is simple: authentic storytelling. And we had to make that true on all platforms.

We started with the characters and their online lives—Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube.

But how do we use these platforms to tell stories? Well, if we are going to undertake “authentic storytelling” in these places, obviously in this case it means the characters must have lives between the broadcast of the episodes … stories emerge in real-time, at the right time of day, and of course, audiences can interact with the world of Skins in new ways. All of this means some logistical, creative and technical challenges. Which we love.

As well as telling stories on the platforms our characters would actually use, we also created something sexay. It’s called ”Skins: Lock-In“  — a place where the audience can “follow the stories between the stories.”

In short: each blog post, Facebook update, YouTube clip is part of a bigger story. A story that might be on-air, but might not be.

Each storyline in the Skins: Lock-in takes the audience on a journey. They can follow the characters on all platforms, or they can just pop in and check what’s been going on.

We are very biased but think it’s some of the best storytelling UX out there (which we should blog about soon) … for example, we know people don’t watch episodes in order all the time. So there’s a cool ‘spoiler filter’ which you can use to make sure you’re just getting stories that don’t spoil the current state of play on TV.