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.

“A Ken Loach Soap-Opera, Improvised by Robots.”

We’ve launched our next project for Channel 4 Education. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a decade, but it has taken some serious planetary alignment to make real. And because of the the brains making it, it’s way better than I ever thought possible. So we’re pretty excited.

We’re telling stories—primarily on linear video—using a video game engine (The Sims™ 3).  It’s a tale of four housemates and their ups and downs; their ambitions and their dreams.

So, machinima, right?

Wrong.

Machinima sees people using game engines as cinema soundstages. You write the script, you make a storyboard showing how every shot will be positioned, you position the actors and cameras and you keep shooting until you’ve got the footage you need. It’s using game characters as puppets, mastered by humans.

We are doing something completely different. Something fitting the driving spirit Will Wright built into his pioneering simulation games—emergence.

There’s no plot in a simulation game; or rather, no pre-planned story. Instead, dramatic gameplay emerges from the complex interactions between the algorithmic expressions of personalities, ambitions, and human foibles. It’s how life works. The game we’re using to tell stories is a version of life tuned to create simulated drama.

A game designer of sensitivity and talent—like Robin Burkinshaw—can carefully sculpt characters and situations and let them run, interpreting their actions in a beautiful and human way. This is what he did in the extraordinarily moving Alice and Kev (the story of two homeless people in a video game) and we’re delighted he’s doing the same on our new project.

Our project is nothing less than the first ever drama improvised by robots.

We’ve cast our characters carefully, given them very detailed character notes, ambitions and motivations and created a dramatic context. Now we’ll let them live their parts for six weeks. It’s more like Ken Loach directing virtual actors.

In keeping with the emergent nature of the drama we are also exploring a Darwinian approach to storytelling. From the same starting point every day we can run different versions of reality on different machines, each of which will mutate in different ways. The one showing the best adaptation to our dramatic needs is deemed most fit to become tomorrow’s starting point—although we sadly won’t be doing that this time round!

It’s whole new way of telling stories and we’ve had to invent many new methods of production for a different kind of drama; there are elements of ‘constructed reality’ and observational documentary as well as a sensitivity to the affordances of software as a collaborative partner. There are entirely different job positions we’re filling and some interesting technical hurdles to surmount (for example, we’ll need over 130TB of storage space at the project’s peak — which is a lot).

For the script-writing part of the project, we’ve drawn inspiration from The Magic Roundabout. When the BBC bought Serge Danot’s series back in the 1960′s they realised too late they had only bought the pictures—not the scripts. So Eric Thompson looked at the pictures and made up new ones. We have the advantage of Robin being the world’s best “AI Whisperer,” who will be interpreting our characters actions. This way we can make sure what goes to the final edit and the script will be fantastic drama—even though the plot lines are emergent. It worked beautifully in the pilot anyway! [edit: it's working beautifully in the real thing — check the link below!]

The final, glorious, piece here is that the project has a positive payload: mindfulness. The series was created as part of our continuing work exploring teaching techniques of resilience for teens.

The SuperMes forms a part of our SuperMe content system for Channel 4 education, commissioned by Jo Twist. Inspired by Alice and Kev by Robin Burkinshaw, it was devised by myself (Paul Bennun) and Jo Roach. Sean Coleman is producing the series and Ian Sharpe from Somethin’ Else is the exec.

Find out more at at http://facebook.com/playsuperme

The game is designed to help 10-13 year olds as they move up to big school, and with life transitions in general.  Unfortunately for the players the game starts seconds before reality explodes and they end up in the worst type of big school imaginable. Their mission is to fix reality by playing through fourteen episodes of brilliant chaos, with the help of some fanciful friends and terrifying teachers (thanks to @neillieb and Neil Richards, the script and story-writers).

Directed and Executive Produced by Jo “The” Roach, the character design and illustration style was conceived by Ben Steers at Fiasco Design, and further developed by Playerthree. The game launches in September 2011, just in time for the new school year.

We’re rather happy.

The project in question is a content system we built for Channel 4 — it brings together games, linear video, text and interactive playthings together within a game framework. Its objective is to show teens how much power they have over their own resilience.

There’s a lot more information about this great project right about here …

… or go and have a play at www.playsuperme.com!

A total surprise, not least because the competition was so amazing, the award celebrates innovative projects that do good Out There. SuperMe’s aim was to teach teenagers to understand the control they have over their own happiness.

It’s a system of video, interactive tools and games all set in a hub visible at http://playsuperme.com …

We’re incredibly proud of it as you may imagine. It’s a feat of engineering, research and design from the Somethin’ Else digital team. A massive original research project fed into a load of audience activity, which lead to something with a lot of complexity dressed up to look like simplicity. The site has a powerful personalised content system, which built a ‘big game’ on top of all the material: animation, stop-motion and full-motion video linear stuff; interactive quizzes, some Flash games, all delivered with beautiful Facebook integration and plenty of 3rd-party syndication.

A million thanks to Alice Taylor / Jo Twist / Matt Locke from Channel 4 Education, to Preloaded who made the Flash games with us, to Tassos Stevens for leading the research and — last but not least — Jo Roach who lead the project.

GO TEAM.

2011 saw the fifth series of Channel 4’s hugely popular drama Skins, and an entirely new cast of characters — the third generation.

This year, Somethin’ Else and Company Pictures worked together to bring Skins online, and to reveal characters Mini, Grace, Liv, Franky, Nick, Rich and Alo online weeks before fans met them on screen.  It’s always challenging launching a new cast when the audience love the old one, especially when you need to tee the action of the first episode up without giving anything away. So we worked with Company to start the stories off online through social networks, fictional websites and exclusive video before the first episode.

It all went rather well.

Fans were even chatting with the characters, swapping pictures and even asking advice, building huge excitement amongst one of the most committed fan-bases in British TV.

Highlights: In-character social networks

The characters have been updating daily on Twitter — playing out the story, talking to each other and responding to fans — all written by the same team behind the TV drama. We also created hidden profiles for Franky and Matty, two of the show’s more mysterious characters and challenged the audience to find them.

To bring everything together, we created a custom Facebook application to get quick access to the latest conversations, highlights of the campaigns and top tweets.

Visit the Facebook App

Leon Levan

Leon is the world’s most obnoxious life coach, committed mysogynist, and (unfortunately) father of lead character Nick. He also has a website where fans can download posters, improve their lives with his motivational videos, email him for advice or even call him for pre-recorded words of … um … “wisdom.”

Visit Leon’s site

Roundview College

Much of the action in Skins takes place at Roundview, where deputy head Doug is responsible for the pastoral care of his students. He’s also built a website, where students can get exclusive videos covering important school issues, email him for advice or even get advice on Sex Education.

Visit the Roundview College Website

Make sure you have at least an iPhone 3GS, iPad or latest version of the iPod touch running the latest version of iOS …

… and then click this link as fast as you can.

For more information, or App Support issues, head on over to PapaSangre.com.

Here’s what The Guardian’s said about El Papa, here’s the The Observer‘s take and here’s what Twitter’s been saying. Oh, and we’re currently on the home page of the app store.

The Skins characters will be seeded across the web ahead of the new series. Fans will be able to interact with them in places relevant to each character, whether Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or Spotify. We’re working with Skins creator Company Pictures to drive the campaign. We’ll put more details up soon about it.

The show brings a weekly treat of R’n'B, with Goldierocks presenting the show alongside dancehall artist Mr Midas and Twin B.

Aimed at teens, Super Me teaches you how to be better at life. It’s made of games, vids and quizzes (among other things) that together form a larger web-based game where the ultimate goal is to attain Super Me status (via other levels such as ninja and robot).

We are very, very proud of it: technology and content working beautifully together, and production values you can only achieve when you have an amazing team working their guts out! Special thanks to our collaborators Preloaded and Coney – and of course our teenage co-creators who kept the project true to life.

Begin your adventure here.