itvt

UK-based Illumina Digital is perhaps best known for the interactive scripted programming it creates using on-demand broadband video, games, and other multimedia elements. The company’s clients include the BBC, Channel 4, and Nickelodeon. Illumina’s head of development, Mike Dicks, recently spoke to [itvt]’s Tracy Swedlow about the company’s efforts to use interactivity to develop new ways of telling stories; about the company’s various productions, which include "Wannabes," an interactive sitcom that invites viewers to form "friendships" with its characters, and "Axon," an interactive drama that is designed to encourage curriculum-based science learning (note: both shows were commissioned by the BBC); about the company’s approach to user-generated content; about new software tools it has developed; about its future plans; and more.

[itvt]: Could you talk a little about your background and about how you ended up at Illumina Digital?

Dicks: I joined Illumina about two years ago. Before that, I’d been working with a partner in my own agency, developing digital content for the BBC and Channel 4. That company folded, sadly, due to creative differences. So I started looking for a home for my various projects and customers, and I found Illumina. At the time, I felt they were one of the unsung heroes of the market, in that they really understood video and interactivity, and how to make those two things work together in a number of different markets.

[itvt]: How long has Illumina been around?

Dicks: Illumina has been around for about eight years. We are a totally integrated, cross-media production company. We actually produce stuff for three main markets. There’s the education market; then there’s what we call the "informal learning" market–which can mean anything from educational games, through to Web sites that support, say, a program on the history of science, or the English National Opera, or the Royal Shakespeare Company. Then there’s the entertainment market–which is the market that most of my projects are targeted at. So that’s where we’re producing things like interactive soap operas, interactive cookery shows–all of them broadband plays.

[itvt]: But you see yourselves as more than just broadband Web site producers, correct?

Dicks: Yes. At least as far as my area of the business–the entertainment side–is concerned, we’re about developing new ways of storytelling. We’re not about just putting video online, and we’re not about just coming up with broadband games based on a TV show. For us, it’s about integrating all that, so that a story can be told through the medium of broadband. What that means, is that you get the chance to interact with the story and the characters, and that, when you play games, those games are an integral part of a plot. So, "Wannabes," for example, is on one level a situation comedy that’s aimed at 14- to 19-year olds. But it’s also a storytelling system: it uses interactivity in various ways to tell stories. We also try to come up with new kinds of storytelling with our broadband documentary projects, too. We’re still in the very early days of this process of coming up with new storytelling techniques, but we’re at least starting to use the broadband medium in a way that we think users would like it to work: when you’re sitting at a computer, watching a video, there’s so much more you should be able to do than just passively watch; so providing more information, providing more things that are clickable, so to speak, is very important.

Right now, there seems to be a fairly widespread belief that people’s tolerance for broadband video is limited. However, I’m a fairly firm believer that we’re going to get past this phase of everybody thinking that this should all be about short clips and fairly small amounts of video. You see, in the various genres we work in–entertainment, drama, comedy, cookery shows and other lifestyle programming–it’s all about telling a story. If you have good quality material and good quality stories, people are going to want to engage with your projects as long as they possibly can. The documentaries that we do often have upwards of 120 hours of video in them. Of course, if you sat through all of that, you’d probably be bored to death by the end of it. But what we try to do is give you the ability to take a path through it that interests you. So, with a documentary we’ve created on the Royal Shakespeare Company, for example, you can explore how they put on plays from the perspective of the playwright or from the perspective of the actors–pretty much each time you come to the material, you can look at it from a different angle. The choices that you make allow you to create an experience for yourself, rather than having it imposed upon you by a broadcaster or a TV producer.

[itvt]: So you see yourselves as challenging the model under which interacting with broadband video is largely a matter of selecting and watching short clips on-demand…

Dicks: Exactly. What’s been happening is that everybody’s been rushing around, trying to figure out how to get their current output and their archives onto the Web–which, I think, is a necessary phase for broadcasters and other content owners to go through. And so the simple video-on-demand model currently predominates.

However, once they’ve succeeded in getting their content up there as broadband VOD, I think they will very quickly start to realize that people consume content on a computer in a completely different way from how they consume it on a television. Basically, they need more stuff to keep them there. You can’t overlook the fact that there’s a keyboard and a mouse on the computer, just like there’s a remote control on the television; and that, just as the user can switch you off or change the channel on you on TV if they’re bored, they can do that on broadband as well.

So we attempt to design projects that engage the user by giving them opportunities to click away and explore a wide array content–that is nevertheless all related to the story that we’re trying to tell. I think that’s where even broadcast will eventually need to go.

There are actually quite a few projects in the UK that I’m aware of that are in the same space as we operate in. Endemol, for example, just got a new gig creating an interactive drama that’s going to be offered on broadband by the BBC. I’m envious of their budget for this–though I should point out that it’s still not a television budget. Likewise, we’re in a development contract at the moment with Nickelodeon for a new project that I think will be on an even grander scale than this Endemol-BBC project. So, anyway, I think a lot of people are starting to come around to the view that "OK. We’ve now got content online. But what we now need to do is make sure that that content actually keeps viewers on our Web site."

[itvt]: Let’s get into more detail about how your interactive narratives work: could you give us a rundown of how the end-user would experience one of your interactive dramas–say "Wannabes"–and how the end-user would experience one of your interactive documentaries?

Dicks: Well, this is never easy in words–it’s much easier with pictures–but here goes. With "Wannabes," we wanted to create a video drama serial that would allow viewers to get involved with the characters and the story. After exploring a number of possible ways to achieve this–including branching narratives, voting for endings or voting off characters–we settled on a combination of small ways for the viewer to get involved with the drama, that didn’t change the overall story. So we introduced a Friendship Rating system–an idea we took from the Role Playing Game world. Each of the main characters in the   show has an opinion about you, as a viewer and as a friend: they all start off indifferent to you–which translates into a score of 5/10–and, throughout the series, this score changes as a result of their interactions with you. So, for example, a character will turn to camera and ask you directly for some advice: "Should I tell her about the letters I keep hiding from her or not?" When you give your advice, like a real friend, the character will decide whether to follow it or not. They’ll also go all wavy and think about the possible outcome of following your advice. Whatever their decision, the effect is on their rating of you: if they like your advice, you go up in score; if they don’t like it you go down. It’s a really simple trick, but it’s made a massive difference to the way people get involved with the characters.

"Wannabes" also uses ‘game scenes’ to further the plot. Here we get the viewer involved in a scene by having them play a game. For example, two characters enter a warehouse and have to sneak past the security guards–at which point you get to control them in a maze game to see if you can get them past the guards. If you do well, your Friendship Rating goes up.

 

As for online documentaries, our approach here is to provide a number of ways to explore the video content we produce. For example, in "Stagework" you can watch a pretty much linear version of a documentary that explores a National Theatre production. We also provide a timeline of the production, so a user can explore the video content in a way that reflects the real process of creating a play–from the writing to the set design, casting and production. Then we offer a themed view that lets the user navigate the only content they are interested in–perhaps the actors’ view or the directors’. This way, users can drill down into the video and take out what they want.

[itvt]: As you know, there’s an huge interest right now on the part of broadcasters and advertisers in user-generated content. What are you doing in that space, and, as a company focused on storytelling, do you see it in any way as a threat?

Dicks: I think it’s a double-sided coin. On the one hand, the emergence of this phenomenon is providing lots of people with a great channel to express themselves. On the other hand, as a production company, what we obviously don’t want is a user-generated world where production companies don’t exist any more, and video starts to be about nothing more than two-minute clips on YouTube. I guess you could call it protectionism, but what we’re basically saying is that our goal is great storytelling, but that we’re very interested in incorporating user-generated content into our efforts to achieve that goal.

So we’ve taken a two-sided approach to user-generated content. One side is that we’re now producing tools that allow people to mash up video–i.e. edit video and create their own productions. We currently have a software product called eSEQ, which broadcasters can offer to their viewers so that the latter can create their own version of an existing program, documentary, or whatever–but within the confines of a specific style. What we do is we try to control the graphics and transitions that you’re allowed to use, so that the broadcaster’s style is maintained in the new versions that the audience creates. For example, we created a site for Channel 4 in the UK, called Breaking the News, where schools were able to create a news bulletin using live video feeds from Channel 4 News, and straplines, maps and idents from the Channel 4 graphics catalog, as well as uploading their own video to insert into the broadcast.

eSEQ is written in Flash, and makes extensive use of Flash Video: we’re currently able to convert a number of video formats into Flash automatically and back again, which makes eSEQ very flexible. What’s unique about it is that we can re-purpose the software to work with a number of different video libraries–and re-skin it to work with a company’s brand.

The other side of our approach to user-generated content is that we’re also developing formats that integrate user-generated content, and we’re actually working with a number of broadcasters and production companies on these projects. So we’re currently talking to Bob Geldof and John Maguire about how we’d integrate user-generated content for them into the "Dictionary of Man" project they’re launching–which is an attempt to create a snapshot of mankind in the 21st century through broadcast video, DVD, books and, most importantly, the Web. We’re also incorporating it into some of our storytelling projects. At the moment, we’re working on a project where users will be encouraged to contribute scenes to a drama. So what we think will really work is the editorial use of user-generated content. We’ve just completed a couple  of UGC sites for the BBC and Channel 4 in the UK that bring TV and UGC together: for the BBC, we’ve built a site to support their British Summer of Film–allowing film fans to create and upload their own homages to British Cinema. And for Channel 4 and Wall to Wall we’ve created a site to support the forthcoming "Empire’s Children," that allows viewers to tell their own life stories through pictures, video and text, to match the celebrities’ stories told in the show.

Now, I do think we should be mindful of the fact that something like 98% of the people visiting YouTube are not creating and uploading content of their own, but are just viewing. And who knows what percentage of their traffic is generated by ripped-off TV shows? But, nevertheless, I do think there’s a much wider creative community than there used to be, and I do think you’ve got to find ways to incorporate these amateur creatives into your work. They need to be able to produce things in a marketplace that allows them to expand their  projects into full-blown films, TV programs and everything else. So while I’m not a big believer in launching new channels devoted purely to user-generated content–because, to be honest, a lot of it is rubbish–I do think that we should be incorporating it into what we’re doing. Clearly, it’s not all rubbish, though: I have seen some fantastic user-generated content, and I’ve even worked with people who’ve sent me their clips. I’ve also seen some fantastic applications for user-generated content. For example, I met some people from a company called ExpoTV at your TV of Tomorrow Show in San Francisco. They’re doing some really interesting things with user-generated video product reviews, and we’re actually talking to them about using our tools for what they do. I really like their model, because they’re not just seeing user-generated content in terms of entertainment–in which case it would always be inferior to professionally produced entertainment content–but rather they’re using it to build communities and to create a useful Web service for people. Honest appraisal of products by real humans is something brands are really interested in.

[itvt]: What tools or tricks do you have up your sleeve that you think really help set your company apart?

Dicks: In terms of tools, we have a couple of things that I’m very excited about. One is these is this eSEQ product I just mentioned, which is an online video-editing package. It’s controllable and keeps all the video on a central server for whoever’s running it. We’ve implemented that with a number of TV companies in the UK including the BBC, Channel 4 and with organizations like the National Archive and the Department for Education. As I mentioned, it allows them to maintain a bit of editorial control over user-generated content.

  The other tool that we’ve got is a content management system for Flash video that allows people to create video-based services. Here’s an example of how that works: we’ve created an online cookery show for the BBC, called "Get Cooking." The video on the site is searchable, by course, chef, food type, etc., and once you have chosen a recipe you are presented with a step-by-step guide to cooking it. Throughout the films, there are points where, if you choose to, you can learn the particular skills required to follow the recipe you’re watching. For example, you can have a masterclass on making pastry when following a pie recipe or one on de-boning a fish when cooking skate. But if you’ve seen that masterclass before, or if you already know how to make puff pastry, then you can continue through the demonstration. So it ends up being a very non-linear experience. It’s actually the first piece of software we’ve created that I’ve used because I wanted to, not because I had to. I’ve used it to check a number of recipes, and it works very well: the only thing is that, when you have your laptop next to the cooker, you have to be careful about splashing stuff on it. We’ve just applied the content management system we created for this project to a Yog a course for a site called the Body of Yoga, and we’re developing the software at the moment to allow clients to add new content. We’re also looking at other educational applications. Again, it’s the power of using Flash video that allows us to create these applications.

Anyway, we’ve taken that backend and made it into a tool that allows video publishers to offer similar capabilities: so broadband video that works like a cross between a TV show and a reference manual.

[itvt]: Are you offering your software on a standalone basis, or is it always employed in the context of a commission that you then carry out yourselves?

Dicks: We can do either: at the moment we prefer to sell it as part of a commission, but we are developing a "vanilla" version that will be useable by anyone with a library of Flash video.

[itvt]: You seem to be very focused on a younger audience. Most of your high-profile projects seem to be targeted at younger consumers, correct?

Dicks: Yes, we tend to concentrate on education and entertainment for teenagers and tweenagers. We usually target an age range between 10 and 19. We do a lot of focus group work on the educational side of our business, which helps inform what we’re doing on the entertainment side, and vice versa. In fact, we’re very interested in the convergence between entertainment and education. For example, we’ve created an interactive broadband video drama called "Axon," that is designed to foster curriculum-based science learning for 11- to 14-year-olds. It centers on the story of a girl who inherits a multi-million-pound fortune on her 21st birthday from her father, who’s missing and presumed dead. She discovers her father’s ex-business partner has a sinister history, and may well have been involved in her father’s disappearance. So she decides to use the money she inherited to set up an online investigative agency that starts to conduct scientific investigations into her father’s ex-business partner’s businesses. You become a member of her team, and you are set missions by your allocated agents–they send you emails and video messages. The plot thickens: planes keep crashing and oil tankers keep vanishing, and, using science, you get to the bottom of what the ex-business partner is up to. So, even though the show is all about science, it’s a drama that engages kids: you can watch the show and play the various games it invites you to play, and you don’t really feel that you’re being educated, even though you are. You could say that this approach is part of a broader approach that we follow when creating interactive broadband video experiences: we try to determine how you get people interacting with brands or organizations in a way that feels natural and unforced.

[itvt]: Why do so many of your projects tend to focus on a youthful audience?

Dicks: The reason I love working in the kids’ sector and the teenage sector is that these guys just totally accept the technology. There’s no question about it, from their point of view. They’ve got expectations of it, as well–they’re an incredibly honest and fickle audience, and they’ll switch you off much quicker than an adult audience will. So you’ve got to get it right. And what’s great–of course–is that they are the adult audience of the future. That’s something that we’ve experienced very literally: because of the length of time it can take to get these projects launched, quite often the kids you did market research with on a show are 18 or 19 by the time the show actually gets to air. And what this means, of course, is that future audiences are going to be much more comfortable with interactivity than current audiences: in my experience, most people who are 30-plus, let alone 40-plus, are a bit trapped in seeing television as a passive medium–and I think that, in some ways, the experience of interactive TV up to now has kind of proved that for them. But what is significant is that, at the same time as the interactive TV technology platform is getting faster and more responsive–and eventually capable of delivering the same kind of interactivity as broadband can–the audience that is comfortable with interactivity is moving into a more adult age range.

[itvt]: When you start a new project, do your clients typically give you some instructions about how they want it to be interactive, or do they usually expect you to generate all the ideas?

Dicks: It’s a balance, really. Quite often, we’re asked to just quote for very specific work that we’re renowned for. I suppose people see stuff that we do and say, "Yes. I’d like to do one of those." We tend to go in and say, "Actually, why don’t you do one of these instead? Because it’s much more fun." That’s partly because we like a bit of variety in what we do; but it’s more because we like to look at the specific client’s brand–be it a TV show or whatever–and then figure out what specifically should be interactive about it and how it should work. We’re also always happy to work with traditional content makers, to help them make their projects interactive. That’s what we’re doing on the Bob Geldof project I mentioned earlier: advising them on ways we think they should approach that project as an interactive project. So, in some ways, we’re a little like a consultancy: we gently take clients on a journey into how their brand or asset should be interactive. But we’re also producers, so we can make the interactivity actually happen for them as well.

Also, quite often, we come up with our own formats and take those to broadcasters or Web site operators.

[itvt]: Do you have any plans to take what you’ve learned about interactivity in the broadband video space and apply it to set-top box-based environments–so to television in the living room?

Dicks: Absolutely. We’re increasingly eager to develop interactive narratives for the living room too. With VOD now available in one form or another through most digital set-top boxes, and with Xbox Live giving you the ability to download video and link it, you’re getting to the point where you can start developing interactive stories that will work on television–i.e. that will work in the context of social viewing.

You see, social viewing is the big difference: broadband video, as a rule, is designed for one viewer to watch. Of course, the goal is to attract a large audience, but it will be an audience comprised of one viewer at a time in front of the screen, with sole control over the interaction. TV, however, is still a very social experience for most people. There are at least two people watching it, as a rule, in any household–and, in most homes, maybe four or five. So the task for a company like ours is figuring out how to get three or four people in a room to interact with a TV show simultaneously, and for this to result in a show that is still entertaining. This is why I think that things like mobile phones and iPods are very important for interactive TV: because they allow you to watch a TV show as a group, and yet interact with it as an individual.

I’m also very interested in the convergence between game consoles and televisions, as game consoles make it perfectly possible for three or four people at once to interact with a game.

[itvt]: You mentioned earlier that you’re currently involved in a project with Nickelodeon…

Dicks: I’d love to blab about this one, but I can’t talk about it too much, because we’re still in development. The phase we’re at right now is that we’ve developed an idea for an interactive sitcom, aimed at 8- to 12-year olds, that will premiere online and that, building on our other work on "Wannabes" and "Axon," will create some new ways to get involved with the story. I’m very excited about the idea though–if we get it right, it will be great fun to make. This is very much a collaborative process with Nickelodeon: we’re working on this with both their US team and their international team–some of the best producers and writers I’ve worked with–to create a global online show, that may or may not have a TV outcome but that will certainly be groundbreaking for us and them.

[itvt]: What kinds of announcements should we expect to hear from Illumina Digital in the coming months?

Dicks: I think you’ll hear a lot from us towards the end of the year: we have a number of cool concepts in development, and I think the market is finally starting to look for the kind of projects we love making. I’ve probably dropped myself in it enough during this interview, but look out for the Second Life play we’re planning, for an interactive movie I’m really close to, and for something clever in the drama/alternate reality game world.

URL: Illumina Digital

Originally Published: June 21, 2007 in [itvt] Issue 7.34

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