Olly the little White (mobile) Van

Bonjour!

For this little article I'm going to imagine you're viewing this on a smart phone or a device with Flash disabled. If you're not, stay with us but if you are why not check out our latest release - 'Olly the Little White Van'. 

Keen followers will know that we delivered a desktop based version of the site last year based largely around a Flash based framework but with the proliferation of smart phone ownership amongst the parent (and in particular young mums) market continuing to rise the time was right to ensure that access to the site was available across all media.

Take a look through the site, it's a compact but fully brand immersive extension to Olly's online world featuring games, video clips and biographies of all of the stars from the show. Whats more the site has a robust framework behind it allowing new content to be integrated swiftly. We're hoping to drop in greater levels of social media interaction and of course new games soon.

The end result was a neatt little product built over just two iterations with plenty of content to keep fans of the show occupied whilst out and about. Speaking of which, optimisation of video content and imagery was a key consideration given fans may well visit the site using 3G and could be without wifi access. Try it out for yourself, it won't let you you down.

Olly as a brand continues to gain momentum within the busy pre school market and we're going to do our best to ensure he stay one step (or four wheels) ahead of the pack.

If you'd like to learn more about ensuring absolute levels of accessibility for your shows and brands then get in touch. Our very own Ollie is on standby at the kettle as I type…

Games for TV

Howdy all. We're currently working on a number of large projects that sadly we can't share with you for the moment. We'd love to but we can't. What I can say though is that our quest continues to bring even greater levels of online immersion and interaction to youth orientated brands without the use of Flash. Stay tuned or get in touch if you'd like to talk to us about how we can help your brands or shows reach your audiences in a more effective manner. The kettle is on and if it's a Friday the padlock to the beer fridge is unlocked…

So today I thought we'd talk to you about the @C21Media organised and inaugural 'Games for TV' conference we attended at BAFTA last week.

The conference was a one day event designed to bring together the TV industry with games developers and proved to be a fun day of debate and networking with a few friends of Bionic chairing or presenting some of the content throughout the day. It was great to hear from all parties within the industry enabling a (relatively) open forum for all to discuss and learn lessons from the past and also glance into what's exciting both sides of the industry in the future.

The day kicked off with an entertaining presentation from Josh Atkins from Microsoft Soho taking us through their exciting collaborative project between Kinect and Sesame Street. If you're not aware yet we're pretty sure you will be soon.

Some of you out there may be aware that we've been talking to some of our producer and broadcast partners about dual screening for some time now so it was great to listen to David Flynn from Remarkable TV talk through the genuine Dual Screen success stories behind the Bank Job and Million Pound Drop Live. Shame he wasn't given quite enough time but what he did share was very well received and brilliantly presented.

We also really enjoyed Nick Lovell's founder of Gamesbrief bullet fast (but erudite) presentation "10 things that TV companies get wrong when making games" and it would appear that his was one of the best received contributions to the day.

In summary a great day, informative, entertaining and rewarding. The only downside for us was timing - some of the speakers were not given nearly long enough to present which impacted the Q&A sessions and in turn shortened the opportunity to network during breaks.

That said C21 reacted quickly (and in my view brilliantly) by creating a free bar at the end of the evening so you know…

We'll be back next year - see you there!

City of Friends is live!

For those of you that stay in touch with our news you'll be probably be aware that for the past few months we've been building a site for our friends CreaCon over in Norway and their show 'City of Friends' (COF). 

Well, we're really proud to announce the sites successful launch last week and the fantastic reception from fans and broadcasters alike. The whole project has been a blast - there have been some enormously productive trips to Norway (life can be tough sometimes eh?!) coupled with a great opportunity to challenge the conventional methods of building a preschool site… 

If you have stayed in touch with our updates over the past few months within the news section of this site or our Twitter feed you'll know that our intention from the start with the build was to create an immersive and interactive experience for children that relies on as little Flash integration as much as possible. That's not to say we're scrapping Flash - far from it, we just wanted to restrict the involvement of Flash within the site to areas where it was absolutely necessary. By taking this route we could ensure accessibility to the site was available by whatever means the end user would choose to visit. 

With a talented bunch of animators in house we challenged ourselves to see whether we could match our usual high standards of Flash based animation (check out our Peppa Pig site for example) with a viable HTML based option.

The solution we decided to pursue resulted in us looking back at very old method of digital animation that has over the past year or so enjoyed somewhat of a resurgence within the web community and become a genuinely viable solution for simple looped animation - sprite animation. We're dead chuffed with the results within COF and hope you like what you see too. Feedback as ever is more than welcome! There are some really great examples of this style of animation embedded within the site but one of note - and to be honest it was a bit of a vanity project for us is the bumper image, its just so smooth! Check it out for yourselves but don't leave the site until you've had a good look through it!

Accessibility considerations continued within the video section of the site where we chose to encode in HTML5 with a Flash fallback. Funny how the fallback option has reversed of late - well at least in Bionic it makes us chuckle… 

Beyond the aesthetics a fantastically intuitive content management system made up a large part of the build giving the client unparalleled control of the end product - clips, news articles, promotions, direct B2C comms, social media integration, character updates, backgrounds, new games and activities can all be managed within the site by CreaCon.

There's loads more content to be added to the site planned for release over the next few months and with CreaCon reporting viewing figures (for the TV show) of over 1.3 million in the UK we're hoping our site goes some way towards the show making a lot of new friends soon. Thanks CreaCon we had a ball!

Bionic are off to the North Pole (and back)

Howdy Folks.

You may have noticed our little pink tab over there<<… If you haven't clicked through yet then let me explain.

We're undertaking a charity campaign for our friends at the Light Fund an amazing group of individuals within the licensing industry who year on year raise a lot of money for various charities and good causes. This year we decided we'd like to help so… We built a little site where we're attempting to 'virtually' cycle from our offices in Wandsworth up to the North Pole then return, finishing at the Licensing Awards 2012 held at the Grosvenor House Hotel Park Lane on September 12th. That's 5,376 miles of cycling to get through.

So far so good though and we're well underway having notched up 663 miles so far. Clearly a long way to go and we need your help to get us there and back. If you work within the licensing or broadcast industry why not visit our little site we built for the campaign and make a pledge. You can even watch us in action via the web cam stream on the home page!

It'd be great to feel the love from you guys so please try to get involved, make a pledge and cheer us on! You can also make a pledge via our justgiving page as well. We've got loads of incentives that could help highlight your brand or show as we make our way through this intrepid journey so take a look when you can.

Keep visiting the site or follow updates via our Twitter feed, you'll know when one of the team are on the bike and streaming live.

Further adventures in HTML5

Todays little article heralds the launch of Discoverchuggington.com. A beautiful little HTML5 site put together as the first foray into a year long brand awareness campaign for Chuggington. The site was to become an integral part of the campaign launch in conjunction with a 24 page booklet inserted into the CBeebies Magazine 300th edition special. 

In planning sessions with Ludorum we learned that the the Discover Chuggington booklet would be contained within a sealed edition of the special edition magazine. Given this scenario we were confident it would not be so easily/accidentally discarded giving Chuggington an edge over previous booklet inserts and an opportunity for us to begin planning digital integration into the booklet for busy mums on the move. 

With this in mind the decision to go with a 100% HTML5 site was an easy one, we knew the magazine and the booklet was aimed towards mums and carers purchasing for their pre-schoolers and as they may be doing this whilst out and about we wanted to ensure it was fully accessible via mobile. Working with Ludorum we created a QR tag which was then added to the back cover of the Discover Chuggington booklet. Knowing busy mums may be on the move with the magazine we wanted to ensure mums had the ability to enjoy the site instantly rather than getting home and potentially losing the booklet.

A key factor for the Discover Chuggington campaign was to pull consumers and key decision makers closer to Chuggington. Children adore the show (ratings prove this across the globe) but how well do parents and carers know the show, the educational benefits behind the shorelines, the characters and so forth? This became the starting point of our roadmap for the site build and so we launched with an interactive map enabling parents and children to drop in to every location from the show introducing the multitude of characters along the way. This was then complemented with character focused clips showcasing characters personalities, their likes, dislikes and comical vignettes from selected episodes of the show. 

A simple prize draw mechanic was also included at launch giving Ludorum the opportunity to expand their parent focused Chuggington database.

We didn't stop there and created a beautiful little game - Guess Choo! Based on the classic board game children and parents play along with a series of clues designed to discover which Chugger Dunbar was delivering clues on.

Plans are now in place to continue adding content in line with the campaign as it begins to roll out across retail in the UK and eventually across Europe and beyond.

Want to learn more about what we can do for your brand or show and how HTML 5 could play an important part in this? Get in touch and we'll get the kettle on! You're always welcome to a brew at Bionic HQ.

The end of an era...?

Avid followers of our Twitter feed (@bioniclondon) may know we're in the middle of Sprint 2 of the City of Friends project - a pre-school site refresh for our client CreaCon. Flash has historically played a big part in many children’s sites enabling truly immersive interaction via rich web content.

However as the web continues to evolve and become more adept at providing rich content (HTML 5, JQuery, some clever Javascript application for starters) the reliance on Flash could diminish and so we've decided for this project to strip Flash down to only the (currently) very necessary areas. Even games are becoming less reliant when you look at the fantastic work out there right now check out: http://www.cuttherope.ie/. And to prove we’re no Johnny-come-lately’s to the game take a look at what we did way back by visiting Chuggington.com on your ipad/iphone. We can't wait to show you the results but until launch this one is under wraps…

Bionic's own bank job!

Back in October 2011, Endemol UK approached us looking for some help with an Interactive presentation for a new game show idea they had, known as the Bank Job!

Naturally we were only too happy to help so we mocked up the game play in Flash so that Endemol could take the game concept and present the idea to interested broadcasters, as well as demonstrate how this could be taken online so viewers could play along during live shows. We created simple animations and integrated an XML feed so that Endemol could alter the monetary values found during the game play. What we delivered was simple but very effective, with Endemol thrilled with the ease of integration and how quickly they could alter key details of the game play which made the "sell in" to broadcasters that much easier. The Bank Job aired on Channel 4 in the UK during January 2012 and we loved the small role we played in making this happen!

Workshopping

We had the pleasure of visiting our friends Creacon over in Norway earlier in the week to kick off a project for one of their hugely popular shows. With every project we undertake the first stage is to conduct a workshop day.

Workshops are an integral part of the Bionic production process involving all members of the working party where they share their views on what is required from the project. Post workshop Natalie (our Project Manager) takes away the notes sharing them across the team to ensure what was said can be done and delivered within the schedule. From here we finalise the schedule of production which is then shared with the client giving them a completely transparent view of the production roadmap.

It was a really productive 24 hours in Norway and we can’t wait to get started on the project. More news soon!

Peppa Pig relaunched!

The past three months have seen us working with our friends over at EOne on the relaunch of the Peppa Pig site (Peppapig.com) and its been live now for just over a month.

The site was completely rebuilt from the ground up - a solid framework and content management system forming the foundations of a site that now truly bridges the broadcast content with a compelling and immersive online experience seamlessly. Children can now create their very own Peppa character which is then integrated into content, they can form their own Peppa band and play games which link in to episodes of the multi BAFTA award winning show.

There’s even a little mention about us in Marketing Week - look…

We could talk about what we’ve done for ages but why not check it out for yourself?

Is this thing on? Bionic London's got a new site!

Hello! We should start by apologising. You see, we've been intending to update our site for ages but the truth is we've been a bit busy (to say the least). That said enough is enough and here we are - the all new Bionic site! We hope you like it.

We've given everything a proper clean up and you can (finally) find us on Twitter and Facebook so come on in and join the party.

We said we've been busy and that's the truth just take a look at the case studies detailing all of the fantastic projects we've been lucky enough to have worked on. We've loads of exciting and fun packed projects lined up for 2012 so stick around and we'll tell you more as soon as we're allowed to…