Nominated for the AOP Best Cross-Media Project and the Broadcast Digital Best Multiplatform Project awards

The Misfits Online Experience, an innovative cross platform campaign to promote E4’s hotly anticipated new comedy drama Misfits.

Six to Start worked with Clerkenwell Films and Channel 4 to develop the Misfits Online Experience, an innovative cross platform campaign to promote E4’s hotly anticipated new comedy drama Misfits.  The interactive prospect embraces a whole range of UK television drama and cross platform firsts including bespoke Twitter campaigns.

The main characters feature on social networks – often active and live during the programme’s broadcast.  Selected characters will have Twitter accounts and will tweet while the show is broadcast – as well as between episodes. They will also have Facebook profiles and other relevant social media accounts such as Flickr accounts and Youtube channels. All this activity is being managed by leading UK digital media company Six to Start (We Tell Stories, Liberty News for Spooks), written and devised with Clerkenwell’s writers and producers.

We’ve built a hub for the Misfits Online Experience at http://www.e4.com/misfits, integrated right into E4’s standard templates. We designed and developed seven exclusive panoramic scenes that will be released episodically alongside each programme. Each week, we let the show’s audience step into the episode’s environment, collect objects to unlock rewards that will add more depth to the story, show behind-the-scenes material and ultimately unlock a bonus game, bridging the way to bonus scenes and characters. The first six scenes preview episodes with the final scene acting as an exclusive online conclusion  to the series’ climax.

From pitch to live:

Our first pitch in response to the Misfits RFP was heavily story-based. We talked about setting up the world of Misfits, exploring a backstory set against the 1987 Great Storm, telling a rich story across social media platforms including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook – but all aggregated on E4.com. Then, 3 weeks prior to TX, we’d start exposing show characters and introducing an online character, Cassandra. During TX, we planned on launching chat applications and social games that the Misfits audience could play during live TX.

We threw all of that out of the window and started again for the second round.

The grand plan for the second round pitch revolved around something we ended up calling the Spine – the core of activity that sat on E4.com. Around the Spine would orbit a casual game, Facebook glue and social media exploded story. All of it, though, against a really strong attitude, exemplified by Dean’s mood board:

Once we got the green light, the Spine evolved a lot during the build process. It was originally envisaged as a cinematic interactive experience, teasing scenes from forthcoming episodes, like an interactive trailer. We wanted to build an editorially relevant collectible game around each scene – so that the audience would have a genuine chance to connect with the compelling characters and world in a meaningful and deeper way.

We were lucky to get the scripts pretty much as they were being written. Here’s an early sketch from Kim Plowright, our producer, on how we planned to treat the end of the series:

There’s a lot that didn’t get made. There were quite a few designs for Facebook applications that – in the end – neither we nor Channel 4 thought would be just right. The project was complicated enough already – here’s an overview schedule that incorporates the missing Asbo app:

What happened:

Misfits was one of the most talked about new dramas of 2009. The Facebook page we ran for E4 gathered over 100,000 fans during the course of the series run, with over 3,000 tweets per hour during TX. Qualitative research conducted by Channel 4 showed that the viewer response saw the cross-platform production as something that was “greater than the sum of its parts” and where there was evidence that our strong social media content (with over 22,000 followers on Twitter) encouraged viewing of follow-on episodes.

At peak, Misfits ended up generating more online forum activity than ITV’s X Factor – and ultimately, Misfits was recommissioned for another season by E4.

What people have said:

• Media Guardian: ”New E4 drama Misfits is to be the first UK programme to have characters tweeting live on Twitter when it is aired next month.”
• Generation Star Wars: “Misfits will embrace, in the words of Channel Four’s Steve Berry, ‘transmedia storytelling’. This is storytelling across multiple forms of media with each element making distinctive contributions to a viewer’s understanding of the story world. By using different media formats, it attempts to create “entrypoints” through which consumers can become immersed in a story world. And, perhaps most coolly of all, audiences will be able to officially follow the protagonists on Twitter”
• “From the moment we saw the scripts we knew that this was something that would work brilliantly for online audiences. By using the freshest of writers and production companies in Howard Overman and Clerkenwell and hottest digital talent in Six to Start and Preloaded, we’ve delivered a uniquely engaging, playful and hopefully sometimes hilarious exploration of the drama and its characters, which, with Clerkenwell’s direction, has the DNA of the series running through it.” – Louise Brown, Head of Cross Platform Commissioning, Channel 4

Credits

Misfits Online is a Six to Start production with Clerkenwell Films for Channel4/E4.

At Six to Start:

• Dan Hon (Exec Producer)
• Kim Plowright (Producer, Project Management)
• Robin Ray (Assistant Producer)
• Claire Bateman (Junior Game Designer)
• Jo Roach (Creative Consultant)
• Antonio Gould (Producer, Sponsored Content)
• Lisa Long (Finance)
• Dean Vipond (Graphics)
• Dave King (Photography)
• Gary Moyes (Photography)
• Phil Gyford (Technical Development)
• Lee Maguire (Technical Operations)
• Ben Edwards (Writing)
• Sam Leifer (Writing)
• Rose Heiney (Writing)
• Roopali Sharma (Production Intern)

At Channel 4/E4

• Louise Brown (Cross Platform Commissioner)
• Camilla Marshall (Commissioning Editor, Drama)
• Robert Wulff-Cochrane (Head of Development, Drama)
• Jody Smith (Editor, E4.com)
• Sarah Rogers (Project Manager)
• Paul Edwards (Technical Project Manager)
• Layla West (E4.com)
• Jade Raad (Sponsorship Executive)
• Sarah Martin (Marketing Manager, E4)
• Andy Pipes (Digital Marketing Manager)