Numiko, an award winning Leeds based digital creative agency

What a start to the week! Last night we were awarded with best Cross Platform Production from the Royal Television Society, Yorkshire Centre in a glitzy dinner at The Queens Hotel in Leeds. Our entry I’m A Celebrity…, a site we created for ITVs television programme of the same name for the 2009 series, bowled over the judges and demonstrated the best use of digital content in a television production.

Well done to the team that worked on the project and put in so many hours to deliver such a first class production.

We’ve done it again! Hot off the heels of winning two Revolution Awards in April, we’ve been nominated for an RTS Yorkshire Programme Award with our entry I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! for ITV.com.

The annual awards in their sixth year, are being held at the Queens in Leeds on Monday 14 June. Wish us luck!

Numiko’s Rich Hilson is talking to Huddersfield Uni’s Digital Media Design students today. FOLD happens every Monday and gives second and final year students the opportunity to share studio practice covering a variety of themes with industry input.

For today’s talk, Rich is covering user centred design with a specific focus on the youth audience.

Numiko is in the running for two prizes at this year’s Revolution Awards, having left a lasting impression on the judges, made up by an expert panel of the most influential people in digital marketing.

The site we built for Edinburgh Festivals has been voted a finalist in the ‘Leisure & Travel’ category and the online channel we built for ITVs I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here 2009, has been voted a finalist in the ‘Media & Entertainment’ category.

The Awards will take place at a glitzy ceremony on the 8th April 2010 at Grosvenor House in London.

Apologies for the complete lack of blogging while we were away, due to a combination of hard work, hard play and a shortage of working net connections.  But, aside from that, MIP was great fun again.

In a whirlwind summary: we met some great people and saw some really weird stuff, pitched, many times, won and lost, ate croissants and got food poisoning from some dodgy chinese buffet, drank champagne and ate the smallest ravioli ever, met people to discuss TV, web and virtual worlds, typed, talked and argued late into the night, then danced like idiots even later into the night,winced as the bill for one G&T came to 17 Euros, cheered as other people bought rounds, networked and went to talks, fretted, commiserated and congratulated, veered between the VIP lounge and our insect-infested hotel and nearly went to the Emmeys. Went to parties on the beach, fought with wireless connections and a lack of French vocab, gave and received advice, travelled by plane, train, autobus, taxi, foot, was nearly run over by a rickshaw and was tempted to borrow a cool motor trike thing, saw the most French man ever (playing an accordian on the beach in a crumpled suit, like a Gallic Mick Jagger).

Oh, and Dave lost my umbrella.

OK, so maybe we didn’t win (this time), but we should all be pleased at starting to get  national recognition for some of the outstanding work we do for our great clients.

This year top 5; next year, with the right wind and ambitious clients – who knows.

It’s now the weekend after the week before – 5 days of energy, collaboration, creativity and no little mental and physical effort that was Crossover Play this year.

I just wanted to give just a brief write up of my week and of the 7 main pitches that were given – all of them brilliant in their own way; and something that I think all 24 delegates should be collectively proud of. These ideas were everyone’s babies.

In no particular order…

Peggle and Pooples and You
A console based ‘learning through play’ game for pre-schoolers. Using a small camera mounted on top of the TV, children were projected into Peggles world were they were invited to trace out forms and shapes. (Huge respect to Mark Sorrell of Freemantle Media who in the pitch played the most convincing 4 year old I have seen in many a day.)

Writer’s Block
Game installation with RFID enabled cubes that represented different (and ever changing) words. Players had a limited time to build a sentence before their cubes were shaken off. A fun and involving activity with a serious point – helping people to understand what it might be like when Alzheimer’s strikes and you lose understanding of forms and your short term memory.

GagTag
SemaCode encrypted clothing and other wares, containing secret messages that were only revealed when photo’s of the tag were MMS’d to the decrypting shortcode.  Players could stitch up their friends or more subversively make making trouble by getting their tags out at political rallies, celebrity events or any other places people will be with camera’s. (Thanks to Andrew and Jeremy, my partners in crime on this job)

GroundHog Day
IPhone-based ‘ARG-style’ game where players are trapped in the same space and ‘day’, coming across the same characters and scenarios again and again, where a change in their actions of decision in any one sessions can dramatically alter their whole ‘day’.

Talkies
Recordable, RFID-enabled pet toys which could be programmed (and reprogrammed) to play audio files to a pet when they come in proximity with their toy, either to provide just fun, provide comfort or give a warning.

I’mDivorcingYou.com
Top-Trumps style card game where the aim was to try to win the most ‘stuff’ by trumping the other players with your ‘gripe’ cards. ‘Stuff’ won can also be used as weapons to vindictively destroy the other players earnings. Online, users could create their own personal deck with their real stuff and gripes, and a social network module allowed the turn-based game to be played globally.

These were just seven of literally dozens of initial ideas created during the first half of the week. Apologies to the final ‘project owners’ if I have scrambled any of the ideas a little – that comes from a scrambled mind – I am sure all of us experienced that to some degree over the week.

Other projects that didn’t get finally developed (including some of my personal favourites) included:

• Goat vs Goat – a goat-racing game (obviously)
• I am Cancer – Isometric browser game where the aim is to smoke yourself to death by persuading other sprites in the game to take up the evil weed.
• Big Bounce Off – Using the big BBC screens to play games of volleyball (and other motion games) directly against other cities across the UK.
• A Mile in Their Shoes -  App that reconfigured Facebook to appear for us all in the same way as it does to sufferers of dyslexia, colour blindness or many other learning or sensory issues; with the aim of en-masse usability testing and interface requirements to make the service more accessible.

A big thank you to all the other Crossover Players who were at Cranthorne last week, an amazing mix of talented people who allowed me to get some new and very different perspectives on how to approach thinking about and then creating/developing new ideas.

And of course, a big thanks to all the mentors, Frank, Heather, Margaret, Matt, Peter, Matt and also Adam Cassels who helped us regularly late into the night on making our often vague ideas come visually to life.

Thank you to you all.

… the very time stamp gives you a little indication of the collective, intensity, focus and required output that means that I get to write this first entry 48 hours in to the lab – and tonight me being one of the first to turn in!

After arriving last to the party last Sunday (while only coming from ‘down the road’  – though from hearing tales the 7 hour mini-bus trip from the south that was something to be avoided) we were thrown into a whirlwind of scenarios, structures and groups to get us to analyze and generate game play mechanics, genres,  benefits in the ‘real world’ and very much challenge ourselves and our notion of games and play – regardless of our gaming ‘credentials’ – and there are some serious ‘players’ here.

As I write this, my most recent recollections are tonights ‘performances’ – borne from  groups choosing ‘genre’ and ‘platform’ envelopes. Our group drew the amazingly fruitful (for an event set in an old fashioned country pile) mobile and horror. Being in a group with Andrew Pawlby, who’s company in part creates and stages dramatic real-time narratives around the historic of London – we were never going to be just restricted to digital platforms.

After spending the best part of yesterday and this morning confusing the s**t out of delegates with conflicting, contradictory and downright creepy texts and links to YouTube clips; a mix of the corporate and those from tragically displaced former Crathorne Hall owners, tonight culminated in a ‘guided-tour staff member of Handpicked Hotel group’ (guess who played that particular stooge) being brutally savaged – having their still beating heart (2lb of best rump) ripped from the chest to a chacophony of screams and the best ‘Hammer House of Horror’ lighting this side of Wardour St.

We treat that as a fun release from the intensity of the tasks – which will see us tomorrow, by just after breakfast (and again in new small groups) have developed two ‘playful’ ideas from randomly selected entries in categories such as ‘motivation’, ‘platform’ and ‘audience’ – with a few Welcome Trust (one of the events sponsors) angles thrown in for effect.

As I now look around the room, contemplating helping the staff clean away the tomoto sauce, mud, leaves and various detritus used to prop this evenings events, I reming myself to leave a tip for room service. I also remind myself that the ‘event’ we staged (and the preceding texts) pulled enough willing and believing participants that one of our party may well have (through a series of happenstance and chance character names) put the brakes on his potentially lucrative commission. It’s a long story, and professionally bad. But personally, ‘catching’ and ensnaring people in an alternate or constructed ‘reality’ – and that from someone who really doesn’t  play ‘games’ – pretty cool.

Brilliant news this morning that our site for I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! has been nominated for Best Media and Entertainment Catagory in the Revolution Awards.  Ten minutes later, we get a call from MIPTV in Cannes telling us that we’ve been shortlisted for two catagories at Content 360 too (which will be our third year in a row, so eyes on the hatrick :-0) Well done Numikons

I was at the 4IP Yorkshire launch last night, which was great! Lot’s of fun and managed to see lots of people that I haven’t seen for ages, which was lovely- it seemed like almost everyone involved in digital media in yorkshire was there, with around 300 people attending. 4IP is a fund set up by channel4 and the reginal development agencies, such as Yorkshire Forward, who’ve added in £5million into the pot. The total fund is £50m over two years. The idea is to find lots and lots of ideas from companies large and small that provide a blueprint for Channel 4’s public service media on the web. These could be services, tools games etc that focus on one of the following:

Hidden gems – tools and sites to help people discover stuff which could change their lives.

Digital democracy – new ways to let everyone keep an eye on money and power.

Amplifying voices – new ways to empower those communities that media could never previously reach.

Wise crowds – connecting people who need to know stuff with people who know it already.

Tools to make trouble – developing disruptive media tools, then putting them in the hands of people that need them most.

You can submit ideas here One of the most interesting strands that Tom Loosemore, whose head on 4ip mentioned it ‘tools and services that keep tabs on money and power’ which to me sounds like a good idea based on the monumentus cockup casued by too few, with too much power and all our money.