Numiko, an award winning Leeds based digital creative agency

Well, another week, another development fund won… We took Zeitgeist to the BBC Innovation Labs for the Vision category (Mass Participation Fiction & Entertainment) and came home with time and money to take the idea further.

Read about it after the jump…

The Idea

After a weekend of catching up on sleep from MIP, Dave and I set off for the BBC Innovation Labs at Swinton Park. We were shortlisted for the Vision category which was about mass participation fiction and entertainment.

The idea we submitted was Zeitgeist, a TV drama series and ARG (Alternate Reality Game) set in the near future in a world where Britain has become an absolute democracy. In this future, the Houses of Parliament have been blown up, and the political vacuum has been filled by the Zeitgeist, a computer system that decides important issues by public vote. We pitched it as the idea that can fix the interactive drama format and provide viewers with an engaging, immersive experience on many levels.

What Happened

The Labs were a nice contrast to last week at MIP – it was great to have a week, hidden away from civilisation in a mobile black spot, to focus exclusively on concept development. We started the week with some theatre games to make everyone feel a bit silly (eg ‘pretend to be fishmongers in a darkroom’), to break the ice, and moved on to creative thinking exercises, led by the ever-inspirational Frank Boyd.

Over the first few days we used techniques like de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats and personas to develop our ideas. I love this first stage – it’s the fun, divergent stage of thinking where you do the ‘yes, and…’ and your concept grows and grows.

After a few days of working in teams with other groups, constantly presenting and giving feedback, we moved towards the convergent phase, where you take the masses of ideas you’ve come up with and start whittling them down again into a cohesive, streamlined idea and coherent pitch.

One of the things we were really happy about with Zeitgeist was the large scale of the idea – unfortunately this made it pretty tough to trim down into a seven minute pitch. But, after some incisive feedback from Frank and mentor Matt Marsh, we focused on the core elements of the concept and came back with a pitch that was short, exciting and to the point – and hopefully distilled a complicated idea into an easy-to-understand presentation.

It seemed to work: we were one of the four out of ten companies who were awarded a development fund to take the idea further. We were really pleased with this – we’d not only pushed a difficult, challenging idea, but also succeeded in another pitch the week after our last win at MIP!

(Me and Dave answering questions after the pitch)

Feedback

The Labs were a big success – I think a lot of other people had been through the same process as us, lots of hard work and deep thought, and pretty much all the pitches and ideas were of a really high quality. Feedback from the BBC commissioners, for all the teams, was very positive, and they agreed that the North East and Yorkshire Lab was one of the strongest they’d seen yet.

As proof of that they gave out the largest amount of development funds ever in an Innovation Lab. Great news for the winners, but also great news for Yorkshire and the North East as a whole… yet more proof that there are some really strong, competitive companies and ideas in the area.

Congratulations to the other winners too: Mint/Different with Doctor Who: In Parallel, Sumo with Inside Out and Rocket with Blue Button Bookmarking; all great ideas, well presented… and a big thanks to everyone who gave us feedback, especially Frank and the other mentors.

On a more personal note, I think I’ve put on about half a stone; I’ve never eaten so many fried breakfasts in one week…

Links

There are some photos of the event here and more information about the Innovation Labs here.