This was a pilot for an interactive soap for the BBC. The audience would have a mocked up ‘desktop’ and would receive video messages from the characters, each containing a segment of an episode’s plot. Occassional ‘instant messages’ would allow the audience to interact with the characters, altering plot outcomes by making decisions.

I was heavily involved in the development of the concept and the eventual show. I helped structure the interactive segments of the drama and how they fitted in with the main plotlines.

I also built the Flash application for the pilot, using Flash video, XML data and components to create the desktop effect (to a design by Will). The interactive sequences required the video to seek and jump to different cue points depending on the audience choices.

Well, yes, FightBox.FightBox was an interactive TV show for the BBC. Players could download a PC game from the BBC website and use it to create and train their own FightBox warriors. The most successful players won a place in the televised competiton.

BBC technology allowed us to film what was essentially a televised gaming tournament as, effectively, a live virtual sporting event as the players brought their warriors into the arena to face each other and our created characters, the Sentients, to fight to the death for the title of champion.

I helped develop the basic concept and did a lot of work on defining the look, feel, world and characters of FightBox. I helped design and develop the PC game and elements of the TV show. I built and helped run the FightBox website. I worked on the commentator’s scripts and wrote some segments of the TV show. I’ve even got a t-shirt.

FightBox aired on BBC 3 and eventually crossed over onto BBC2 where, after a reasonably strong start it suffered slow death by scheduling shuffle. It was very popular with the online audience, especially the ones that thought they might get on TV. My five-year-old godson loved it.

The Maze House was an interactive ghost story we produced for the Sci Fi Channel.The show went out in short episodes on the Sci Fi channel in the days leading up to Halloween, apparently showing the progress of a small team investigating a haunted house in Northumberland. As the week went by events in the house got stranger and stranger until on Halloween something terrible happened to the team.

The audience were able help with the investigation, by watching web-cams, for example, or using a custom built piece of software that apparently measured levels of electro-magnetic fields round the house. Both the web-cams and the EMF monitors were rigged to produce anomalous results in conjunction with events in the show.

There was also a network of ‘hidden’ background websites that the audience could discover through search engines and links, which gave clues to the background of the hauntings and gave the audience a chance to try and warn the characters of the fate that awaited them.

I came up with the original story line and developed the concept and the show along with Finbar Hawkins and Tim Usborne. I also wrote the scripts, built the website, helped cook for the production crew and even played all 6 characters in a live web chat.

Maze House featured fantastic work from all concerned, especially the actors (including John Millington, of course) and proved extremely popular with the Sci Fi Channel audience.

It’s the show that’s big, not the giraffe.

This was a short series of tiny animated interstitials for Nickelodeon in the UK. Originally it was going to be a chat show hosted by a Giraffe in a Spacestation (although no one can remember why) but then he had as guests a pair of Goldfish with astronomical IQs and minimal attention spans and they took over.

Nickelodeon loved the Goldfish and wanted an entire series of them, which was a problem, since while I had a lot of jokes none of them concerned short term memory loss. Any kudos are due to the animators, JonJon, and the voice talent, including Bill Nash, John Millington and Sally Hawkins among others.

I created the characters and wrote the scripts.