realtime:uk

Play

ITV tasked advertising agency Play with bringing the dinosaurs back to life as part of the promotion of their highly anticipated summer show Prehistoric Park. Play turned to RealtimeUK to help fulfil the brief and we were asked produce a series of five online adverts and three dinosaur Cyberpets to be used as desktop interactive movies.

The challenge was to create dinosaurs that looked realistic yet without being too frightening, as the target audience was families with children aged 7-14. The theme that Play wanted to emphasise was the most dramatic element of the docu-drama - prehistoric creatures interacting with modern life.
Play supplied us with storyboards, which we then expanded on and then set to work breathing life back into the dinosaurs. The Cyberpet movies showed the dinosaurs in a number of scenarios, walking, running, hunting, eating and sleeping. The Cyberpets were then used as ‘tamagotchi-style’ pets that can be downloaded onto a user’s desktop, where it is the responsibility of the user to play with, exercise and feed their pet. We had great fun looking after our Cyberpets. However, we learnt that overfeeding could have dire consequences, and we had to recreate these consequences for Ornithomimus, the little dinosaur!

The online adverts showed five dinosaurs interacting and playing with the web page. These included the Elasmotherium charging onto screen and then crashing through the side of an MPU, Nyctosaurus flying across the page before swooping down and making off with a pop-up and the T-Rex stalking onto the page before taking a chunk out of an advertisement of the show.

The campaign also incorporated offline elements with the Cyberpets being put onto over 80,000 CD’s, which were distributed to children at cinemas that were showing the Prehistoric Park advert.
The success of the campaign has been phenomenal with the interaction rate for the Cyberpets at 51% in comparison to the average 9.50%. The campaign has also won the Creative Showcase Award for July www.creativeshowcase.net and has been nominated for several high profile awards. The online adverts appeared on a number of websites including AOL, UpMyStreet and Orange. \r\n\r\nPlay were thrilled by the animations, and Nick Hamilton, Design Director at Play, commented that "we are delighted with the animations created by RealtimeUK and early indications suggest that the Prehistoric Park will rank amongst ITV's most successful interactive campaigns to date. We look forward to working with RealtimeUK again on future projects."

Realtime - Realising Reality

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