How young digital animators are mixing it with EastEnders and Shakespeare

It’s almost a year since the BBC’s Mixital website went live, offering young people digital tools to create their own animated stories and music and dance videos, using ‘assets’ from popular BBC programmes.

Our target users are 13-18 year old digital natives, itching to get their hands on the means to make, remix and share their own visuals and stories. And our selling point has always been ‘by young people, for young people’. We’ve even got our own dedicated youth advisory panel to make sure we’re as good as our word.

So this week has been a bit of a milestone. The very first digital ‘makes’ kit designed by members of the Mixital youth panel has been given the go-ahead, following a successful pitching session to BBC Radio 1Xtra - our latest BBC collaborators. It will be a new storytelling format, launching later this year, delivering a creative opportunity that the station feels will chime well with its own audience.

I ought to explain a little more about what Mixital is and how it came about. Mixital is a BBC website that was launched last autumn by our five-strong BBC Digital Creativity team, as part of the BBC Make it Digital season.

It was created with input from expert digital partners like Freeformers, Nesta and Mozilla. The site is not overtly BBC-branded - we’ve traditionally had trouble attracting the teen audience - but it clearly uses big BBC brands and assets like EastEnders, Strictly Come Dancing and BBC Introducing. It’s more a case of the BBC ‘opening the door’ to these digital tools and our aim is to work with more external partners to offer a wider range of readily available content and creative kits. 

Current offerings include ‘EastEnders: Soap Factory’, where users can pick locations, props and characters, add dialogue, poses and expressions to tell their own animated story from Albert Square (top image); ‘Shake It Up’, an invitation (in the Bard’s anniversary year) to remix the works of Shakespeare in cartoon format (above); and ‘BBC Introducing: Vizii’ - a chance to create and edit a music video to accompany a selection of tracks.

We’ve also branched out into comedy (below), tying up with BBC Three’s Top Ten comedy show to invite budding comedians to devise their own cartoon sketches with our special comedy kit. It is a natural medium for the BBC Three audience.

The kits seem to have been hitting their mark. To date, half a million ‘makes’ have been created and more than 10 million assets added by users. One witty courtroom clip in the EastEnders maker has had more than 7,000 views.

All the work created can be published (getting its own page on the Mixital website), shared on social media and be commented on by other users - with the usual BBC profanity filters and moderation services in place for this age range. We want to start a conversation. Our regular contributors, meanwhile, are growing their own followings.

True to our USP, we’ve been as hands-off as possible with the Radio 1Xtra kit. Our youth panellists (aged 18-23) have been charged with identifying a content brand, generating suitable assets, integrating those assets into a generic digital kit and marketing their new tool.

To support our young producers, we’ve brought together individual BBC professionals and freelancers to lead on these four stages, and our panellists will be trained along the way.

Almost one year in, what have we learned about what works and what gets our users inspired?

• Reducing barriers to entry is key - a no brainer - and this cuts across device of choice, browser and registration 
• Brands that resonate with the audience will perform best: if it sounds like school, they’re out! 
• Given a blank canvas, we're not always as creative as we'd like to think. We need prompts, challenges, or ideas to bounce off, to get that initial spark going
• The tools have to make you look good: and you've got to be proud enough of your finished product to publish it (but you might share with mates on social media before then)
• Our younger users like breadth of tools, older users like depth of tools. As you go up the age scale, people think of themselves as, for example, ‘a music guy’

As for future plans, all this creativity is currently only available on desktop and tablet, so Mixital’s own next level is naturally to move onto mobile.

Longer term, we’d like to incorporate an upload facility for new assets so that our young creatives have many more choices. And who knows, new partners - including other broadcasters - may be able to bring other kits and content into the mix.

More immediately, look out for Mixital’s new game-maker kit next month with a Gold Rush theme to run alongside BBC History presenter Dan Snow's new show. 

To cater for a wider audience, we also host some of the kits we produce on the main BBC website. We recently collected the Best Children’s Content 2016 Award at the Broadcast Digital Awards for our Doctor Who Gamemaker (above), and our Blue Peter Storyteller kit also continues to prove itself popular.

All in all, our small far-flung team, based in Salford, West London and Glasgow, has had a pretty good year.

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