Shining a light on Pilot Light Festival
2018 started amazingly for us; there was a huge amount of excitement in the office as Sundae Communications was invited to look after the publicity campaign for Pilot Light TV Festival Season 3 at HOME, Mcr.
Anyone who knows the Sundae team well knows that telly is one of our favourite subjects and we even watch the same things at the same times so that we can discuss them in detail over lunch…. so PLTVF3 is was well and truly up our straße.
With talks and panels featuring Julie Hesmondhalgh, Christopher Eccleston, Walter Iuzzolino, Sue Johnston, Kevin Eldon, Michael Cumming alongside leading industry specialists and content from Walter Presents, Sky Atlantic/HBO, Blue Peter, CBeebies, Arrow TV and shortFLIX it really was a hugely diverse and relevant festival. Julie Hesmondhalgh also received the inaugural Pilot Light Excellence in Television Award.
As part of our strategy we created a bespoke publicity campaign based around the festival’s individual strands including Talks, Panels, Web Series, International, Culture, LGBTQ, Pilot Light Awards, Industry and, the inspired, In-Memorium and Anniversary Celebrations strands. We pitched screenings and events to titles within the media sector appropriate to each strand, as well as targeting traditional film, events and Manchester based press.
Sundae delivered a huge spread of quality, targeted coverage with key highlights including i-D Magazine, i Newspaper, BBC Radio Manchester, Manchester Evening News, Northern Soul, Emerald Street, Custard TV, Dr Who Magazine, The Skinny, Aesthetica, Prolific North, I Love Manchester and Manchester’s Finest.
The spread of coverage was phenomenal with previews, listings, reviews featuring heavily alongside interviews with Festival Producer Greg Walker and talent such as Sue Johnston and Julie Hesmondhalgh.
We were proud to achieve an op ed in i-D Magazine from Grace Barber-Plentie, the brains behind the innovative Sex and the City: The World according to Woke Charlotte, an event in collaboration with London’s Reel Good Film Club that examined the impact the show had on women of colour, and the progress in on screen representation made during the last twenty years, through a live script writing of the pilot recast entirely with people of colour.
We even hosted our own panel, New Voices in TV & Film, hosted by our MD Fiona McGarva, looking at the steps being taken to improve on screen representation, in particular shortFLIX, a short film initiative led by Creative England in partnership with National Youth Theatre and Sky Arts, featuring young filmmakers and champions of new voices in television and film.
One of our favourite projects ever here at Sundae and we can’t wait to get on board with Greg and his team next year for Season 4.
Launching Factory’s Creative Engine
We have some wonderful clients, but our longest standing is Factory, the BAFTA-award winning animation house, home grown from the ground up right here in Manchester – they’ve been with us since day one!
Factory told us over the summer that they were going to be launching a dedicated state of the art studio, Factory Creative Engine, which would mean they could bring every aspect of animating in-house, sets, puppets, costumes, the lot!
We were so excited to support them on this launch – its a huge leap for the company, allowing them to make great headway with their business strategy to create more and more of their own self-initiated creative content and intellectual property.
The incredible new workshop consolidates the production of sets, puppets, and models, synthesising cutting edge technology, including 3D printers and CO2 laser cutters with traditional methods, all under one roof. The new technology means that all the lengthy processes involved in creating worlds and characters in animation can be slashed, streamlined, and executed much more quickly!
The studio was opened by Keith Chapman, creator of Bob The Builder and Paw Patrol, whose production company Chapman Entertainment was formed alongside MD Phil Chalk, and based at the Altrincham site which went on to become Factory!
Not only will the new workshop allow Factory a whole world of creative freedom, the opening means that the animation studio is creating upwards of 40 jobs in Manchester, in the North West’s thriving animation sector rich with talent.
We had coverage in online and print editions of the Manchester Evening News, with further online coverage in television trades Televisual, and Broadcast Magazine, and animation trade outlets including Animation Magazine, and Animation World Network. Major licensing trade publication Kidscreen also ran an announcement piece.
The ‘A Week In My Life’ feature with Prolific North gave some insight into the daily routine of Jon Kershaw, Factory Creative Engine Manager, and they also ran an announcement piece on the day.
ITV Granada Reports came along on the day and filmed an amazing package for the 6 o’clock bulletin that Friday evening, which showcased the entire studio and its capabilities, with a refresher of the Factory’s impressive back catalogue!
Manchester Animation Festival
The Manchester Animation Festival launched in 2015, and in 2017, we were delighted to deliver the festival’s press and publicity for the first time. We’d met the team through our work with our animation clients and with a team of huge animation fans at Sundae, we were delighted to be part of such an up and coming event.
The festival is a three-day celebration of all things animated. From short film competitions, feature films, retrospective screenings, workshops, networking events, panel discussions, masterclasses and talks from the industry’s best and brightest.
With animation really taking flight in the North West with the likes of Factory, Mackinnon & Saunders, and CHF producing and creating a huge chunk of the UK’s animated output. The BBC and ITV have now moved to the thriving Media City, making Manchester a significant UK hub for creativity and media.
We wanted to really capitalise on both the strength of the festival’s incredible programme, and the emergence of the North West as an animation powerhouse with our messaging. We spread the word about the Manchester Animation Festival UK wide, and were able to amplify the 2017 festival, with an impressive national broadcast campaign.
Key national broadcast activity included an interview on BBC Breakfast with Will Becher, Animation Director of Early Man, who hosted a talk at the festival, and brought two of the puppets direct from the set for an exclusive view.
We also achieved a piece on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row around the Ivor Wood retrospective event. Ivor Wood expert Joseph Wallace, and Ivor’s widow and sometime animation partner Josiane Wood both appeared for a talk through the magic of the late animator.
This was bolstered by a fantastic regional broadcast coverage, with a TV piece going out on ITV North West Tonight, exploring the relationship with sponsors (and another of our clients!) Factory and the festival. Additionally, we had TWO interviews on BBC Radio Manchester, with Will Becher, and festival director Steve Henderson, plus A Week in My Life for Steve on Prolific North.
We also secured a profile of The Simpsons writer Josh Weinstein in print, with Broadcast Magazine, one of the major television trade outlets. Josh is responsible for Strange Hill High, a CBBC programme that we also had the pleasure of working on and is currently working on Disenchantment.
The festival’s lineup announcements was covered in the bulk of the animation trade outlets, including Animation World Network, Creative Boom and Animation Magazine, amongst others, and we had listings coverage in the Manchester Evening News, Sight & Sound, and many more.
The festival teamed up with the BBC to host a family day the weekend ahead of the animation festival’s launch, which we announced and was covered by Manchester Evening News Online, as well as parenting bloggers What To Do With The Kids and Daddy Daydream.
We generated almost 65,000,000 opportunities to see, and we helped cement the Manchester Animation Festival’s reputation as the go-to for everything animated, and the biggest and best animation festival in the UK.
Factory goes Off The Leash
It has been a very busy summer season here at Sundae and this year we had the pleasure of working with our good friends at the award-winning animation studio, Factory, to announce a whole host of new and exciting plans!
One of the first projects to be developed this year is a lovely fun-filled collaboration with critically acclaimed cartoonist and writer, Rupert Fawcett to launch his first ever animated YouTube channel for his wonderful canine cartoon brand, Off the Leash (OTL).
The development of OTL’s new animations came as Factory announced its new licensing and brand management division, Factory Rights, following the acquisition of Rollo Rights, reported here in Kidscreen. The deal transferred rights to a catalog of brands including Rupert Fawcett’s Off the Leash, David McKee’s Mr Benn, King Rollo, and many others.
Most famous for his creative and humorous comic strips, Rupert Fawcett, is the original creator of OTL cartoons, a selection of drawings, featuring the secret thoughts and conversations of dogs of every size, shape and breed. The series aims to celebrate the nation’s favourite belly scratching, tail-chasing, bed-stealing canine friends for dog lovers everywhere.
As an office full of animal lovers, the campaign for the OTL YouTube channel has been a lot of fun to work on and one of our biggest successes so far was landing a partnership and social campaign with the RSPCA for National Dogs Day on 26th August.
To celebrate National Dog Day, Rupert Fawcett released a special RSPCA cartoon to encourage people to consider taking on a rescue dog and to also help the charity to spread the ‘Adopt Don’t Shop’ message with a special charity edition.
Factory supported the ‘PAWFECT’ partnership by dedicating the first premiering OTL episode ‘Bedtime Barker’ to the RSPCA’s #FindEachOther campaign which has now gained nearly 10k views on YouTube and 17k on the RSPCA Facebook page and Instagram since launching.
The campaign has been extremely well received by doggy lovers across the nation and OTL fans old and new. So far, the OTL YouTube channel has gained 1200 subscribers in just a few weeks and the RSPCA partnership has gained coverage in ATV Today and one of the most popular dog publications in the country, Dogs Monthly.
Looking ahead, Factory has proudly sponsored this year’s Manchester Animation Festival which takes place in November. Factory’s Managing Director, Phil Chalk will be hosting a special ‘in conversation’ event with Rupert Fawcett himself, to chat all about the journey of strip to screen! You can fetch your tickets here.
You can also watch all of the latest Off the Leash episodes here.
A very Sundae Sunday running the BBC Sports Personality Red Carpet
On the weekend before Christmas the Sundae team headed down to the vibrant city of Birmingham, where Andy Murray was crowned once again as BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2016 for a record breaking third time.
The prestigious awards ceremony was held at Birmingham’s Genting Arena and after a massive year of Olympic success in Rio, we were proud to run the biggest SPOTY red carpet ever seen!
The atmosphere was electric as some of the biggest names in the sporting world arrived to walk down the carpet. It was an honourable experience being able to chaperone the likes of Judy Murray, Jamie Vardy and England rugby star James Haskell through the hustle and bustle of flashing photographers, live television crews and journalists. It gave me a brilliant insight into how hectic their showbiz lifestyles must be.
We welcomed press from near and far onto the carpet including the Daily Mail, The Sun, Daily Star, P.A., Birmingham Mail, Style Birmingham and Radio 1’s Newsbeat who were joined by Olympic medallists, Jason and Laura Kenny, Jessica Ennis-Hill and Premier League cup winners, Leicester City Football Club, plus a rich selection of non-sporting celebrities like Eddie Izzard, Laura Mvula, Bake Off’s Candice Brown, Gareth Malone and Strictly Come Dancing 2016 winner, Ore Oduba.
In front of a 12,000-strong audience, the show was another huge success, with performances from Robbie Williams and Laura Mvula, a lifetime achievement award for Michael Phelps and a surprise appearance from Prince William! Murray accepted the award via video-link from Florida as runners up Alistair Brownlee and Nick Skelton collected theirs in person.
It was an amazing feeling to see all the blanket entertainment coverage the next day in the Daily Mail, Daily Star, Mirror Online, The Sun and The Times and making the front page of the Metro! Here’s to 2017!
Marie-Clare x
Scream Street asks, what are the grossest things that PARENTS do?
Voiced by John Thomson, Debra Stephenson and Tyger Drew-Honey, Scream Street is Coolabi Group’s hit comedy-horror animation.
Scream Street is packed to the bat-filled rafters with hilarious gross out stories centred around Luke Watson (Tyger Drew-Honey) and his best friends, (almost) vampire Resus (Rasmus Hardiker) and sassy 4,000-year-old mummy Cleo (Tala Gouveia), as they deal with everyday problems, and super-natural situations, in the spooky underworld of Scream Street.
We are HUGE fans of the show, which we first launched back in October 2015, and so we wanted to create a huge buzz around 13 spooky new episodes of the show, which launched on CBBC last week.
Everyone knows that parents thinks their kids do gross things, so what better way to get them back than a nation-wide survey to find out the grossest things that PARENTS do? Now there’s a comedy-horror story.
We worked with a national survey company to ask 1,300 kids the things their parents get up to that really gross them out.
Getting kissed at the school gates, holding hands and being told off in public were high on the list, along with wiping food off their face, seeing their parents snog and getting called pet names in front of their friends.
And our friends over at Coolabi rightfully said, “UK families have great fun grossing each other out, and that no matter your age, parent or child, being gross is universally funny.”
The press loved it; from The Sun, the Daily Express to Entertain the Kids and Good to Know , who even put together their own gross quiz from our findings, Scream Street hit the headlines and told parents a few home truths in the process 😉
(Images: Coolabi Group)
Call the Clangers at King’s Cross
The Clangers new episodes hit CBeebies screens in May and to celebrate we worked with our client, Clangers international rights owner, Coolabi Group, to collaborate with infamous UK yarnstormer Deadly Knitshade and Teasemade in a Clanger-ific kids activation.
Armed with an iconic red phone box, Tiny and Small costume characters and the wonderful film crew at CBeebies, we set up camp at Battle Bridge Place Kings Cross on the morning of Saturday 21st May.
Our magical knitters worked for weeks to hand craft and knit a bespoke Clangers pink phone box cover that magically transformed a traditional red London phone box into a Clangers experience, where families could hear the loveable, pink, mouse-like creatures whistle a mysterious message to the world.
With a phone line straight through to the pre-schoolers’ favourite little blue planet, parents and children were put through to the international space via a special pink telephone.
That wasn’t all though, a familiar Clangers friend and show narrator Michael Palin recorded a message encouraging the children to guess what Tiny ‘whistled’ to them. Children were then invited to guess the message from Michael and the Clangers, which was later revealed in a video on their social channels as the wise words: ‘be kind to each other’.
We had an incredible day with Coolabi, the Clangers and Cbeebies and so did Netmums and TV Choice who came along with their kids. Hundreds of thousands of people caught the campaign online and both the reveal video and the CBeebies film had around 30,000 views each!
PR Week took a liking to our pop-up brand activation too, and they picked it as one of Five Campaigns we liked in May 🙂
Toy World, Event Magazine and License Global also covered the fun!
Take a look at the CBeebies video narrated by the inimitable Michael Palin.
Becca x
(Images: David Jensen)
Jodrell Bank announces we are not alone in the universe #littleblueplanet
Friday was an exciting day at Sundae, we arrived at the office just as the sun came up to make sure we hit all the national news desks with our lovely April Fool story from Jodrell Bank and Clangers.
At 7am on 1st April, Jodrell Bank Observatory made the exciting announcement that a signal had been received by the giant Lovell Telescope, proving beyond doubt we are not alone in the Universe…they had found a little blue planet!
Tim O’Brien, Professor of Astrophysics at Jodrell Bank, announced that although the signal was extremely weak and so very fuzzy, the astronomers had been able to enhance it using techniques they normally apply to observations of distant galaxies and produce a video of the planet’s surface. He said that, astoundingly, the pictures show this little blue planet is inhabited by what appears to be a family of mouse-like creatures.
The story and the accompanying (seriously cute) video, lovingly created by Factory animation studios, caused quite a stir. Of all the amazing coverage, including Manchester Evening News, Digital Spy, BBC North West Today, ITV Granada plus a mention from Mr Michael Ball on BBC Radio 2, one of our favourites was a piece on CBBC Newsround as it spoke directly to kids.
There were also tweets from BBC Breakfast, European Space Agency (who said they’d let Tim Peake know about our discovery) and CityLife Manchester.
The partnership between Jodrell Bank and Clangers aims to engage children with space and science, and get them excited about the solar system. They have worked together to create some special activity sheets which you can take a look at over on the Clangers website- I might have a go at making a rocket myself!
Katy x
It’s ghouls and gross-out gags as Scream Street airs on CBBC
Following the hugely successful launch of Clangers, it’s been our pleasure to work on another of Coolabi’s amazing properties, as the first episode of Scream Street aired on CBBC yesterday.
A gross-out comedy-horror stop-motion animation series based on the book series by Tommy Donbavand, Scream Street features the voice talents of John Thomson, Debra Stephenson, Tyger Drew Honey, Claire Skinner, Rasmus Hardiker, Tala Gouveia, and Jim Howick. We were even lucky enough to go and catch some of them in action when we shot the BTS film, where we caught Rasmus voicing so many characters from one of the leads, a vampire called Resus, to surfer dude zombie Doug, and the gatekeeper to the Underlands!
We worked on Scream Street’s launch at the end of September, hosting a press screening at The Mondrian on London’s South Bank that welcomed press from national and kids’ publications, talent from the show, members of the production team and the BBC.
Along with an exclusive first look at two episodes from the series, the event also saw a talent Q&A with showrunner Giles Pilbrow, John Thomson, Debra Stephenson and Tyger Drew Honey. We also handed out branded goodie bags containing Scream Street books signed by Tommy Donbavand, novelty bone pens, chocolate eyeballs and zombie fresh mints.
The 52×11 series has been animated by our friends at Factory (Clangers, Newzoids, Strange Hill High), who have made the show into something that’s both a trick and a treat through clever, stunning and high quality stop-motion animation. It’s this craftsmanship and skill that has been an important strand of our campaign, and it was great to secure an on-set feature with Animation Magazine and a double page spread in Girl Talk focusing on the production process.
From the onset of the campaign we’ve also achieved press coverage with key national, broadcast, kids’ and online titles including interviews with Debra Stephenson on Good Morning Britain and in the Sunday Express, plus some great pieces in The Sun, The Observer, Girl Talk, National Geographic Kids, Mega, SPLAT, First News, Totally Tween, Fun Kids Radio, Female First and many more.
Jess x
Stars line the blue carpet for the launch of Clangers
Sundae has just landed back on earth after the premiere for the new series of much-loved children’s TV classic, Clangers!
Four decades after they first appeared on TV screens, Clangers are now set to make a return thanks to Coolabi and CBeebies, and Sundae was tasked with creating and producing a launch event that officially introduced the pink, whistling space mice to a select audience. I was looking after the Blue Carpet and the photographers and it was great to see celebrities like Kate Garraway, Shaun Dooley, Shappi Khorsandi, Ranvir Singh and Rani Price join Clangers Costume Characters for some pictures!
Sundae created a Clangers Planet within a central London hotel, with beautiful felt flowers lining the blue carpet and the stage, wire copper trees and mini dustbin lids hanging from the ceiling (which were my favourite!) setting the scene for the children’s Clangers activities including tile painting, model making and the creation of a giant collage!
The highlight of the event was seeing narrator Michael Palin join creator Peter Firmin, executive producer Dan Postgate and, of course, Major Clanger on the Blue Carpet.
Among the first to see the Clangers episodes were a whole host of journalists from Guardian, Daily Telegraph, What’s On TV, Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph to name a few. Before the screening started, guests were treated to a musical performance from composer John Du Prez and Young Musician of the Year Sophie Westbrooke.
Swanee-ese expert Dan Maddicott then took to the stage to show the kids how the Clangers talk to each other, shortly before our fantastic host Maggie Aderin-Pocock was joined by Michael Palin, Peter Firmin and Dan Postgate to talk about what went into creating the new series.
The event saw coverage from Yahoo, BT, Independent, Sunday Express and Sunday Telegraph, among many more and the event was part of a huge press campaign for the launch of Clangers!
Clangers is on CBeebies every day at 5:30pm.
Katy x