HBO Stories 2020

HBO for Europe came up with the idea of bringing 2020 to life in a humorous way, using a familiar story format. It wouldn't be HBO if the story didn't move; after all, it's assembled from their original productions, so forget about a mere textual summary of events.

The icing on the cake is the personalisation of the video itself, so that the viewer can relate to it personally. In fact, he or she will be able to determine what the video will look like based on a few questions. The generation of the videos was handled by the skilled colleagues at Motionlab, with whom we have been working for quite some time.

The initially easy-looking brief in the form of a simple web structure had many surprises in store for us, especially throughout the overhead. HBO stories were to cover 14 countries in Europe, each with different content both textual and visual according to the content licensing. This involved buying domains, implementing different measurements so that the campaign could be evaluated during and at the end, and tweaked if necessary.

After filling in the answers to the questions and starting the generation, which takes around 15 minutes, the user has to be entertained somehow before the content is delivered. Alternatively, he can enter an email so that when the generation is complete, the video will reach him there. The aforementioned areas require flawless API communication throughout the generation, proper setup of mail senders, and more.

To easily deal with the many mutations and possible proofreading, we didn't separate the site into 14 runs, but instead into one application where we keep the text and images as "variables". All actions are connected and measured on Google Analytics with the possibility of filtering by country. After the user fills in the inputs, we pass the data to Motionlab where video generation starts. This begins our task of waiting for the response to complete and keeping the user on the site in the meantime, as entering the email is purely voluntary. A mistake would mean non-delivery of content, an endless wait for completion and similar inconveniences.

The biggest challenge ever lay in stable communication, hosting or messaging. We don't normally encounter assignments where the content is still being prepared for the user, which caused further worries all around.

In conclusion, we can now boast of a working website that has seen tens of thousands of users across Europe, which has facilitated the delivery of humorous personalised stories generated by Motionlab. This got a piece of our work into HBO's official channels and networks, which was an honour in itself to have such an opportunity in the first place. Despite the short lead time and all the challenges, we were able to bring the piece to a successful conclusion before the 2020 Christmas holidays, in collaboration with everyone involved, who had to set aside time in front of family and loved ones during a difficult time and the end of the year. We are looking forward to the next collaboration where we will be able to experience at least a similar adventure!