We’re All Video Stars Now: Bringing the X-Factor App to Life

For all those who belt it out in the shower or use their hairbrush as a microphone – this one’s for you. CHI&Partners, MPC and Believe director Sammy Rawal have been working hard to ensure that the bedroom pop princes and princesses of the UK are one step closer to realising their dreams of music video stardom. They’ve created a staggeringly hardworking app to celebrate telecoms brand TalkTalk’s sponsorship of X-Factor. So now with a few swipes and some enthusiastic miming, the most tone-deaf dreamer can be in with a chance of starring in the X-Factor idents – and can share their efforts with friends and families... I mean, with their growing fanbase.

This year’s campaign soft-launched a couple of weeks ago, but with the all-important ‘judges’ houses’ episodes this weekend, the team is doubling down for the hard launch. That means there are now even more tracks and styles to choose from. It’s the result of a fruitful collaboration, and both director Sammy and the MPC team were involved right from the beginning, as MPC’s Interactive Creative director Andre Assalino explains.

“It meant that we could truly collaborate on treatments which would offer variety, style and maximum enjoyment for the audience, whilst also being achievable and replicable via an app environment and interface,” he says. “The results were video templates that challenge users to engage in a creative but easily accessible way. More than anything the process of creative sparring and ongoing improvement and ambition was hugely enjoyable, thanks in great part to Sammy’s generosity with his creative vision, and flexibility in sharing and shaping it to our guidance. Sammy was brilliant at taking on board what would work best for users, then moulding his vision to that end.”

And this creative tussling and noodling was vital to the end user experience. According to CHI & Partners’ creative director Micky Tudor, everyone involved was keen to ensure that the videos produced were contemporary and interesting in their own right. “We wanted all the music videos to be contemporary. We could have easily done the clichés – rappers in their bouncing car, that Boyzone thing where they’re sitting on stools,” he laughs, explaining that they had decided to work with up-and-coming Canadian director Sammy because of his genuinely fresh and edgy work had been surfacing on their radar.

The app itself is an impressive piece of tech – it allows users to choose from up to nine tracks, seven video styles and a cast of up to four. The output is broadcast ready 1080 resolution videos and the filters, automated editing and compositing that it applies to each video makes it a hard-working piece of 21st century VFX wizardry. And that's before you even consider the other social functionality – there’s geolocation, sharing capabilities and even the opportunity to collaborate with other budding video stars on the other side of the country (users can opt in to allow others to use some parts or all of their recordings, should they wish to). 

And all that isn’t easy – digital creative director Chard Warner reckons that the level of ambition and complexity involved means the app would not look out of place at a Silicon Valley start-up. “I’ve said to the team when we’ve had hard moments, ‘this is not a regular project. It’s a hard idea and that means that the work is going to be hard’. Looking in retrospect, it is more complex than Instagram. It allows, tagging, filters, geolocation. It is an app in its own right. It is the sort of app that could be the result of Silicon Valley VC funding and we managed to do that in four months. It would normally take a start up with a scrappy team a year but we had the resources of MPC.”

Ambition and boundary-pushing is one thing, but if a project like this lacks consistency and is plagued by bugs then it’s finished. For Andre at MPC that was one of the biggest challenges, particularly given the project’s scale and the fact that the app lives on iOS, Android and desktop.

“Replicating precise and complex user-experience and designs across both app platforms is a significant development challenge, and called for us to really stretch our senior developers to the limit of what is possible,” he says. “The same is true of the development of a dynamic and modern desktop experience to tie all components together. But undoubtedly the biggest challenge, once we had decided on server-side rendering over in-app filters and treatments, was building a rendering pipeline which could replicate high-end, precise VFX work in an automated, fast and reliable way, seamlessly serving up polished finished videos.”

Despite the complex workings of the app, the team were determined that the intricacy would not spill over into the user experience. The whole point of the app is that it’s fun and easy to engage with – it does the hard work so you don’t have to. “We didn’t want to let the technology overwhelm what you see on TV. We wanted to make sure that even if you don’t take the best shots with your camera that it’s still fun to watch the end product.”

The key this was to keep simplicity top of mind during development and to use MPC’s servers to carry the weight of the rendering. “At every stage, we asked ourselves how we could simplify the journey, inspire people to get involved, and to make it as easy as possible to perform and mix,” says Andre. “This meant speed of experience and simplicity of interface were essential. By putting the strain on our render farm and off-device pipeline, we could focus on the record and mix features, secure that the heavy duty and complex engine of the app was remote to the device itself. That is not to say that the app doesn’t call on some pretty extensive functionality and design itself, but hopefully the only way we would ever damage the phone itself is by the sheer weight of videos being saved by users who just can’t stop making their own personalised pop videos!”

And it isn’t just the developers and servers working hard – this is a project that also requires some pretty serious man-hours. Creative team Matt Searle and Sarah Levitt are working with the rest of the team to sift through the videos and choose which will make it into the following week’s TV idents. They make notes over the weekend, create a 50-long shortlist on Monday and continually whittle them down. Plus, thanks to the social ranking aspect of the app the team can also see which new videos are most popular with other users. There’s a delicate balance to strike too between all of the different music styles and apps, as well as making sure the amateur cast and their content are varied and interesting.

This isn’t the first year CHI & Partners have used a crowd-sourcing, interactive approach to TalkTalk’s X Factor idents, but the 2014 outing certainly represents a leap forward in the depth of interactivity and creativity that it places in the hands of the audience. And the team have already seen the results for that, saying that the levels of engagement, even before this weekend’s hard launch, has outstripped previous levels.

So what next for the app? Well over the coming weeks the team will publish more video styles and tracks for fans to experiment with. And after that? Is it something that could be released as a standalone product? The potential’s there certainly, but there would be lots of details to iron out (not least the heavy lifting on the part of MPC’s servers!) and Chad Warner thinks it should just be allowed to exist as a great piece of digital/interactive/mobile/experiential/social/activation/category defying advertising.

“This is made for the sponsorship. It lets people get involved. It’s a bout glamour, glitz, music and creativity. That’s what it’s built for,” he says. 

Glamour, glitz, music and creativity – what’s not to love? It’s a fun and clever piece of kit that surely the most ardent Simon Cowell-hater could not resist.