Who Is Panic the Cat?
Panic used to be a normal kitty – until the day his owner left him to fend for himself on a Newcastle council estate, while she ran off to London with dreams of being a popstar.
Left alone with nothing to do but read piles of fashion and gossip mags, Panic grew up to become a bitter and twisted fashion expert.
In 2011, Panic was hired by Facebook game “Beautytown”, to become their voice of fashion – dishing the dirt on the biggest names in the world of entertainment.
How did the campaign work?
Every day for a month, Panic released a new celebrity put-down video. The videos were promoted daily through Facebook, along with other blog content from the character.
Visitors to the site were shown the most recent video, and given the option to view videos for the previous days.
Users were given exclusive access to tomorrow’s video by sharing the site through Facebook and Twitter.
And what was your input?
Coming in just after filming had finished, I was tasked with editing the videos and syncing them with the separately recorded voice-overs.
I then built the website that incorporated the video, audio, images, and social media components, and made them all play nicely together.
What’s the technology behind the site?
The site was built using Flash – this decision was made because the majority of the content was video and audio, and required a degree of copy-protection. The wide ranging penetration of Flash Player was also a factor in the decision.
Javascript was used to provide the social media integration, and we used a PHP script to access the live images by proxy.