We wanted to inspire tourists to visit Britain by inviting them to go ‘digital orienteering’, freely navigating a huge story that spans the entire kingdom on both a local and national scale. Future tourists can tune in and out of each location using a compass, or use their body and gyroscope to literally go orienteering and heighten the sense of adventure.

By exploiting ‘Britonics’ - tribal dialects found around the island of Great Britain - with its charming accents, colloquial phrases and slang words, we aimed to make the familiar feel foreign and encourage a deeper cultural exploration of these shores. The success of the entire experience hinged on using great sound design in an innovative way to keep continuity.

This is a character-driven work starring five quirky locals with strong individual identities that combined give a collective voice to the whole nation - it’s Britons that make Britain Great.

We created a unique web and mobile experience that allows tourists to go orienteering and explore the hidden gems of British culture to help plan and book their next vacation. Users were invited to set forth and ‘tune in’ to different regional places, each chaperoned by a proud local showing off their stomping ground. Five quirky characters give a glimpse into their lives through tongue-in-cheek infomercials that reveal the highlights of London, Manchester, Wales, Cornwall and the Scottish Highlands.

Editing and syncing these five different scripts and dialogues into one coherent experience was the central challenge for our team. Each script focused on colloquialisms and slang unique to the region. The master script had to be carefully-written to allow for varying lengths of words and phrases translated across different dialogues, meaning each line had to be performed at the same tempo by our actors which the help of a metronome and voice coach.

Each place had its own unique soundtrack which we leveraged by using the WebAudio API and a multi-channel approach to seamlessly transit between each different soundtrack. The audio for interface effects and background sample were separately added as additional channels to enhance the user experience.

To control the FPS rate and keep the tracks synchronized with the audio we combined 5 videos into a single file. Using translations based on RequestAnimationFrame provided by HTML5 Canvas API we switched between videos depending on the user interaction.

Using this multi-channel approach also let us determine how much time the user spent tuned in to each place which dynamically changed the contents of their own personalised itinerary they receive at the end of their trip which is then booked or further customised on Expedia’s main site.