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What was the allure of Devil’s Bridge?

As the Hinterland story comes to a climax, we find ourselves back where we started - the legendary Devil’s Bridge. The location, with its hairpin bends and dramatic waterfalls, was the perfect backdrop for much of the murderous activity of the series, but also saw some of the most challenging scenes. The perfect place, then, to test a new way of exploring behind the scenes of Hinterland in its final series.

What are you trying to find out?

Audiences often like to explore behind the scenes of their favourite dramas, whether deeper into the story or finding out how it was made. This content is usually structured around episodes, available either as flat lists of clips based on publication date or pushed out somewhat temporarily on social media.

With the current interest in 360 tours, we want to see how physical spaces can be used to create a different, more engaging metaphor for discovering this wealth of content. We hope this will be an inviting way to collate the myriad of content available for a programme (or in the future other subjects), letting the audience ‘look around' for themselves - mimicking the experience we know they enjoy on studio tours.

But it’s early days for this kind of experience, and there’s a lot we need to learn about how to help the audience navigate in 360 and how much - and what kind of - content to offer.

What challenges have you faced?

While we’re optimistic that audiences will find the content interesting, there are challenges around how to build these more three-dimensional experiences on the web. Different platforms - desktop, mobile, tablet and the Head Mounted Displays (HDMs) used for VR - all use different controls and it’s challenging to find and explain a single navigation method for all of them. We’re interested in seeing the audience feedback on how well this works, to help us finesse this further.

Meanwhile, we have a lot of video content we want to showcase to the audience. Unfortunately, many devices currently won’t play a video on top of a 360 video within a web browser. This meant we had to decide to focus on particular platforms - desktop, mobile and tablet - leaving HMDs to another integration in the future.

Finally, this experiment wasn’t just based on what the audience sees, but also on how we could produce it, adding new content as a series progresses and routinely build similar experiences. After a pretty steep learning curve, the team who deliver our programme support were able to deliver the content themselves. Hopefully this stands us in good stead to add this to the portfolio of approaches available to us, and you’ll be seeing more experiments like this as we hone our approach.