An adventure in online safety for kids
Telling stories and writing scripts for Google’s Be Internet Legends, brought to life by Aardman Animations
Scriptwriting
Stories for kids
Creative collaboration
Brief: connect with a new audience
Google’s Be Internet Legends helps kids be safer, more confident explorers of the online world. It’s usually delivered by teachers in schools – but with schools closed for much of 2020 and kids spending more time than ever online, Google needed a new way to connect with parents and kids. The key part of the brief: take the world of Be Internet Legends, the spirit of the Legends Assemblies, and bring them to life online.
Meet the Legends Family - Mum and Dad, Lumen and Volt.
Exploration: the ideas that didn’t make it
I was the lead writer on the project, working with digital agency Toaster. I worked on a bunch of initial concepts for bringing the Be Internet Legends syllabus to life. We tried a few tv ad concepts, then I wrote a full set of sing-along songs. Then we binned all that and landed on the idea of a classic adventure story.
Idea: Lost in Interland
We decided to go with three short animated episodes, each one built on one of the key principles of the Be Internet Legends syllabus – and each one with an activity for families to do together after watching the episode.
I wrote the story, using the characters from the pre-existing Interland game: the Phisher, Oversharer, Cyberbully, and Hacker. I created a family in Interburb, at the centre of which is a young, timid girl called Lumen, who becomes a badass Legend.
The story begins when Lumen’s bear goes missing one day. The family set off for Interland to get it back – with no idea about what they’re about to get into.
Working with the masters at Aardman
I worked with director Simone Giampaolo and a whole crew of brilliant people at Aardman, alongside the creative team at Toaster to turn a Google doc into a six-minute animated short. Together we refined the script, tuned the humour and fleshed out the characters to bring the whole thing to life. I am still in awe of everything they did to make this world real. Watch all three episodes over on the Be Internet Legends site.