The Challenge
Across four evenings, in partnership with SXSW in London. Converse, Syd and the Kult Sounds team were giving viewers a behind the scenes look at the creative process through a series of live interactive workshops.
Covering everything from making beats, customising Chuck Taylors and shooting music videos whilst bringing in guests and reacting to the audience as the sessions unfolded. Flux were brought on to help take the in-room visuals and event concept online.
The format needed to feel natural to a Twitch audience. This was Converse’s first foray into streaming on Twitch and the content had to be fun, informal and interactive, whilst still maintaining the quality of a brand like Converse.
At the same time, the production needed enough structure to keep things moving. There were multiple rooms, up to 14 people involved and content that had to shift depending on what happened both in the room and online.
Strongroom Studios gave the project the right feel, but it was still a working studio rather than a broadcast venue. The challenge was to capture the sessions well, keep the online audience involved and build a live workflow and format that fit around the artists, their process, guests and the space.
The Approach
We started by helping clarify the purpose and getting early alignment on the creative direction with all key stakeholders, including Talent, to ensure there was clear alignment.
That early alignment was important. The client understood their brand, the talent understood their audience, and Flux understood Twitch as a platform. Both pointed towards the same thing: the stream needed to feel authentic, responsive and part of the creative process, rather than a hyper polished broadcast, but without any structure it would quickly turn to chaos.
From there, we helped turn the idea into a live format. The streams were planned around broad segments rather than rigid scripts, giving everyone enough understanding of what might happen next without limiting the natural flow of the content. The production needed to move between music-making, shoe customisation, guests, audience interaction and supporting content, so the talent needed to understand the confines and the team had to know what feeds, graphics, audio and assets were needed at each point.
Once the content was locked in, Flux built the technical solution around it.
The gallery was designed from scratch to fit inside one of Strongroom’s vocal booths, allowing the team to manage the live stream, cameras, lighting, audio, graphics and playback without putting a large production footprint into the middle of the sessions. Every part of the setup has to earn its place, we only added things the format needed. Where possible, we used what the venue already had and made sure that everything supported what the audience would see on stream without bloating the setup.
That approach also meant looking for opportunities the client had not necessarily considered. Converse were launching a new Twitch channel for the project, with no existing audience. We proposed using a live clipping system to clip key moments during the live sessions. These could be approved and shared across other platforms while the streams were still running, giving the campaign wider social media reach and giving the audience another route to the broadcast.
The Impact
The project gave Converse and 160over90 a working Twitch format for a brand new channel, turning a series of creative workshops into live content that people could watch, interact with and share.
Across the four sessions, the broadcast reached 95,858 live views and generated 358,456 minutes of total watch time. For a new Twitch channel, that was a strong result and showed that the format gave people a reason to stay with the content.
The audience were not just watching passively. The streams generated 34,715 messages and 1,268 unique chatters, with viewers reacting to the sessions, feeding into the format and helping shape the live experience as it unfolded.
For us, it’s a good example of how a thoughtful, well put together production can create strong live content without overbuilding the idea.
