THE MAGICIANS
Art Director: Joey Polino Video: Chad Reininger
Concept and write content to sustain Syfy's The Magicians. Bring the magical world of Fillory to life in dynamic photos, videos, GIFs, and more to support Tune-In, Binge Watching, and other NBCU initiatives.
Season one
Midway through Season One, VaynerMedia was tasked with continuing tune-in and creating evergreen content until Season Two premiered in January 2017. Over the course of 10 months, I concepted and wrote content solely from Season One to keep current fans excited and to grab new fans on the way.
One of my favorite projects to work on during Season One, was concepting "supercut" videos with our video editor. I really enjoyed the process of diving into a full season and pulling quotes from dozens of episodes to create a new story. Whether we did a "best moments of" or a re-telling someone's story from start to finish, our fans really loved these fresh takes on old episodes. The video to the right highlights the most powerful spells.
WIZARDING WEEK
As part of J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World, Syfy and Warner Bros launched Wizarding Week to celebrate everything magical! We created social posts to support the theatrical release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. See a few example posts here.
SEASON TWO
Magic just got real. After a successful Netflix campaign we launched into full fandom mode. I wrote all copy across all social platforms, driving tune-in, catch-up, and more.
My favorite project I worked on was creating Twitter Moment recaps for every episode. Syfy’s fans are hilarious and always chose the best GIFs and memes to live-tweet with. Weaving our live tweets with relatable reactions not only put fans in the spotlight, but gave those who DVR the show an opportunity to "join the live tweet" later on.
I took a Buzzfeed-style approach the week before the finale to unite fans in the pain that is realizing you only have one episode left. See it here.
THE HALL OF MAGIC
I concepted and wrote social content to drive attendance to the experiential event in Brooklyn, New York. This was part of our Season 2 pre-premiere launch to get nerds, superfans, and the magically curious, all over New York to participate in an interactive experience where you could practice mind control, levitation, and more. We executed a 360 Periscope live stream on Twitter here. See a few example posts here.
ADULTING
In Season Two our magicians had to put classes on hold in order to save the world, hashtag #adulting. We took the most popular Google searches and had the cast try and answer the "adulting" related questions in character.
Even Lisa Vanderpump had a few choice words to share!
BONUS CONTENT
The above video was a concept my video editor came up with. The idea was to feature all the most important characters, storylines, and worlds in one video to recap the season before the finale. I pulled stand out quotes and timestamps and he did the rest! I suggest watching this video via mobile, even if you're unfamiliar with the show! View here.
If you can't tell from my personal twitter account, I LOVE memes. Penny is seen wearing a hood in both seasons and this was when the "me to me" kermit meme started to take over the internet. Since the show references pop culture, it was a perfect opportunity to insert ourselves into this specific conversation and fans loved it!
I LOVE conversation cards on Twitter and could not leave The Magicians fans out when it comes to finding your magical discipline. While they don't get a fancy sorting hat to sit under, we manually followed up with every fan adding their name to a custom image with their respective magical discipline.
Inspired by Stranger Things, we took advantage of this "platform hack" and used our magical abilities to psyche out our fans into thinking "The Beast" was lurking in their Instagram feed.
We all know organic reach is basically dead, and posting text only is like a sin in a "pivoting to video" world! This "email" was heard via voiceover in the episode and was never shown. We typed out the full email so fans could enjoy it in text form and it over performed with comments. I always try to play to the strength's of each platform's capabilities, because video isn't always the best way to tell a story.
