By Gabrielle.
I have some great big news about Olive Us — and I’ve been sitting on this news since January! It’s taken all sorts of self control to not share this happy bit of info. : )
Scripps (you may have heard of them because they own HGTV, The Travel Channel, Food Network,etc.) is launching a new online channel called ulive. It’s all about useful (and entertaining!) lifestyle videos covering topics like food, home, travel, parenting, and wellness. They’ll be featuring content you already love from their well-established TV channels, and they’ll be introducing lots of brand new content as well.
And that’s where Olive Us comes in.
ulive commissioned 20 Olive Us episodes for 2013!! Twenty episodes you haven’t seen before. And we’ve already shot 17 of them — in fact, every spare minute of our last 3 months in France was filled with shooting. Hah! Which means when the ulive site officially launches next week, you’ll have access to a steady stream of brand new Olive Us episodes through the end of the year. So great!
Extra fun: To celebrate, Olive Us is hosting a contest — share your favorite episode and you could win an iPad Mini! It’s easy to enter. Find all the details here.
For those of you who are curious, here’s a little Olive Us history, and why this is a big deal for us.
We launched Olive Us in May of 2012 with the idea of creating videos that families could enjoy together. Instead of an on-going narrative arc, each episode is a stand-alone short film — usually around 3 minutes. Because they’re stand-alone, we’ve been able to try all sorts of different things. From cultural introductions, like visiting a French Bakery, to an old school Family Carwash, to a funny little episode called Stacking Wood — inspired by the narrator character in Moonrise Kingdom. One of my personal favorites is a heart-melting video about a Day in the Life of a 2-Year-Old.
And each one is created to inspire families to get up and move, work together, make something, learn something, or try something new.
The launch was a success! And we spent the next year making a total of 24 episodes and lots of behind-the-scenes videos too. You can find them all here or here.
Creating videos is very different than creating other sorts of blog content — and it was a big learning curve for us, as well as a significant investment of time and money. But we loved doing it! It’s endlessly exciting to come up with new ideas, it’s an ideal project that our family can work on together, and it’s brought us in contact with so many talented illustrators, musicians and videographers.
We really, really wanted to figure out to keep going, but as we finished up that first year, we weren’t sure if we would be able to continue creating episodes beyond those first 24. So you can imagine how beyond thrilled we were to find a partner in ulive!
We can’t wait to share the new episodes with you. I’ll be posting one each week here on Design Mom. And you’ll be able to find them all on the ulive website too (of course!).
If you don’t want to miss out, be sure to subscribe to the Olive Us newsletter — subscribers are always the first to know about Olive Us happenings.