CONNECTING STORYTELLERS AND THEIR AUDIENCES

I’m here at at AnimfxNZ 2014, in Wellington, New Zealand to engage with storytellers to share with you how our technology can enrich the storytelling experience. How we can take you and your audiences ‘beyond the story’ and in a way never achieved before. It’s exciting – to be home, amongst the best of the best in the film and television business. We make apps. But I’m not talking about partially animated apps or apps with gimmicks, or book, film or media companion apps that aren’t based on any underlying text, or apps even attempting to replicate a physical book. We are evolving storytelling into something that can be educational or informative, entertaining or enlightening. As Steve Jobs said: a vehicle in which to “surprise and delight” the audience. There are organisations in our commercial space offering digital services to the publishing industry. These typically take edited manuscripts and transform them into electronic formats for reading on handheld devices. ‘Books and manuscripts on screens.’ We approach storytelling from a different philosophical angle. We’re going back to the nature of storytelling itself, and giving the storytelling industries, publishers, film or television makers, a new means to connect with readers and audiences. As technology has evolved, so the commercialisation of digital devices has opened up new possibilities. We can now bring stories and ideas to life with images, active links, audio, video and 3D content. So let me introduce to you Publisher Plus - a tool that enables narrative to be transformed into an interactive storytelling experience. This offers one digital solution across all devices. For the first time Publisher Plus allows our partners to generate new income streams from their assets using one software solution. No more do writers, editors; curators, designers, animators and developers need to use a multiplicity of tools to produce an animated app. One system … all working in concert and allowing people to work concurrently cutting the process by a third. Publisher Plus which will be launched in April will provide media companies with their own licensed version of the platform, with revenues derived from the development, together with transactional and licensing income.