The team at BTS is very proud to announce the global release on 23 May of the interactive app for the highly anticipated sci-fi thriller movie After Earth, starring Will Smith and his son Jaden.

The app, entitled After Earth: Kitai’s Journal, has been developed for the Sony Pictures Entertainment/Overbrook Entertainment film and its tie-in book.

After Earth, set 1,000 years into the future, features a teenage Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith) battling to save himself and his father (Will Smith) after their spacecraft crash lands on the vastly changed planet Earth.

The app features all 13 journal chapters, exclusive film imagery and audio, detailed background insights and interactive spacecraft and creatures. The movie, distributed by Columbia Pictures, launches in the United States on 31 May and rolls out globally from June 7th. We have been working extensively with Apple Marketing and Sony Digital in the lead up to the launch, which sees the arrival of Will and Jaden in London on the 23 May to promote both the film and the app.

Jen Porter, CEO

Filed under after-earth-kitais-journal.

I want to give new storytellers the tools to tell stories drawing multiple creative dimensions together, and not just words or film or music or paint.

Sure it’s hard if you come at it retrospectively, as the imagination-free publisher, trying to shoehorn some interactive gimmicks around an existing story conceived as a ‘word story’ only. But Beyond the Story wants to empower the next wave of storytellers to embrace new structuring and delivery mechanisms from conception to publication.

There is an old point around resistance through the preconception that augmenting the words destroys the reader’s room to apply imagination. That’s a widely held attitude. To this day there are many people who resist illustrations in books for the same reason. But it’s mixing up a rose-tinted view of pages of words with the fact that some publishers have never delivered anything else anyway because they have – rather, had – a nice little earner thank you very much. We are a part of the evolution of long form storytelling which gives great storytellers the chance to tell their stories in more than just words. It’s about extending their craft, their options. About meeting new ‘readers’ on the digital battleground.

I want to temper what I say with ‘there will always be the words-only novel’, to make myself sound reasonable to publishers, but to be honest I’m not sure it holds true anymore. Even in leisure time we’re seeing consumers actively mining their way through media, evaluating and coordinating information from diverse sources. It strikes me that reading a novel alone could become a symbol: of an active stance of resistance to change, or a signifier of how far you are from the digital poverty border. Technology is changing how we engage with media, and this has to include storytelling in all its forms.

Kirk Bowe, Chief Creative Officer

Filed under digital-publishing.

Following on from the successful launch of Wind in the Willows, we won the contract to produce the official app for the novelization of the new Sci-fi movie After Earth starring Will and Jaden Smith. We worked in collaboration with Sony Pictures and Will Smith’s production company Overbrook Entertainment.

It was exciting to have the opportunity to work on such a high profile project, particularly as we were given access to many of the 3D assets and artwork used in the film.

The project had a very tight deadline as the app launch had to coincide with the launch of the film, this required us to think carefully about the scope of the design and to consider what was realistically achievable from both a creative and technical perspective.

Key Technical Achievements:

• Based on our experiences of developing Anne Frank and Wind in The Willows it was decided that a better way of handling transitions between app states was required. In the past, it soon became tricky when handling transitions to and from different app views and content displays.

• We decided to develop our own state machine and centralised notification classes based on existing ideas from objective C and various .NET state machine implementations. The notification system was based loosely on a C# Notification centre implementation from the Unity Community Wiki:

http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/CSharpNotificationCenter

• Rather than having central classes controlling behaviour of asset objects, we decided that temporary assets should manage their own behaviours. Different content types were split into prefabs with their own controllers which would determine their position and interactive behaviours. This solved the problem of having a central bloated content controller and allowed for graceful de-initialisation  / dismissal of content.

• Part of our optimisation process was to start with a basic test bed, particularly for higher res 3D models and then layer additional content on top, testing for performance across iOS devices at each stage. Using this method allowed us to track performance bottlenecks more easily. Using test beds for key features also allowed us to provide regular progress builds to the client for key content as and when they were produced.

Lessons learned:

• The production process required very close communication with the creative team as we tested new models and effects as soon as the first cut was ready. This tight-knit communication between creative and technical was key in enabling a quick turnaround of ideas in a short space of time. This was something we definitely wanted to continue doing on future projects.

• Taking the time to design the app structure based on states at the beginning makes programming transitions much easier.

• Regular calls to unload unused assets helped reduce memory spikes and subsequent crashes on lower end devices.

Filed under tech.

Soon after hitting the submit button for Anne Frank to go to the App Store, work began on our next independent project, Wind in the Willows.  The brief for Wind in the Willows was to bring the story to life by including 3D introductions, interactive cut-scenes and audio narration for key passages. The project included 3D rendered scenes of key passages to make the experience even more immersive. We were very excited that Stephen Fry agreed to perform the audio narration, many of us in the office are huge admirers of his work so it was a privilege to work with him.

Key Technical Achievements

This project was the first to make use of our new in-house developed typesetting engine. The engine was based on established professional print typesetting principles and a bespoke C# API was created for easy integration into Unity 3D. The engine allows us to generate professionally typeset text in 2D and then import into Unity 3D retaining typeset layout and associated contextual markup.

A realistic 3D animated model of a book was developed in Maya  to display the text rendered from the typeset engine in Unity. A queue of rendered pages was produced on-the-fly, applied to the pages of the model and enqueued and dequeued as pages are turned.

Lessons learned:

• Alpha Blended shaders that include texture RGB work well for rendering text meshes.




• There is no double ended queue (deque) data type included as standard in C# so a third party one was used. This was preferable to using a combination of standard stacks and queues to dynamically add items to the beginning and end of a collection.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/11754/A-Deque-Class-in-C

Filed under tech.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet forces liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp, which today, has become a symbol of the Holocaust, representing the depths of man’s inhumanity to man.

The 2013 observance of the International Day of Commemoration is in memory of the victims of the Holocaust built around the theme “Rescue during the Holocaust: The Courage to Care”.

It has been both an honour and a privilege for our team to have produced the digital edition of “The Dairy of a Young Girl” in partnership with Viking, Penguin and The Anne Frank Foundation.

It was our desire to reflect the theme of this year’s commemoration, and while Anne was never rescued, she cared greatly about those around her with a similar desire to end both persecution and discrimination. To that end, we sincerely hope that this seminal work provides the reader with an insight that not only goes BeyondtheStory, but pays tribute to Anne’s story.

Jen Porter, CEO

Filed under anne-frank-diary-digital-edition, company-news.

It’s been non-stop here since embarking on our first Unity project 18 months ago. Back in June 2012 we started work on a digitally enhanced version of The Diary of Anne Frank. The brief was to create a rich, immersive iPad version of the diary centred around the text of the original diary with keywords linked to carefully curated related content. The aim was to create a high quality experience, faithful to the original diary and the context in which it was written. The challenge was to create something that both felt modern and had a sense of historical authenticity. The use of Unity3D allows production of rich 3D interactive content with relative ease across different operating systems and devices. We wanted to create an immersive experience incorporating accurate 3D interactive representations of the house where Anne Frank wrote the diary and of the diary itself.

Key Technical Achievements:

• Creation of a 3D hypertext system to enable individual words (links) in a body of text to be interactive. Required generation of bounding box coordinates for each word in 2D typeset space which were then converted to 3D world space in relation to the 3D modelled page. Required conversion from typeset points to pixels.

• A bespoke markup language was created to allow raw text to be marked up with different link types to allow for links with differing behaviours.

• Creation of web based content editor / asset manager. The text was marked up using this editor which allowed words to be marked as links and for assets to be associated with those links. The text editor allowed non-technical content producers to decide where and how content is displayed in the final Unity app.

Lessons learned:

Below are some key takeaways from our experience of developing Anne Frank:

• Layers of full screen alpha drastically impacts performance and reduces frame-rate (overdraw) kills iPad 1 and drastically reduces frame rate on iPad3.

• Transparent cutout-shaders that use Alpha testing are very expensive when used on large areas of mobile screens. They should be used with care as alpha testing checks for a given level of transparency per pixel per frame.

• Standard unity movie textures are very limited, at time of writing they do not support audio / video syncing making them unsuitable for video including speech. Due to time limitations we decided to use full screen playback which hooks into native iOS video playback. Later we investigated various third party movie texture plugins available on the Asset store.

• Optimising for iPad 1 is time consuming and difficult especially if assets have been produced for retina resolution. In the majority of cases it was decided that the effort required was not worth the gain in terms of numbers of people actively using iPad 1. The main learning we took away from the optimisation work which benefitted our other apps was better management of the creation and destruction of assets on demand to keep the memory footprint down.

• The iPad 1 work was useful when we were asked to do versions of the app for the Nook tablets.  A lot of the same optimisations were applicable in this case. The Nook also had a 50MB app size limit at this time so we used Unity Asset Bundles to break the content up.

• At time of writing, JSONFx json reader is the only C# JSON parser that works across mobile devices on the supported Unity .NET framework (2.0).

• In order to use version control such as Git, it is necessary to enable to the Metafiles mode in Unity Editor settings and to set Asset Serialization to Force text. Serializing assets allows Unity to perform the delta checks between versions on binary files. If using Git, care should be taken when collaborating on scenes as changes to scene files are not automatically merged.

Filed under tech.