“Beautiful, provocative, enticing story world!” —Ana Serrano
“The storytelling, craft and execution blew me away. I wanted to explore until I uncovered every last story and detail.” —Troy Lachance
Overview: Internationally known for her best-selling Inkheart trilogy, children’s fiction writer Cornelia Funke crafts fantasy worlds that capture the imagination of readers young and old. To recreate and expand upon MirrorWorld, the fantastical setting of her recent adventure novels Reckless and Fearless, Funke partnered with Los Angeles-based production studio Mirada to develop a “living” storybook for devoted fans. More than 100 people worked for nearly a year to develop the iPad app, which features fifteen new short stories told through video, illustrated and animated text and scrolling graphic novels. But the real hero feature is MirrorWorld itself: three-dimensional interactive panoramas, where audiences explore the landscape and meet the characters.
• The project features over 110 minutes of feature-film-quality content, resulting in terabytes of video, source code and assets that needed to be compressed down to the 2GB limit.
• Many of the assets were created in Mirada’s VFX pipeline: Photoshop, After Effects, Maya, Zbrush, photogrammetry, NUK, Flare, matte painting and shadow puppetry.
• Critical acclaim from the Cannes festival, along with rave reviews from publishers and fans—the app has over 10,000 active users—has created a demand for a print version as well as subsequent apps for new book releases in the MirrorWorld series.
Comments by Andrew Merkin:
What were your goals in designing the user experience of MirrorWorld? “To be as diegetic as possible. We wanted the beauty of the world to be the foremost feature, so we avoided overlays and artificiality wherever possible. We chose one of the main locations in the novels, The Ogre tavern, as the hub from which each of the fifteen stories extended. For those seeking a more traditional experience, we also included a text-based table of contents. The ultimate goal was to keep the navigation intuitive, rooted in a gyroscopic, spherical POV that responds to the user’s exploration of the space. Users find the stories they want to hear and enjoy the ambiance of the environment.”
Did you learn anything new during the process? “Cornelia Funke and Mirada developed a partnership and began to learn about MirrorWorld together. We explored the favorite plot points, established the backstories, foreshadowed future events and lent texture to the creatures that rule her world. We challenged Funke’s own assumptions about the world, developed characters not explored in the novels and inspired Funke to write in forms she hasn’t visited in a long time. While we are established storytellers, expanding a world with someone who created it was a new and exciting adventure.”
