Collider Hits Cinemas This Friday

Sci-Fi fans rejoice: Collider an Irish production from beActive Entertainment, that started as a Comic Book and multiplatform project, and will now be released as a Feature Film in Irish cinemas next Friday, January 10th.

collider movie

Collider was inspired by experiments performed at the CERN campus in Geneva, where scientists found the Higgs Boson and won the Nobel Prize in physics 2013. With the theme of “What would you do if you could go back in time?” COLLIDER’s action takes place in 2018. The planet has just collapsed and the human species will be wiped out due to a succession of natural disasters and the emergence a mutant race called the Unknown. In the movie, Peter, Alisha, Carlos, Fiona, Luke and Lucy must join forces to reactivate the Collider, to go back in time and prevent the apocalypse. This will not be an easy journey: in less than 24 hours, the time portal will close forever.

Directed by Irish helmer Jason Butler (Republic of Telly, The Rubberbandits) and produced by Nuno Bernardo (we have an exclusive interview with him here, done before production started), Triona Campbell and John McDonnell, COLLIDER features actors Iain Robertson (Basic Instinct 2, Plunkett & Macleane, The Contractor, Band of Brothers) and Lucy Cudden (Pulp, Judas Ghost Afterlife) in the lead roles. It was written by two-time EMMY nominee Nuno Bernardo (“Final Punishment” and “Beat Girl”).

Collider will be released in Ireland this January 10th, followed by a release in the UK, USA and Japan.

Collider #4 webisode

We hope you have been enjoying the Collider webisodes. Here is number four. Exclusive to Frost Magazine first.

Collider #3 Webisode

Here is the third Collider Webisode. Exclusive to Frost Magazine.

beActive LAUNCHES NEW TRANSMEDIA SERIES BEAT GIRL

Multi-award-winning transmedia production company beActive has today announced the launch of Beat Girl, a live action music drama which will shoot in Dublin and London over the next four weeks.

Beat Girl follows 21-year-old Heather’s journey through music. Following the death of her pianist mother, Heather’s only option is to move in with her estranged father and half-brother. She turns to music and DJing to help her make some sense out of life. Heather is determined to continue her mother’s legacy and decides to audition for a place at a prestigious music school. But finding a balance between her music and career as a DJ leaves her divided; struggling to commit to her dreams and friendships against the backdrop of a turbulent home life. Heather soon discovers that music is inseparable from feelings and without the emotions, the dreams and the people we love, life, just like music, would not make sense.

Targeted at 18-35 year old women, Beat Girl will feature on several platforms, including online and social media, TV, books, magazines and iPhone/iPad applications. A Beat Girl novel and interactive eBook will go on sale in June at the same time as the Beat Girl mobile game.

Content Television and Digital holds the international online and broadcast distribution rights to the series, which it will debut at MIPTV as a 12×2’, 6×22’ and 1×90’ feature. Content Television and Digital will be at Stand RB.44 at MIPTV.

beActive’s co-founder and CEO Nuno Bernardo said: “It’s a great time for us to begin shooting Beat Girl. The series follows in the footsteps of the hugely successful Sofia’s Diary and demonstrates our continued commitment to engaging with audiences across multiple platforms, and really showcases us as being one of the leading producers of multiplatform content. We hope fans around the world will love Beat Girl just as much as Sofia”.

NEW beactive PROJECT ON A “COLLIDER” COURSE with SCI-FI SUCCESS

BRAND NEW beactive PROJECT ON A “COLLIDER” COURSE with SCI-FI SUCCESS

Multi-award-winning trans-media production company “beActive” have released another ingenious cross-platform creation, “Collider”, on Monday 4th of June 2012!

The new sci-fi concept will be available in various formats, spanning comics (print and digital), live-action web-series, app/online game, graphic novel and eventually becoming a feature film, to be released in 2013.

The first of the weekly series of eight webisodes are available exclusively on Frost Magazine first and then on beActive’s You Tube channel and stars BAFTA award-winning Scottish actor Iain Robertson of Rab C. Nesbitt and Basic Instinct fame.

The edge-of-your-seat action sees Iain’s character, Peter Ansay, a quantum physicist who is ostracised by the scientific community after issuing warnings about the dangers of The Hadron Collider.

Peter takes matters into his own hands when he breaks into CERN, the facility on the Franco-Swiss border, to sabotage the collider and accidentally transports himself and five others to 2018 where the post apocalyptic world is racked by natural disasters and at war with the “Unknown”. The six time travelers now have to fight to discover how they got there, how to survive and most importantly, how to get back to the present!

beActive’s co-founder and CEO Nuno Bernardo said: “Collider is a real sci-fi spectacular! By transporting the viewer into another dimension we are really able to delve into each of the characters pasts and follow their journey as they fight to return back to their present time.”

Follow the rise of Collider at:

www.facebook.com/colliderworld

and on Twitter; @beActiveMedia

Nuno Bernardo Interview; On Collider

Nuno Bernardo describes Collider as “Lost meets Terminator”. At Frost Magazine we are super excited about this multi-media story. Nuno is very inspirational and, according to BBC, “Nuno Bernardo is a leading world expert in New Media”.We also have the web series exclusively before anyone else does, so keep an eye out for it and check out our interview with the creator.

Catherine Balavage: How did the idea for the project come about?

It came about more than two years ago. We had been doing lots of projects, and the thing that connects all of our projects is that they are multi platform, in digital and online media. They start on the web and they move to television shows, etc. We had made Sofia’s Diary that also used this format of the multi platform We decided we wanted to make a new journal, but [do] something that we hadn’t done before. So we came up with a story that was about six characters that wake up in the future. They never met, they have nothing to connect them, and they need to learn to work together and to overcome the challenges of being in a place that is a possible colloquial world.

We started with hiring some writers from different backgrounds. We had a script writer, we had a comic book writer and we developed a story further. Changes changed and the characters changed, and the universe around the story was evolving . One year ago we were comfortable with the world we were creating and then we moved ahead. Then we started developing the comic book, developed a feature film , started developing some games and then the story started to get in shape.

Do you think in the future all films will become multi-platform? Is it possible for a film to just be a film?

I think it is. If you had asked anybody three or four years ago if a black and white movie [The Artist] could be done commercially everyone would have said no. I think there is always space for nicely told stories. A good, nice story in just one medium. You can also do the same in different mediums. The advantage if you do something in multi-platform is it works for marketing. You get different opportunities and different windows for your story but also at the same time different ways to connect with your audience. No everybody watched or reads the same story in the same way. The multi-platform allow you to create different experience. If someone wants to go and watch the film at the cinema they can just go and buy a ticket and watch the movie. If they want to play a game on a more interactive level, or they can read a novel or a comic book. We don’t want to exclude any medium. It is not saying that any medium doesn’t work alone. We are trying to create experience that are more in-line [with the fact] not everyone reads the same story or watches the same story in the same way.

Was it hard working with all of the different writers?

Yes. Because what was more important for us in the first year of developing the story was trying to get different writers who knew the story well, trying to write for a format, bringing roles of this world, bringing characters, bringing ideas and at this point everyone was working as a stand alone. It was like a big brain storm if you want because what we were looking for was more and more ideas, and some if them would contradict each other, but others were more complementary. After this first year of a chaotic process we somehow said; “okay this makes sense, this can interact, and connect with the other part of the story”. So then we start collaborating and after that moment everyone starts working together based on the same story and the same skeleton.

Have you taken anything from real life and put that into the story to create this fantasy world?

We kept with this, we based our concept, the starting point was the real Hadron collider experiments. and the fact that man, mankind are trying to replicate god or replicate the beginning of the universe. We picked [up] that experiment where they try and replicate the black hole and replicate the actual big bang event. What if all of these experiments are not just experiments and they are putting the world out of balance? Based on this theory we then developed our own story.

What happened in the process was around the same time last year, we were working full time on the project and we hired a film director to start working on the feature film. One or two weeks after we hired him he emailed us and said; ‘You guys are genius”. And on his email he put a link to an article that was published on CNN, and was all around the world, and on news agencies, about this guy that went to CERN and started to protest because he said he was from the future and all of the Hadron collider experiments were very dangerous. The director thought it was marketing genius to create these news stories to create a buzz about the project, but, no, it was just a coincidence that someone went there and protested. There is someone in the world with the opinion that these experiments at CERN may be creating some chaos and some problems to the planet.

Have you cast? Did you cast first or write first?

No. The casting is still ongoing. We cast the web series which will be out at the end of next week. And we cast one of the characters, which is the part of the scientist, Peter, who discovers this big problem, and we cast Ian Robertson the Scottish-English actor to perform the role. We are now at the process…we had a casting session last week in London, we are casting the other five characters of the story and we hope to have the cast finalised by the end of June.

What kind of inspiration have you taken from other Sci-Fi and time travel projects. Did you give the writer any reference points?

In our marketing pitch materials we call this Lost meets Terminator. In the first place dropping six character in an abandoned island, in this case it is not an abandoned island. It is in the future in a place that isn’t known and in a time that isn’t known with no way to control the environment that surrounds them. There are all of these challenges and interactions from a story point of view, and from the other point of view, what six people will do together to overcome their difficulties. So that is the part that you can pick that story and adapt it to other type of movies. We want to adapt six people in an unknown and challenging environment to the sci-fi framework.

Watch Collider Preview here.

How do all of the parts link together?

We have a time line. Our story start in September 2012 and the narrative goes to 2018. So what we have is these two narratives where, through this period through six years, lots of stories, sub-plots and characters will have lives in present times and in the future. What we did was to divide this time in small chunks of story so we have the web series. The web series is an initiative, which starts the story is when Peter is fired from CERN and he tries to alert the world of what is going on and then when nobody listens to him he tries to sabotage the Hadron collider and without knowing it, it creates a time machine that makes him and five other characters jump to the future.

So it is this moment of present time, when all began. and then we have each comic book which tells the background story of each of the characters. Because in the feature film the characters have already been featured but they have a past or a present and things happen to them that have an impact in the future. So this next story where things happen in 2012, 2013 in the comic books so the audience can know a little more about the characters.

Then we have a game. The game is the stuff the characters have to do in the feature film so ahead of the feature film you can get familiar with the character’s , the location, the setting and the mission of the characters and you can do it yourself by playing this game.

Each piece of content tells a little bit more and the big story line which we created over the six years, and all the elements are part of this timeline. Of course you have to be very careful of each element so if you just want to watch the web series you will be able to watch the web series and enjoy it as a stand alone, if you just want the comic series you can read about the beginning, middle and end, and if you just want to watch the movie you can just go to the theatre and buy your ticket. You can watch the movie and you will understand the story. But of course if you pursue all of these pieces of content you will have a better grasp of the story and know the characters much better, and you will be more engaged with the universe that we are creating.

Whereabouts are you filming?

We start shooting mid September and we are shooting the movie in Dublin, Ireland.

Tell me a bit about you

Yes, I started to be active ten years ago and my previous experience was first in the advertising world so I was doing producing ads and then I worked for interact television company where we worked in the late 90’s, early 2000’s. We were trying to do the first interactive television. It was when the internet bubble just exploded so most of these interactive [projects] weren’t done. We see them coming back nowadays with the television being connected with the internet, When this interactive television project ended I based my experience in advertising and because some of our clients at the time started to worry about the internet, and that viewers where not watching the ads on TV anymore they started feeling that the world was changing and just putting ads in traditional media was not enough anymore.

Communities and sub communities were developing. Cable TV was exploding and expanding throughout Europe, so in 2002 we put these two expertise together to create a company that specialised in entertainment that was multi-platform and that was focused in telling stories on different platforms, and benefited from the tools and the relationships that audiences had with different platforms to tell a better story.

How did you get funding?

Initially we had some venture capital when we started the company and, with our success and the fact that some of our multi-platform shows are being sold around the world, in TV and publishing, and mobile and licensing in different platform that we distributed our content, recently we managed to secure additional funding from Jill Banks in Portugal that allows us to fund and self-fund from the development and the early parts of this project.

So it is web series, comic, games in that order? What is the scheduled time-line?

First release of the projects is the web series, the comic and the game will all be released by June 4th and we have a second game planned in the Fall. We also are shooting a film in September for a 2013 release. We are also working on a follow up to the comic books. So between now and to the end of 2013 we have a schedule, a planning of releasing the different content, sub-plots and characters. So this time-line which is our universe between 2012 and 2018 we are working on a novel so different products will come out based on this project about one character and then two characters or one moment in this journey.

Are the people from CERN involved?

They are not involved but if the story gets popular then they will probably not be very supportive of the story [laughs] It doesn’t portray them in a a bad way but it creates a story which says that what they are doing will probably create problems with the planet. So if I was them I would probably not be happy with the story. So we are not working with them.

Thank you Nuno