BradField Narrative Designs Inc. has been established to create and distribute Digital Interactive Narratives that are entertainingly educational and every bit as compelling as playing computer games. In a world of shortened attention spans and considerable distraction the company intends developing a slate of titles based on success with its flagship series, Inanimate Alice™. The Sailor’s Stone is the company’s second title in development.
Ian Harper – Producer, Vision Holder, Commercial Director
Ian Harper has lived and worked in the Middle East and SE Asia travelling extensively across 4 continents for more than 25 years. Attendance at the UK’s National Film and Television School focused Ian’s writing skills towards narrative forms that work across screens. The resulting theatrical movie screenplay with game interfaces E|Mission (2004), substantially developed through the Euroscript programme, provides the characters and plot for the multi-award-winning interactive series Inanimate Alice. Ian established The BradField Company (UK) to host and develop the intellectual property within the title, explore its brand potential and commercial realization. Originally envisaged as an entertainment title, it was the recurring use of the story by teachers around the world that inspired the focusing on education audiences. Investments in the work by Education Services Australia, the Arts Council of England and Canada Media Fund have made Inanimate Alice an internationally recognized exemplar of transmedia storytelling. Ian established BradField Narrative Designs Inc. in 2016 to further develop the potential of the series as a flagship for a digital novel studio. The Sailor’s Stone is his second screenplay.
Kate Pullinger – Writer
Kate Pullinger writes fiction across multiple platforms. Her novel The Mistress of Nothing won Canada’s 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her 2014 novel Landing Gear took the story first developed in Kate’s collaborative work of digital multimedia, Flight Paths: A Networked Novel, co-created with Chris Joseph. In 2014 with co-creator Neil Bartlett, Pullinger created the digital war memorial Letter to an Unknown Soldier; this project was commissioned to mark the centenary of outbreak of World War One. 22,000 people participated in the project, and Pullinger co-edited a selection of the letters for a book of the same name. In 2013 Pullinger’s opera libretto Dorian Grey, based on Oscar Wilde’s novel and commissioned by Slovak National Theatre with the composer Lubica Cekovska, premiered in Bratislava, Slovakia. Kate Pullinger is Canadian. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University, England.
Chris Joseph – Technical Director, Digital Artist, Musician
Chris Joseph is a British/Canadian writer and artist who works primarily with electronic text, sound and image. His past projects include NRG, a bicycle-powered interactive multimedia narrative created during his time as the first Digital Writer-in-Residence at the Institute of Creative Technologies in De Montfort University, Leicester, UK; and Animalamina, a collection of interactive multimedia poetry for children funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and Canadian Heritage. He has been awarded the IBM Prize for New Media and was the recipient of the first ‘Premio per l’Arte Digitale’ for his work on Inanimate Alice, awarded by the Italian Ministry of Culture, Department for Cultural and Environmental Heritage, National Museum for 21st Century Arts and the Fondazione Rosselli.
Andy Campbell– Digital Artist, Lead Developer
Andy Campbell creates and develops interactive media. With almost a decade of experience in Unity game and application development for a wide variety of platforms, and over 20 years’ experience creating digitally-born literature, he specialises in immersive environments, digital storytelling, game design and artistic direction. He is a speaker and workshop leader giving masterclasses in Unity and digitally-delivered storytelling. He is Director of Digital for arts/media organisation One to One Development Trust and the founder/lead developer of Dreaming Methods, One to One’s award-winning in-house digital storytelling and VR development studio. Often called upon by international arts and culture organisations as well as universities across the globe, his work includes services to the Orient Foundation for Arts and Culture creating the world’s largest online archive of digitized Tibetan cultural resources.
"Welcome to the future of reading"
"This professionally produced resource stands above most educational resources in its production quality, progressing past traditional texts and novels into a multimedia landscape that offers enhanced insight… it is one of the best examples of multimedia available today for use in classrooms… can be used in many areas within the BC curriculum effectively… consistently explores the important issues of sustainability, world communities and development through the lens of a young girl…"
"Alice is a book that blinks, buzzes, hums, sings, jitterbugs, plays games, and, on occasion, rains and snows."
The Sailor’s Stone tells the tale of Canadian engineer, Conrad Williamson, who travels back to his ancestral homeland in Southern England following receipt of a document from a firm of London-based solicitors. No more than a scrap of paper, it contains a sketch of a mechanical device. A few words endeavour to explain the workings but all are indecipherable with the exception of a date and what could possibly be “lock and key.” Worn and stained, for all the world it looks like a page torn from one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks. The official letter accompanying the fragment offers an apology for the late delivery of the material which had turned up by surprise when the firm relocated to new premises. Somehow, it had been misplaced the previous time the solicitors had moved home. The document is dated 15th October, 1786.