In 1957, a group of tourists mysteriously disappeared in an uncharted area between Wellington, New Zealand, and the Samoa Islands. Some time later, a group of explorers found a journal from one of the missing tourists. The journal was so damaged, only fragments of information could be found about the trip and what happened - mostly blurry pictures of random moments. What was clear was that the tourists boarded one or more trains that took them further into the mountains of the islands, and none ever returned... 

Two decades later, Mister Pinson, a controversial anthropologist, and Alice, a photographer, visit the islands, hoping to solve the mystery of the lost tourists by following clues left in the journal.

On their expedition, they meet the ‘Famous People’, a group of people from the past who have lived on the island for years but long to return to their home, back in time. Their journey eventually leads Mister Pinson and Alice to the ruins of a civilization that developed advanced railroad systems that could bend time and send passengers on board into the past.

Competing against a group of mercenary Archaeologists and Anthropologists who seek to exploit the secrets of time travel, Mister Pinson and Alice, with the help of the Famous People manage to refurbish an old steam engine they found and travel back in time… arriving in Berlin, year 1937. There, they find a trail of clues left by the group of missing tourists, which sets them off on an incredible adventure that would take them through time and space around the world.

The following embeded video shows an example of viewer's journey.

The interactive scenes presented here are available in the "Video and Interactive Scenes" section - Scroll all the way to the bottom of this long webpage or click on the menu item "Video&Interactive Animation" on the top of the page.

"BeCity" on Vimeo by Jean-Marc Gauthier.

The World and Reality

After traveling through time and back to 1937 Berlin, the world of Pinson and Alice is an alternative history that precedes the reality where of what they live on the island. In order for them to find a way home, they have to find that one train station with an alternate tunnel that could open up the right wormhole. Otherwise, they’d be stuck perpetually in this alternate world, while continually be hunted by the Archaeologists and Anthropologists. They do not know where this train station is at except it’s in Europe.

Professor Pinson has a deep interest in the Famous People and has studied them for decades; spending many summers on the island.

But Pinson has a secret – one that drives his obsession about the Famous People: he learned long ago that the Famous People hold the key to time travel, through special vehicular machines that use the railroads and tunnels in the mountains to create a time vortex.

For years, Pinson did endless surveys of the railroads, tunnels, mines and the steam engines that drive these machines, or special trains. He kept his work secret from the other anthropologists, until one day, when he was finally ready to take his own time machine journey.

It is in fact not the journey that interested Pinson, but the fact that this particular reality of time travel, as he found out, has the ability to return him his youth, something he desires above all else.

Temporal travels

Special trains pulled by steam or electric engines are the vehicle for time travel. The engines need to move on ramps, giant wheels and double-helix tunnels excavated in the mountains. The time distortion takes places inside the train when the alignment of the train and the cars change inside the tunnels.

The memories of our lives are sucked by a large time vortex located in Tokelau near the Samoa islands in the Pacific Ocean along the International Date Line, an imaginary line on the surface of the Earth.

By running underwater trains continuously between the two islands, people have engineered an artificial system of date change where repeated travels change small increments of time until they achieve a substantial jump in time, thus enabling time travel.

Alice and Professor Pinson

Professor Pinson, a controversial anthropologist, has raised money to build railroads and refurbish old trains in order to fulfill his desire to travel back in time. He is anxious to go back to the island. He feels that the survival of a community of people, stuck on the islands is at risk. Maybe some of the people living in the abandoned city are hiding and still alive.

Professor Pinson has a deep interest in the Famous People and has studied them for decades; spending many summers on the island.

But Pinson has a secret – one that drives his obsession about the Famous People: he learned long ago that the Famous People hold the key to time travel, through special vehicular machines that use the railroads and tunnels in the mountains to create a time vortex.

For years, Pinson did endless surveys of the railroads, tunnels, mines and the steam engines that drive these machines, or special trains. He kept his work secret from the other anthropologists, until one day, when he was finally ready to take his own time machine journey.

It is in fact not the journey that interested Pinson, but the fact that this particular reality of time travel, as he found out, has the ability to return him his youth, something he desires above all else.

Alice, a photographer, was one of the rare visitors who climbed the long flights of stairs leading to Pinson's office. She immediately understood the extraordinary story that she had access to through Professor Pinson. He had decided that he was comfortable to share the story with her. Alice is an intuitive and ambitious photojournalist that was initially assigned to Pinson by the Anthropologist Society as an assistant to help document the Famous People and Pinson’s work. In time, she too learns about the time travel capability hidden in the mountains, and Pinson’s plans to go back in time with the Famous People – back to 1937 Berlin. She was in fact the first to leak information about the time travel machines to other anthropologists.

The Anthropologist Society has different ideas about how to use the time travel technology that is within their grasp. They envision huge, commercial projects of tourism built on the islands based around a prehistoric history of time, and will stop at nothing to pry the technology away from Pinson and the Famous People.

Despite their fractious relationship, Alice aligns herself with Pinson, not wanting to see decades of his passionate work end up in the hands of commercial mercenaries. They partner up and escape through time with the Famous People, and over many adventures, form a bond as they seek to eventually return home.

Together they find a trail of clues left by the group of missing tourists, which sets them off on an incredible adventure that would take them through time and space around the world.

Transmedia

Experiments with storytelling

Elements of “Be City” can be available across multiple social media applications. The above illustration shows the “entry points” to and from social media during one episode (several scenes make up one episode) of “Be City”. Something that will be mapped over several days by the new data visualization application.
Extensions to social media will serve several functions.
The main challenge will be the creation of episodes that allow entry
points for new viewers without a deep knowledge of the plot
and to keep the interest of the fan base. This difficult balance can
be achieved with a very talented team of writers and animators
using new tools to quantify the resonance of each new episode in
the social media landscape.

Transmedia and Social Networks

A s part of the “Be City” project, new tools will be designed in
order to evaluate the presence of “Be City” in social networks. A
data visualization application will show most of the activities of
“Be City” viewers traveling between story nodes and social media
channels. A data visualization application tracking watermarks
will highlight the users dependencies and bridges between the
elements of social media.
We plan to build a community of volunteers who will let us map out their navigation through the social media landscape.

Video and Interactives Animations

Video trailer

The following embeded video shows an example of viewer's journey through interactive scenes of the story.

"BeCity" on Vimeo by Jean-Marc Gauthier.