Be City


There is an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where a group of people came with their memories and souvenirs from other places. No one understood how they got there. All they remembered about their journey is that they arrived by train and had escaped hard times. After living on the island for decades, they started refurbishing the trains and planned to travel back in time to Berlin - the city and time from which they came.

Be City
By Jean-Marc Gauthier
Credits: Thanks to Ervin Han, Miro Kiro (modeling), Emil Polyak, Vernice Chua and Sandhya Prabhat and to all the people who helped me during the past twelve months. Drawings, story, character designs, conceptual design and animations by Jean-Marc Gauthier.

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 network of railroads, tunnels and mine shafts is unusual for a small island of the Pacific Ocean. Even beaches located on the South shore can be reached by steam engine trains. Beyond those beaches, another world used for time travel begins.
For decades, a hand drawn sketchbook with surveys of railroads, tunnels, mines and of the steam engines, remained locked in a drawer in Professor's Pinson desk.
Dark traces on satellite picture of the Vanikoro islands. Professor Pinson's breakthrough was the interpretation of the traces as part of a giant calligraphy.
Professor Pinson was able to reconstruct a map of the secret underground network of tunnels and railroads, tunnels, mines, from the language of the Famous People. Professor Pinson studied the art of landscape calligraphy developed by the Famous People. They told him that experimental time travel trains have been running through the network.

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.

VANIKORO Island

Captain Nome's Coal Mines

Incline

POMOTOU Island

Wheel

Gamier River

Nautilus Shipwreck

Landing Dock

Last Beach

< Shipping lines to Wellington

to Los Angeles>

CLERMONT-TONNERRE Island

Valley of the Time Machines

--- Official Time Change Limit ---

Be City

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.

The network of railroads, tunnels and mine shafts is unusual for a small island of the Pacific Ocean. Even beaches located on the South shore can be reached by steam engine trains. Beyond those beaches, another world used for time travel begins.
Some of the Famous People live on trains. Others live in decommissioned passenger cars.
Alice and Mister Pinson spend most of their time on trains where they can live with the Famous People, learn their language and learn about their life on the island.

Time Travel

Tonight Professor Pinson and the Famous People will board the time travel train. The last ride after a long series of tests of experimental trains. Today is a day that sounds like a day with a tomorrow that will be decades away in the past.

What if we would be archaeologists visiting the ruins of a modern city? What would be left of our vibrant cities ? The infrastructure of transportation, the highways, the airport, the railroad system, the tunnels and the underground structures.

A group of anthropologists competing with Mister Pinson want turn archeology and linguistics into a touristic business to develop an time travel theme park, a tower of languages and a industrial archeology hotel on the island . They want to have the exclusive monopoly of the research on time travel which was so far the activity of a few unknown archaeologists.

Photographs by Alice. Professor Pinson discovered that the location of the Time Machines was hidden inside encrypted calligraphy.
Photographs by Alice. Professor Pinson worked closely with Mister Puddle who is the Main Engineer. Mister Puddle was the assistant of the Berlin engineer who built the first time travel trains in the mid 1930s.
During Professor Pinson's next trip to the island, Mister Toga, one of the Famous People will guide him and Alice, a photographer, to the isolated valley of the Time Machines.

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.

Pinson. Photographed by Alice before leaving the human sciences building for the last time.

Character: Risk taker, individualistic, opinionated
Temperament: Rational and logical. Man of a few words.
Wants: to be free and to play but would not mind to be the "paterfamilias" of the Famous People
Does not want: this word does not exist in Mister Pinson's language. Everything is possible.
Fears: that other anthropologists will be faster than him and prevent the departure of the time travel train from the island
Goals (internal: to be a young boy, to disappear in the past/ External: to help the cause of the Famous People, to be their voice
Professions: Anthropologist, activist

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. Self-portrait during her first trip to the island in 1977.

Character: Type "A", goal oriented
Temperament: Communicator, a good actor, multi-faceted.
Wants: to help the community of the Famous People
Does not want: to help the Famous People the way Pinson does it
Fears: to be wrong, to be in a situation that is out of control
Goals (internal: to go home after the work is done / External: to be a famous photographer)
Professions: Photograph, singer and dancer

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.

For decades, Professor Pinson documented the life of the Famous People.
The Famous People live inside mine shafts and underground tunnels. They re-invent forgotten technologies for mining and for transportation.
But nobody knows if it is possible to take them back in time. Who will take care of them?

Mister Toga takes Alice on a path leading to the valley of the Time Machines.

The dangerous life of the Famous People

The Famous People are a group of emigrants who arrived on the island years ago, bringing with them only their memories and artefacts from a lost time. They were originally from Germany – Berlin, specifically. On a fateful day in December 1937, they boarded a train in Berlin to escape predators and the threat of death. However, this wasn’t a regular train departing, but one that travels through time and would forever spare them a life of hate and violence.

After living on the island for some time, the Famous People started refurbishing the train and planned to travel back in time to Berlin - the city they came from, their home; now armed with knowledge of the future.

The Famous People have powerful enemies. They are an obstacle to the plans of the Society of Archaeologists and Anthropologists for Time Travel based in New York City. Archaeologists and Anthropologists are eager to turn the time travel trains into a profitable business. This will not happen if the Famous People quickly refurbish the trains and travel back to the past with the help of Professor Pinson And Alice.

Mister Elephant has a large family with elephants of all ages and sizes.
Character design for Mister Puddle. He comes from an old family living on the water edge. He is the main engineer of the trains.
Little Sir is a happy person. He is goofy and likes to hang around with his friend Mister Elephant.

Art

A typical scene of “Be City” includes several images with transparencies in the foreground, character animations in the middleground and a painted background. Writers and programmers will create scripts that keeps track of the assets during production and assembles the scene - in real time inside the web browser. The “Content Manager” chooses to hide or to show assets, to create basic animations (translate, rotate, scale), to add filters for color, black and white, transparencies, motion blur, etc...

The production of assets for “Be City” will be similar to the creation of interactive animations and content using HTML5. A talented team of artists will paint high resolution hand drawn digital paintings for the backgrounds and detailled drawings of the foreground. Actors and animators 3D characters will animate in Maya using motion capture and render the animations as 2D sprite sheets. Other assets for “Be City” will include scripts, still and moving objects, text, music, sounds and videos.

Character design for Mister Toga
Conceptual design for the Ramp and the Wheel which are parts of the time machine. Professor Pinson was one of the few experts who knew that the Famous People had mastered the use of time machines.
Conceptual design for Be City, the landing dock, during the day. Professor Pinson kept paintings of the 'Be City' hanging on the walls of his office.
Conceptual design for Be City, in the evening.
Conceptual design for Be City, at night.

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.

Viewers will encounter interactive nodes throughout the scenes. The nodes will give the possibility to branch out to different parts of the story or to change the camera, assets and attributes inside a scene.
As part of the “Be City” project, new tools will be designed in order to quantify the presence of “Be City” in social networks.

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.

Demos of interactive scenes

Click on the images. Each scene opens and plays in real-time inside a web browser. Best viewed in Chrome or Firefox.


Scene 1. Click on the image to view the scene with interactive animations in HTML5
Scene 2. Click on the image to view the scene with interactive animations in HTML5
Scene 3. Click on the image to view the scene with interactive animations in HTML5
Scene 4. Click on the image to view the scene with interactive animations in HTML5
Scene 5. Click on the image to view the scene with interactive animations in HTML5
Scene 6. Click on the image to view the scene with interactive animations in HTML5