FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Local authors join group of international best-sellers to create real life Choose-Your-Own-Adventures in Brisbane.
Local authors Kim Wilkins, Angela Slatter and Marianne de Pierres have joined forces with NY Times best-selling and award-winning authors across Australia, on a new interactive storytelling project that aims to culturally enrich cities around the world via real life Choose Your Own Adventure stories.
“It’s a mix of cultural tourism and storybook adventure, I jumped at the chance to bring such an exciting project to Brisbane,” says Slatter, author of four highly acclaimed short story collections and a British Fantasy Award winner. “The producer Emily Craven has gathered together a dozen award-winning authors, each with a world-wide fanbase and published in over a dozen countries, to write Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style stories in cities across the world. Each adventure is written specifically to highlight the beautiful and intriguing parts of a specific city and to appeal to a young, tech savvy traveller.”
The international project aims not only to boost tourism, but create a completely new way of telling a story, by dropping the reader physically in the middle of it. Rather than reading the choose-your-own-adventure in printed book form, this project is creating maps so adventurers can read the story in the location the adventure is happening. Each map has a series of QR codes that a reader can scan with their smart phone. Each code links them to a webpage where they can read the next part of the adventure and then choose from several options to continue the story. Each new part of the story takes place in one of the locations on the map, showcasing the landmarks of some of the world’s most trendiest cities in a whole new way. Each story happens in a specific city, and the chosen city for the three, is Brisbane, their home turf.
“Not only are we trying to create real adventures, but we’re going to lead you to the hidden nooks and secret features of Brisbane and other cities around the world, taking you on a journey you would never find in a guide book,” says Wilkins, author of over 20 novels and a lecturer at the University of Queensland. “At the same time you could be avoiding an alien invasion, solving a mystery, surviving a zombie apocalypse… Hey, anything can happen on an adventure…”
Not only is the project unusual but so is the method of funding it. “To get this project off the ground we are crowdfunding it,” says Producer Emily Craven, a Brisbane based transmedia storyteller and Digital Producer for if:book Australia (The Australian Institute for the Future of the Book). “This project is about enriching communities through storytelling; we wanted the community itself to be invested, to take part in what we’re creating.” Crowdfunding involves raising funds from the public, via ‘pledging’ to support the project start-up costs. In return, the ‘pledgers’ get rewards for contributing to the project, with different rewards for various levels of contribution ranging from maps, to books to, private conversations with authors, to actually having a character in one of the adventures being named after you!
“Each project has a time limit to reach its funding goal, in our case, our crowdfunding campaign finishes on the 4th of October 2013,” says award winning speculative fiction author, de Pierres. “What we’re proposing is a unique, modern and fun way of increasing tourism in Brisbane. Just think, an adventure in our backyard.”
If you would like to find out more about the Choose-Your-Adventure project, see the crowdfunding page at http://pozible.com/chooseadventure.
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