CORNELIA FUNKE: MIRRORWORLD

Credits & Description:

Advertiser: CORNELIA FUNKE
Agency: MIRADA
Category: Best Use of Mobile Devices
Advertising campaign: MIRRORWORLD
Producer: Andrin Mele-Shadwick (Mirada)
Marketing Director: Caroline Gomez (Mirada)
Author: Cornelia Funke
Creative Director/Writer: David Fowler (Mirada)
Lead Editor: Fred Fouquet (Mirada)
Digital Creative Supervisor: Andrew Cochrane (Mirada)
Music Composer: Atli Örvarsson (Mirada)
Lead Concept Designer: Jing Zheng (Mirada)
Lead Concept Designer/Sculptor: David Meng (Mirada)
Lead Concept Designer: Francisco Ruiz Velasco (Mirada)
Executive Producer: Javier Jimenez (Mirada)
Executive Producer: Patrick Nugent (Mirada)
President Of Digital Production: John Fragomeni (Mirada)
Art Director: Mark S. Brinn (Mirada)
Production Manager/Hr Director: Tina Van Delden (Mirada)
Ios Developer: Ken Boreman (Mirada)
Production Coordinator: Ryan Hitch (Mirada)
Producer: Andrew Merkin (Mirada)
Lead Ios Developer: David Sweetman (Mirada)
Director: Mathew Cullen (Mirada)

Execution
Cornelia Funke came to us with the desire to see “a glance” of her world. If [her budget] allowed her “to see one monster for three seconds before kicking me out. It would make [her] the happiest in the world.” We comprised a team from three facets of transmedia production: film, books, and gaming to define the creative concept and production chain. Given the importance of mirrors, we pursued an iOS-based experience using the large screen of the iPad; the iPad would thus become the mirror. As we wanted to establish the world, we created an experience that lived between the visual linear narrative of a film with the nonlinear narrative capabilities of text driven books to create a living storybook. We avoided heavy use of objective-based games or a “game-ified” experience to discourage users from ignoring the world in lieu of the chasing a minor task.

Effectiveness
Sales numbers are infantile but since launch, the free app has unique downloads of 250+ and the paid full app has 125+ downloads. Sales growth has held consistently at 13% since launch. The retention rate for users has held steady at over 70%. Critical acclaim has been extraordinary with press coverage from FastCo Company, L.A. Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Animation Magazine, and the German press agency, dga. Cornelia Funke is planning to create apps between each of the 5 books in the series and is formalizing a joint venture with us with the sole purpose of producing her non-printed page properties.

Strategy
Our goal was to establish the visual world: the look and feel, the characters, the texture that defines the MirrorWorld and has been living in the author’s mind for 6+ years. Fans of the stories can visit the MirrorWorld, for a short time, in-between the novels. The novels are not retold or adapted but rather the world is expanded upon with 110 minutes of original story. This story stands alone and expands on the relationships and backstory of the novels. The target audience is fans of adventure and historical fantasy and is both an invitation for the unexperienced explorer and the rabid Cornelia Funke fan. For this reason, we are not necessarily seeking to force a book fan to convert to reading/ watching Cornelia’s work on an iPad but instead capture new fans of fantasy that use iPads and invite them to the world.