When worlds collide: an interview with Nuno Bernardo

CEO of multinational production company beActive, Nuno Bernardo is an award-winning and Emmy-nominated writer/producer/publisher with several years' experience in transmedia production. He’s just launched his latest project, Collider World, an epic sci-fi story told across a range of media platforms. Goji editor Ally Millar recently caught up with Nuno to get the lowdown on what’s shaping up to be a major event

Sum up Collider World in ten words or less
Nuno: A sci-fi transmedia series about six characters who jump to a post-apocalyptic future.

Tell us about Collider World
Collider World is a sci-fi multi-platform project that combines TV and web series, exclusive access to pre-series storylines, mobile games and online graphic novels available on the App Store and Google Play. It focuses on the stories of six people who were mysteriously transported to a post-apocalyptic future, and their mission to get back to the present time and save mankind, and their own lives.

Why the multi-broadcast approach?
Our approach to storytelling is to create a universe (or ‘storyworld’) and then divide that big story into different – but self-contained – pieces and distribute them in different media. The reason for this approach is to connect with the audience and fans on all the different media they use during the day. The story can follow the audience and be there with the audience, whatever media they are on, be it the internet, a mobile phone or just reading a book.

It's an ambitious project. What have been the major technical and practical obstacles?
We worked with a team of writers in different countries, from scriptwriters to comic writers to web bloggers and game designers. So, the big challenge was to keep the same voice and coherence across all media and not have facts and events in one media contradicting what was going on elsewhere.

Why did you opt for comics, webisodes and an app?
These three media were chosen because they were the most suitable to start telling this story. The comic books – six in total, one for each character – present the lives of the six characters, in both present time and in the future, so the audience can begin to know who they are. The webisodes focus on the initial incident that starts the story: the discovery that the experiments that are happening at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are putting the world out of balance. The game introduces the world to the story in the future, in 2018, and allows the audience to execute the same mission that the six characters will undergo in the upcoming feature film.

How does it all tie together?
Each of the products, each of the media, focus on a period of time in the big Collider storyworld. The full story spans from summer 2012 and goes up to the fall of 2018. Each media, each piece of content will tell one part of that story. Next year, when we have released all the pieces that are part of this Collider storyworld, the audience will then have accessed all the plot points, all the events, all the stories that are happening in this world we are creating.

Who and what influenced the story?
In the development of Collider, we were inspired by the work of J.J. Abrams and the sci-fi post-apocalyptical movies like the Terminator saga, where the world collapsed because of machines. The way we pitch Collider is Lost (the TV series) meets Terminator. We were in love with the concept of putting average, otherwise anonymous, people in a challenging environment. As Lost put a group of people on a desert island, we put six random people in the future where the world collapses, and we gave them the mission of saving mankind.

Do you think Collider will set a precedent as to how projects are broadcast and aired to their public in years to come?
We’ve been doing this multi-platform model for years in our projects, not only in sci-fi, but also in horror and teen drama. As audiences are becoming more and more used to different platforms, you, as a producer, can control the way (or which device) the audience uses to access and watch your content. You need to be clever in the way you distribute and tell your story. At beActive we try to use the new platforms to get our audience more engaged with the characters and with the story, and we use these tools to build a loyal fanbase.