[NEW APP] A Christmas Carol Drawn & Told

General (non-technical) New Apps / Works in Progress
#1

Developed in collaboration with StoryGameToy.com
Rediscover a classic with a striking audio visual app of Charles Dickens’ masterpiece A Christmas Carol – Drawn & Told.

After 2 years in the cupboard with only pizza, OS 7.1, and food that can be slid under the door. We are proud to announce a gift to you all (well it is if you consider several thousand hours of work for 99c a gift).

It’s a storytelling of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. WIth over 300 drawings by an amazing artist called Mike Cole and 2 hours of narration by British BBC radio actor Christain Rodska. Please do have a look because you will be getting something the team are more than proud of for a price that we hope will enable the app to be seen and enjoyed by a wide audience.

While at least 28 film versions of the enchanting tale have been made, nothing beats hearing the literary genius’s own words and the atmospheric, full-colour illustrations highlight the story of miserable miser Scrooge’s journey from darkness and despair to the true joy of Christmas.

We are taken through the story, from Scrooge on Christmas Eve to his encounters with the ghosts of Marley, Christmas Past, Present and a Future Yet To Come - meeting his nephew Fred, Bob Cratchit andTiny Tim along the way - to the up-lifting finale, in a rich telling with more than 300 drawings and nearly two hours of narration.

The story and images can be browsed or left to play, to allow you to enjoy the glory of Dickens’ wonderful tale in whichever way you choose. There are simple controls to find chapters, swipe control or touch presses to take you through pages, and your place is remembered when you pause the story.

This project has been a labour of love by all involved and we hope you enjoy it as much as we have making it. For only 99c you get to experience this incredible story, drawn and told in amazing, atmospheric and beautiful detail.

We built the project using the Corona SDK, so we’d have full control over the memory management, as squeezing in over 300 full size images/pages, many with multiple images would have proved impossible in some other SDK’s. We also built the App to be fully universal for all the Apple devices, from the iPod Touch to the iPhone 5 and all the iPad range. We then took this a step further and made the app fully universal for Kindle & Android Tablets and devices.

Be sure to watch our initial promo video, in full 1080p if you can.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmA9KxmWueA

Also, CLICK HERE to see more information about the App, or visit our websites to get more details:

Thanks
Wayne & Alan.

DeepBlueIdeas.com
StoryGameToy.com [import]uid: 125294 topic_id: 33638 reply_id: 333638[/import]

#2

Truly stunning artwork, really love the style. Look forward to checking this out properly this evening.

Best of luck with downloads!

Peach :slight_smile: [import]uid: 52491 topic_id: 33638 reply_id: 133733[/import]

#3

Very Cool, Great Job!!!

But do have a question for you. That is a huge amount of audio. What file formats did you use for IPAD and Kindle.

We were including some audio in our music app and had issues with size.

But your app is small with the amount of audio you have.

Thanks
Larry Meadows [import]uid: 11860 topic_id: 33638 reply_id: 133770[/import]

#4

Thanks Peach and Larry. We hope you like the app and it helps puts everyone in a Christmas Mood.

For the audio files we used MP3 files for all the devices (Kindle, iOS, Android). The original audio sizes were huge and in high definition AAC, but what we did was the following:

  • Chopped the audio into approx 300 files
  • Passed each audio through several filter passes using various tools
  • We then cross sampled each audio slice to achieve a maximum bit rate and threshold
  • Each audio was then exported as MP3, optimised according to the harmonics in each section.

Using this technique took some time, but rather than having all the samples compressed to hell - for the sake of file size, we were able to compress specific sections within a sample, stitch it back together to create a fully optimised, individual MP3 for each of the pages.

A similar process was applied to all of the other audio SFX, music tracks etc.

The end result was hundreds of MP3 files each optimised and compressed according to the harmonics, levels and thresholds within each.

We applied a similar process to the hundreds of images. Each image was compressed and optimised individually based on the colour saturation each image contained and neighbouring pixel colour compression algorithms applied. Again this took some time, as we wanted the images to look their best on an iPad3, iPhone5, Nexus 7 and all the other smaller devices.

There’s always room for improvement, but to squeeze this much data into the (under 50mb) Apple roaming, download limit, we did our very best to achieve this goal.

Cheers
Wayne
[import]uid: 125294 topic_id: 33638 reply_id: 133820[/import]

#5

Truly stunning artwork, really love the style. Look forward to checking this out properly this evening.

Best of luck with downloads!

Peach :slight_smile: [import]uid: 52491 topic_id: 33638 reply_id: 133733[/import]

#6

Very Cool, Great Job!!!

But do have a question for you. That is a huge amount of audio. What file formats did you use for IPAD and Kindle.

We were including some audio in our music app and had issues with size.

But your app is small with the amount of audio you have.

Thanks
Larry Meadows [import]uid: 11860 topic_id: 33638 reply_id: 133770[/import]

#7

Thanks Peach and Larry. We hope you like the app and it helps puts everyone in a Christmas Mood.

For the audio files we used MP3 files for all the devices (Kindle, iOS, Android). The original audio sizes were huge and in high definition AAC, but what we did was the following:

  • Chopped the audio into approx 300 files
  • Passed each audio through several filter passes using various tools
  • We then cross sampled each audio slice to achieve a maximum bit rate and threshold
  • Each audio was then exported as MP3, optimised according to the harmonics in each section.

Using this technique took some time, but rather than having all the samples compressed to hell - for the sake of file size, we were able to compress specific sections within a sample, stitch it back together to create a fully optimised, individual MP3 for each of the pages.

A similar process was applied to all of the other audio SFX, music tracks etc.

The end result was hundreds of MP3 files each optimised and compressed according to the harmonics, levels and thresholds within each.

We applied a similar process to the hundreds of images. Each image was compressed and optimised individually based on the colour saturation each image contained and neighbouring pixel colour compression algorithms applied. Again this took some time, as we wanted the images to look their best on an iPad3, iPhone5, Nexus 7 and all the other smaller devices.

There’s always room for improvement, but to squeeze this much data into the (under 50mb) Apple roaming, download limit, we did our very best to achieve this goal.

Cheers
Wayne
[import]uid: 125294 topic_id: 33638 reply_id: 133820[/import]