How delighted are we?

After awards from econsultancy and recognition from Wallpaper* we’re ending 2009 with Apple selecting Bunny Munro as one of their best apps of 2009.

Apple selected 30 apps for their “rewind: 2009″ promotion, and we were right there. With over 100,000 apps available, we’re pretty ecstatic with the odds on that one.

Thanks to all of our customers, friends and partners for helping us get this far – lots more to announce in 2010. Don’t forget that Bunny is at 33% off for the rest of 2009.

Enhanced Editions has been selected by Wallpaper* Magazine and branding agency Wolff Olins as one of ten companies that they think will be big in 2010.

We  feature in the January issue of the magazine, (page 84!) out now, and Enhanced Editions MD Peter Collingridge recently spoke at the launch party for the issue, alongside Duncan Fitzsimons, the inventor of the folding wheel, Hans Rosling of Gapminder, and Gerhard Romen of Nokia Money.

We love the illustration commissioned by Wallpaper to go with the piece, shown above.

Some great news – we’ve just won the prestigious eConsultancy Award for Innovation in User Experience (more prestigious than pronouncable). More than 400 entries were judged by an international panel from companies known for innovation such as Honda, The Guardian, Orange, Channel 4, and Google.

The judges described the entry as “a brilliant and engaging iPhone application which helped to bring to life Nick Cave’s second novel, with video and audio which gave users significantly more than they could get from a physical book.”

Enhanced Editions was the only book, ebook or publishing producer to be short-listed in any of the 22 categories.

Co-founder Peter Collingridge said, “Enhanced Editions was set up with the aim of providing an innovative and delightful digital reading experience. Our users have told us how delighted they are with this experience, and it is a fantastic accolade to have this reinforced by the highly experienced judges at eConsultancy.”

A great way to round off our inaugural year – and don’t forget that our Bunny Munro app is available for 33% off for the month of December.

The Free Version of The Death of Bunny Munro has now been approved and is available on the app store. For free. The free version carries exactly the same features as the full version, but is limited just the first three chapters.

Bunny Munro Sampler App
Bunny Munro full-fat

Brilliant
by jacklouisburns – 6th September 2009
“A fantastic way to really get into a book.”

The Future?
by Kit_Bsm – 6th September 2009
“Awesome. Finally something substantial for the iPhone that’s more than just a game or a gimmick. Worth the price.”

Incredible App
by majn1988 – 6th September 2009
“Such an enjoyable way to experience a novel, seamlessly blending text, audio and video. Substantial, highly polished and very well presented. Great value for money too.”

It’s great!
by twittizenkane – 6th September 2009
“This is the first time I’d spent over a tenner for an app, It was a tough call, but once I’d started reading and listening to the author, Nick Cave, read the book my worries faded away. The app has been lovingly produced with attention to detail apparent at every stage. The audio production is possibly the best bit when teamed up with the ability to switch between audio and reading. It came into its own when catching up on the tube and then cycling to work.”

Brilliant App for a Brilliant Book
by Leo McMarley – 6th September 2009
“I read this book in its paper version as soon as I could because I had a feeling it would be something special. And it is. But nothing was going to stop me buying the Bunny Munro App which I had been hearing rumours about for the last month. And it delivers big time.”

Absolutely Fantastic
by dpeace – 6th September 2009
“Superb idea, well-executed. Videos, Cave reading the book with musical accompaniment, RSS-style updates of planned live dates…”

This App is available worldwide, so if the above link doesn’t work for you (it should), just search for “Bunny Munro”.

The Bunny Munro app is currently in review at Apple. We had hoped to clear the process before yesterday’s iTunes podcast and audiobook went live, and before the Guardian ran a piece about Enhanced iPhone books, but haven’t quite made it.

Still, the book officially comes out on September 9th in the UK, and we’re talking to a lot of people at Apple, all of whom are being really helpful, and hope to resolve this really soon.

More info as soon as we have it.

Podcast of Nick reading from Bunny Munro at the iTunes festival
Audiobook version of Bunny Munro
Guardian piece

The original manuscript of The Death of Bunny Munro, marked up for audiobook comments

Producing and sound-directing the audio project for The Death of Bunny Munro has been an epic and intense trip. We’ve never done anything like this before, and doubt we ever will again! We’re artists. We make stuff – films and installations, and over the past few years we’ve been having a ball making videos and films with Nick and the Bad Seeds. And that’s how this started – with filming.

Nick asked us to shoot a series of short video clips of him reading excerpts from the book. We placed him seated in front of the camera, and behind him was a screen onto which we back-projected images that in some way related to the passage being read.

Nick Cave during recordings for the video readings from The Death of Bunny Munro

Once we’d edited these Nick suggested adding some music and Warren provided us with a selection of music that they’d produced together. These were in various states, from complete passages of finished music to more random sounds, noises and Warren’s now-famous ‘loops’ that have played such an important part in recordings by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Grinderman. We scanned through everything and selected material that we thought worked well with the readings and assembled the video clips that can now be seen on the Bunny web site and have been included with the DVD and this iPhone app of the audiobook.

From the previous projects we’ve worked on with Nick we now felt that we had a good sense of how he would work best in front of the camera. Most excerpts were read only once and, like much of our own artwork, were shot in a single take. The imagery you see in the video was there, live in the room – nothing was added in post-production other than the music. We hadn’t finished reading the book at this point so it was revealing to see how Nick presented certain characters, the vocal inflections and hand gestures that began to enhance the mental picture we were already developing of the characters. Between readings Nick was still frantically editing the manuscript and the process of reading out loud seemed to be having an effect on Nick’s perception of his writing; it certainly was on ours.

Nick and Warren both liked how we’d selected and used the music in the video clips, and a few weeks later asked us to produce the audiobook for Bunny. We knew we had to create a extraordinary listening experience, something that could truly convey something of the vivid trip we’d experienced reading the book, and listening to Nick reading those few short excerpts for the videos. We almost always work with film and video, so the most immediate challenge for us was working without pictures. Warren dug deeper into The Vaults and delivered an incredible library for us to work from – again everything from very complete and finished pieces of music through to strange and experimental sounds, loops, whirs and noises, different layers and textures for us to work with and play with. Incredible stuff. It literally felt like being allowed to poke into Nick and Warren’s minds, and it felt for a split second as if we might have caught a glimpse into their working processes.

The recording of Nick actually reading the book had already been made, so that was given to us basically done. But we also knew that we wanted to introduce some ‘real world’ sounds into the mix. The idea of these was to interrupt and disturb the listening experience, so it was vital to us that they didn’t become predictable. Often clearly described sounds would go unsoundtracked, others would be pronounced even if subtle in the text, some just buried in the mix. These came from a combination of foley library recordings and actual field recordings we went out and made. Understanding that the book was set around identifiable locations in Brighton we had considered trying to hire a canary yellow Fiat Punto and attempting to follow Bunny’s journey, armed with a microphone. Wish we’d had the time, but we didn’t.

The text is incredibly vivid and without doubt we’d begun to construct a mental image of Bunny’s world from our first reading, so we began by sharing those images with each other, and developing a kind of shared non-existent movie. We even selected an imaginary cast for this non-existent movie to help us share our visual understanding of this world and the characters that inhabit it. Working with a film score seemed to us to be the closest relative of what we were trying to do, so we began to try to think in those terms. We identified themes for key characters, for example, or particular types of sounds and instruments that would relate to particular emotions or events, such as Bunny Junior turning to his encyclopedia. But clocking in at over eight hours the soundtrack analogy only really goes so far. The finished result is really something else altogether. Something between a film soundtrack, a radio play and an hallucination.

One area of sound we have previously explored in our own work is Ambisonics. Essentially this is a series of techniques for the recording and playback of sound that exists on multiple channels that can then be presented back in a multi-dimensional soundfield. More simply, it can be thought of as ‘3D sound’. We first worked with Ambisonics in 2006 when we produced a work called Silent Sound for A Foundation during the Liverpool Biennial. It began as a live performance with an original score by Jason Pierce (Spiritualized) and was highly visual, but the gallery-based installation that opened the next day centred on a pitch-black listening chamber, designed to focus your mind on the sound. This immersive technology essentially played back sound in a true three-dimensional space using a 12-speaker array. So visitors to the gallery would sit in a space measuring less than twenty feet wide and hear the sound almost exactly as it was heard by those attending the live performance, which took place in an 85 feet wide classical concert hall. We later recreated the same installation at Art Basel in Miami inside a shipping container on the beach little more than 8 feet wide.

The team that made all this technically possible was the remarkable acousticians who we’ve come to know and love at Arup in New York. Principally an engineering company, their acoustics department focuses on the acoustics of buildings, with projects ranging from creating some of the world’s finest concert halls to reducing the impact of airport noise. But like all good people they have a rebellious streak, and undertake projects with artists that take them to places their core business simply wouldn’t. We immediately felt a connection with these guys, not least because they shared our passion and commitment to constantly pushing things, trying to look beyond the edges. We also over time and whiskey unearthed a shared past; during our teenage years we’d attended many of the same London gigs as Raj, who heads the team (although based in New York he grew up in the UK). Another story, for another time… But should you ever meet him, don’t get him started on Bauhaus unless you have an awful lot of time to spare.

We’re used to working with museums and art galleries. Bureaucracies. Red tape. Health and Safety. Yet every time we work with Raj and his team we only ever talk about how something can be achieved, never if it can be. They have a unique and creative approach to solving even the most pedestrian of problems. We’ve got to know the team pretty well and have worked with them several times since Silent Sound, including Radio Mania, a big project we did recently for the BFI with multiple screens of 3D video and full Ambisonic sound. As soon as we began talking about working on Bunny we just knew we had to get them involved. We had an initial meeting with Raj and he immediately shared our excitement and saw the same potential to take this into radically new direction if we were to produce the audiobook in full 3D sound. Ambisonics requires precise control over the playback equipment so it’s not really a practical solution for something being widely released to the public, but by using similar techniques and creating a binaural mix a similar effect could be created for listeners using headphones.

So – after completing work on the stereo mixes of the complete audiobook we began work on a process known as “spatialisation”. The whole team at Arup got involved, but the project was very much led by Terence Caulkins, who was assisted by Anne Guthrie. We went back through the eight hours of stereo mixes that we’d produced and began to make what we imaginatively called “spatialisation notes”, essentially a script that stage directed the three-dimensional space for the sounds to be placed in.

Example notes supplied by Iain and Jane to Arup

We took a wide-ranging approach to this; directions would range from the literal and obvious (seagulls would be heard high above your head) to the more emotional (a piece of music suggesting fear might be placed so that it begins in the pit of your stomach and rises to your mouth over the course of a passage) or completely esoteric (the horned killer ‘theme’ creeping up behind you like a Scooby-doo villain). These notes would be sent over to Terence and the team along with the multitrack parts from our original mixes. They would then begin work on spatialising each chapter. It was an epic task that culminated in a solid month of heavily timetabled work on both sides of the Atlantic. With the New York/London time difference we would usually have a conference call around 9pm (GMT) that would allow us all to agree on a plan for a particular chapter. We’d then wake up the next morning to find new mixes waiting for us to listen to and feed back on. We’d review, type up comments, requests, suggestions and fire it all back to New York, ready for our next conference call. The Arup team would review and provide their feedback in the same timeframe. And together we slowly wound a path through each chapter, almost chronologically.

It was an intense journey. But an incredible one. And almost certainly something we’ll never experience again. Within a few days of the spatialised mixes being finished and approved they’d been mastered by Will at Sterling Sound in New York and we had in our hands the masters that would make up the CD/DVD edition, iTunes/Audible download and iPhone app edition of the book. Job done. Looking back, our only regret is that we didn’t get to take a ride in that canary yellow Fiat Punto. Maybe we’ll hire one anyway, and cruise the streets of Brighton listening to The Death of Bunny Munro.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, August 2009