Today I am talking with Rares and Anamaria, from New Mindflow, authors of the beautiful Where’s Paradise, another app made with Kwik. As you are going to see below, I really think this documentary can open your eyes for what we think paradise is. Anyways, enjoy!
Alex) Tell a little bit about you and your company
We’re a team of two film-makers/photographers, Rares Kovesdi and Anamaria Chioveanu. After graduating from film school in 2008 we discovered mobile apps as a potentially great medium to distribute our work and explore new possibilities for storytelling and new audiences. It presented itself as a good opportunity to create and distribute our work outside the conventions of the established system and it allows us to be a lot more independent and focus on the creative part, rather than the bureaucracy of getting a project funded, something that young film-makers often have to face.
Currently, our company, New Mindflow is made up of just the two of us.
We started New Mindflow in 2009 with the idea of exploring games as a new medium to tell our stories and engage our audience in a way that isn’t yet possible with films. After almost two and half years in which our high standards conflicted with our limited budget and the high costs of producing a great game, in October 2011 the company was re-established to give commercial life to some of our artistic projects.
What is Where’s Paradise about?
The Where’s Paradise? series puts side by side the western idea of paradise that conjures images of small tropical islands with white sandy beaches and coconut groves and the actual lives of the actual people that live in these often remote places. The first episode focuses on the island of Nusa Lembongan, 20km SE of Bali.
We like to think of the app as a new kind of a book; a new medium for presenting a film; a new means of exhibiting photos and a new way of experiencing an artistic inquiry.
To find out more about Where’s Paradise? the project and the app head over to our website www.newmindflow.com.
How did Kwik help you to build it? Any favorite features?
By using Kwik and Corona we were able, with relative ease, to take what otherwise would have been just a collection of a film, photos, text and designs and make them into a responsive and stable iPad app.
Any trick/tip you would like to share?
Some advice that we learned as artists:
- Ask yourself if you can do better and if you can, do it.
- Focus on the content rather than the technology or methodology, even though both can be overwhelming at first.
- Particularly if you’re an independent developer/artist, be honest with yourself when evaluating and choosing your projects, you’ll feel a lot better working on and releasing great stuff.
- A small team is not an excuse for putting out junk.
What is your overall experience with us (product and services)?
Kwik is very fast and easy to work with and we haven’t encountered any major problems while developing our app with it. Preparing the content and designing the app took almost a year, building the app with Kwik took less than two weeks.
In addition, Alex has been really helpful and quick, both in answering our questions and in implementing new and useful features (sometimes we wonder if he ever sleeps).
What is next for you and your company?
For now, New Mindflow will be focusing on bringing to market some of our film and photography projects. This, however, doesn’t mean that we’ve abandoned our desire to make great games, and we still have some game projects in development. For more details see the Projects section of our website www.newmindflow.com/projects/.
Rares and Anamaria, thanks again for spending your time with me (yes, I sleep more than I should 
) and the users. Hope to talk to you again soon (how knows a meeting in Nusa Lembongan – yes, to leave in an island it is still my dream).