Within this learning report I will be answering how interactivity can shape narrative, as well as giving a quick summary into the research and idea generation throughout this brief.
When used correctly interactive storytelling can greatly help shape the narrative of your story, firstly because it helps the reader feel like they are living the story by making them interact with the characters and environment to progress through the tale. A good thing about an interactive book is that it allows the creators to add hidden elements to the story, an example of this would be clicking on a specific character on a specific page and causes an action that isn't needed to progress in the story but will allow the reader to explore the book looking for different aspects to interact with and helping them become more engrossed with the story.
Having a interactive eBook also allows the creator to use animation as well as words to help shape the narrative which can be a good tool for portraying a characters personality and emotions throughout the story. By combing interactive animation with words it also helps the reader become more attached to the characters and their story.
For our eBook I feel it is important to use a range of interactive elements to not stop the process from becoming repetitive as the viewer may become bored if they just have to keep clicking the page to progress through animation and scenes, were as if they have to click different objects as well as dragging or shaking them it will hold their interest for longer and make them feel more involved in the story.
Another way Interactivity can strengthen the story is sound effects, by having sound effects the Writer can set the mood of the scene more effectively, this can also be used for dialogue which would be a powerful way to show the emotion you are trying to portray through a character by how the voice actor says their lines.
In my opinion interactive eBooks are combining the interactivity of video games with the narrative style of books, i would define the the difference between video games and eBooks to be that in eBooks the interactions you make dont change the story were as in even the simplest game you will be reset to the last checkpoint if you don't interact correctly. Now if that line was crossed and you had a story were your interactivity gave the reader the ability to chose paths that actually changed the narrative to make the story different every time they read it this would force them to feel a lot more involved in the story.
One problem i found while looking into other eBooks is that apart from short trailers and a few screen shots it is hard to see much of the eBooks without buying them, this made it quite hard to do much in depth research into them.
While looking at other fairytale based interactive eBooks I realised that the animation can be quite crude, for example you could get the same if not a better effect by having a character rock from left to right while sliding across the page instead of having them walking across the page with a walk cycle and by doing this it could also save time on the animating.
I realised after looking at a few different eBooks that the treatment and media used to create the eBook is very important for setting the atmosphere through the story, we decided that we would have quite a positive atmosphere to encourage young children to read it without being scared.
One eBook I found influential was 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' even though it has a very different theme to ours i found the digitally hand painted backgrounds and still images used to tell the story very powerful, this helped influence the backgrounds to be hand painted instead of been photography or digital even though we haven't used the same media to create them it got me thinking about how the background could influence the mood of the eBook and helped me decide that a water color background would allow us to give it quite a happy atmosphere. In this eBook most of if not all of the animation is still images been moves strategically to give the best effect. Even though for some of the scenes in our story we have still used frame by frame animation I have tried incorporating this style in were possible and effective to save time and give a variation in the animation.
As a group we decided early on in the brief that we would create a Interactive narrative, I personally liked the idea of been able to combine a written narrative with animation. We decided it would have to be quite a short story so we wasn't aiming too high for our first eBook production and could focus more on the quality other than the quantity of work done, because of this, we started to look at different short fairy tales to base our story around. Eventually we narrowed our search down to three stories that we felt were rich in narrative, 'Snake Prince','The Three Dogs' and 'Pretty Little Calf'. We decided to go with 'The three Dogs' after looking into more into them as their is a few variations of the story which helped us come up with different ideas while adapting the storyline to make it our own.
For our target market we decided because our story is a fairy tale it would be more appropriate to aim at children which aloud us to use quite a cartoon based style but also meant that we would have to make it easy to use as well as have quite a lot of interactivity.
We decided that the best way to share out the workload would be for one of us to do the human characters one of us to do the dogs and one of us to do the sheep and dragon so that their would be consistency for each character type e.g. all dogs are drawn the same, all humans are drawn the same.
While developing the dogs I used their roles within the story to help me craft their personality and tried to show that through their size and features, I also chose their fur color to be Gray, brown and yellow to resemble their names (Salt,Pepper and Mustard) which was the same in all the variations of the fairy tale so I felt should be kept the same to credit the original story.
When designing the wedding, house and throne room door backgrounds I looked at various images of the scenes to help me select key features for each background that would make it self explanatory to anyone that looks at it.
I was also tasked with finding a way to show time passing, I decided to use snowflakes falling down the screen on a cycle which i created on Photoshop from snowflakes i discovered over the Christmas holidays. i chose to use snowflakes because the rest of the story looks to be set in the summer so by showing other seasons it shows a huge passage of time.
If we had more time to perfect the eBook I would of liked to add a lot more interaction to the story as I would of liked to have hidden elements to the animation that the reader would be able to explore after finishing the story allowing them to reread the story several times and still find new features.
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