Week 6: An eBook/App/Interactive Experience

When I read this week’s blogging prompt I immediately thought of a project I was involved with during the last two semesters of my undergraduate degree and the summer following. Two friends of a friend were working on a graphic novel, using photographs rather than drawings for the graphics, and needed real people to pose as the characters. I was cast as one of the characters and we shot the first two chapters of The Weekend Wars, quite sporadically, over the next two years. Originally, Ryan and Dylan, the creators, imagined a conventional graphic novel form, a physical book with printed pages. As the project evolved they realized it would be easier and less expensive to self-publish an eBook with their considerable combined tech skills, and once they changed to an online platform the possibilities for a graphic novel really opened up, and they actually ended up creating an interactive app. The final product involves sound and movement on each page or panel, from small touches within the story, like steam rising out of a hot cup of coffee, to larger and more surprising movements barely contained onscreen, like a plane taking off across the screen, sound included.  

In their chapter from this week’s reading list, Stoicheff and Taylor speak of aural acts and acts of looking as part of reading, referring to these as part of reading’s “multimedial” quality (48), and my example makes these acts much more explicit. Some pages or panels have sound effects, as previously described, while others feature music, scoring a scene like a movie, adding emotional cues. The app also brings in other media, like messages that pop up looking and acting like text message bubbles in the middle of the story, interrupting a character’s thought process and the reader’s progress through the narrative just like the sudden distraction of an actual text message. Graphic novels in their more static, print form can challenge the conception of reading and the page, making Stoicheff and Taylor’s “acts of looking” even more explicit, and this example also brings movement into the equation.

While there is still a linear plot and story, and even a forward swiping similar to turning pages, there is also the idea that, in sudden movement and interactivity, the story is a little bit unpredictable, and out of the reader’s hands. Indeed, Stoicheff and Taylor also talk about this idea of a pathway in reading interfaces, an awareness of moving through space (60), and one of the interesting aspects of my example is that while some of the movement on the pages is within the narrative, like the motion of driving, some takes the reader outside of the story and reminds them of the eBook, like handwriting scrawled over images and text.

While The Weekend Wars app is by no means perfect, and a few years out its creators themselves have spoken of changes or regrets, it is an interesting prototype of the way that eBooks might play with format and move away from the so-called restrictions of the page, making the experience more multimedial while still including elements of book-like narrative and navigation.

I don't think screenshots can accurately capture the innovation of these pages, so if you want to see the eBook in action, as well as hear about the idea for its design, check out the first 30 seconds or so of this video (scroll down this page a bit): http://theweekendwars.ca