Thesis Outline
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008Here’s the thesis outline I will turn in:
Personal Statement
A writer and web designer by trade, I have recently fallen in love with animation. I discovered the medium during my current master’s studies at NYU.
I find animation to be a direct and literal way to communicate an idea or tell a story – with absolute freedom of both subject matter and style. With today’s powerful and straightforward animation technology, an artist can create a whole world before lunch.
First on paper, and more recently on the computer, I have always created whimsical worlds with a dark undercurrent. Now I am starting to liberate those static images from the page and express them in full motion and sound.
Context, Inspiration
From the moment I discovered I could create an animation for my thesis, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. But what kind of animation would really challenge me? Further, what kind of animation is interactive?
At first, I toyed with the idea of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-type branching narrative. I gave the idea a whirl and was disappointed with the results. I learned from this experiment that I like telling a story from beginning to end.
Next, I thought I’d like to tell a children’s story using not only text, but sound, illustration, animation, and possibly gameplay. At first, I didn’t know how I would incorporate the other media into the text.
I read about The Book of Lulu in a book I read for class, Dust or Magic by Bob Hughes. Hughes spoke so glowingly of this work that I hunted it down and bought it.
The Book of Lulu is a CD-ROM published in 1995, at the heyday of the hypertext and CD-ROM era. The story, written by a Frenchman named Romain Victor-Pujebet, is about a lonely little princess who teaches a space-traveling robot to feel human warmth. It’s presented to us as an open book with text and interactive portions.
Neither the story – a knockoff of children’s classic The Little Prince – nor its presentation – an open book with interactive portions – was original. The Book of Lulu blows people out of the water because it integrates these narrative elements so effortlessly. It was the template for The Book of Lulu, not its content, that inspired me.
Specifically, this CD-ROM confines its interactivity to its images, the places that correspond to illustrations in a printed book. Every picture is different, and not every picture is responsive. Sometimes clicking changes the picture right on the page of the book; other times it launches a whole new window.
In one of the pictures, your cursor becomes a butterfly and clicking anywhere on the princess’s castle changes the season. In another, the cursor becomes a fly. When you land on the cat, he meows in protest, and when you click on the statue, a marble horse appears and rears up on hind legs.
Your cursor does not indicate hot spots, so you just have to click around until you discover all of the scene’s possibilities. Sometimes there are clues in the text or in the image itself.
I need to investigate whether The Book of Lulu was the first (or indeed only) title to approach interactivity this way.
Method
There’s a story I’d really like to tell. I wrote it down and lost it years ago. My first step will be to write down the story that will become the text portion of my interactive book.
I’ve animated in Flash before, but I don’t have the chops to create the work I’ve envisioned. I’ll have to sit down with a book or a Flash expert to find out how to go about creating my interactive book.
I want to create a working version of my piece early on so I can continue to refine and polish its presentation. To date, my animations have been more explanations than finished pieces. I want this one to be deliberate and finessed.
I also want to leave myself enough time to test my storybook with both children and adults, and change it accordingly.
Partial Bibliography
My bibliography currently includes:
- The Book of Lulu by Romain Victor-Pujebet
- American Girl CD-ROMs: Felicity, Samantha, Molly…
- Dust or Magic by Bob Hughes
- Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins
- “Reframing Research and Literacy Pedagogy Relating to CD Narratives: Addressing ‘Radical Change’ in Digital Age Literature for Children” by Len Usworth
- “Click and Turn the Page: An Exploration of Multiple Storybook Literacy” by Cynthia R. Smith
- “Don’t Press That Button” by Matthew J. Costello
- “Hypertext and the Changing Roles of Readers” by Nancy G. Patterson
- “Children’s Media Culture in the New Millenium: Mapping the Digital Landscape” by Kathryn C. Montgomery