Meredith Silverman

After many tinkering attempts, I’m finally happy with my collaborative storytelling wiki.

I have completely massacred notsosimple.css, notsosimple.tmpl, notsosimple.php, config.php and Site.Sidebar — but I’m the only one who will ever have to use this mess.

I’m going to send out the invitations to participate today.

I tinkered with the wireframe and added a couple of two-page, centerfold-style animations.  At first I thought these might interrupt the flow of the story, but I decided that the text looked too dense without them.

Two-page animations create a special problem because each page is a separate Flash file.  It’ll be a challenge to make them work as one seamless scene.

I’ve worked out that I’ll need 18 animations — so I’d better get cracking.  Here’s a list of all the animations I will create.

1. Page 3: full page: Tony remembers the performance

• Tony and Marley on the bike, thinking about Tony and Marley at the circus
• Signs say “Newtown Circus” and ” The Amazing Rigatoni and his Dancing Blue Dog”
• Tony: pulls a rabbit out of a hat, turns it into a lion, makes the lion jump through a flaming hoop
• Marley: spins and dances
• Audience: cheers and throws roses

2. Page 5: 2/3 page: What Hal thought he saw a week ago

• Hal in his truck, thinking about Hal in his truck
• A car passes him with 2 people in bathing suits, waterskiing off the back. Hal rubs his eyes.
• A huge, car-size frog with a ribbon in its mouth jumps across the road and says “ribbons.” Hal’s mouth is agape.
• The Mystery Mobile from Scooby Doo, a headless ghost driving

3. Page 7: full page: Penny remember’s Tony’s performance

• Penny at circus thinking about Tony’s performance – her recollection is the same scene from Tony’s recollection
• Tony: drops a rabbit into a hat, waves his wand, pulls it out, then it hops away and is eaten by the lion
• Marley: attempts a pirouette but falls
• The Bearded Lady and Sword Swallower fume in the background
• Click on the crowd: a kid’s voice says, “Mom, can we go home now?”

4. Page 9: very small animation

• Conjoined triplets hurrying offscreen toward right

5. Page 10 & 11: two-page: Penny and the circus folk

• Outdoor scene shows faraway tent, an elephant chewing hay, trailers, etc. – everyone’s assembled around Penny
• Conjoined triplets in purple dress scurry into scene from left
• Sword Swallower: sneaks a bite of a sword, then swallows the whole thing
• Bearded Lady: gently strokes her beard
• Penny: sighs and produces thought bubble of Tony and Marley on bike
• Tattooed Man, acrobats, lion tamer, a lady dog, a midget… are all there.

6. Page 13: ½ page: Tony vs. Hal part 1

• The moment at which Tony and Marley are about to get hit
• Bike: drifts toward truck and back
• Tony: snores, Rock-a-Bye Baby plays
• Marley: barks urgently
• Hal: watches motorcycle in fear, says “it can’t be! when clicked
• Hal’s horn: honkable

7. Page 15: 1/3 page: the flower truck

• Truck drives offscreen to the right, spewing dirt and flowers on road

8. Pages 16 & 17: two-page: Tony vs. Hal part 2

• Tony and Marley confront Hal, the motorcycle up ahead and the truck behind them
• Hal: rubs his eyes and says “not real, not real, they’re not real”
• Tony: puts hands on hips and says, “that’s no way to treat people.”
• Marley: barks and runs around Tony in a circle
• Truck: makes idling engine noise
• Motorcycle: flowers fall off

9. Page 20: 2/3 page: the speech in the dark

• The whole screen is pitch black except for the whites of eyes – you can make out a speaker on stage and a crowd
• Crowd: jumps up and down and shouts, “freedom, freedom, freedom!”
• Speaker: “Join with me: fleedom, fleedom, fleedom!”

10. Page 23: 2/3 page: the restaurant

• Tony and Lulu are seated at the table with Marley beneath it
• Lulu: smiles, taps her pencil on the table
• Tony: smiles, takes a bite of his Jell-o or sips his coffee
• Marley: licks Tony’s hand
• Door: a customer walks in and says, “Mister, your dog smells terrible!”
• Salt and pepper: Tony knocks them over

11. Page 25: ½ page: the protest

• Crowd sound in background
• Eyes in the darkness jump up and down
• Placards with writing on them: when you click them, they get yelled out loud

12. Page 27: full page: the cardboard box

• Tony and Marley standing in front of the open truck door and the box
• Tony: picks up the box and shakes it
• Marley: sniffs the box
• Box: jumps or tips a little when clicked

13. Page 29: ½ page: the last leg

• View through the windshield from Tony and Marley’s POV – scenery going by
• Radio: plays a short clip of music – or a few
• Air freshener: goes “sniff sniff aaaaah.”
• Tony: scratches
• Marley: scratches

14. Page 31: full page: the fleas’ new life

• TK

15. Pages 34 & 35: Tony and Penny reunited

• Tony and Penny on the circus grounds, the truck cab open, Marley sitting in the driver’s seat
• Tony: hugs Penny
• Penny: laughs and smiles
• Marley: jumps out, sits next to Tony and scratches
• Truck: honks?

16. Page 37: ¾ page: Martha and Hal’s flower shop

• Hal: hands someone a bouquet, sneezes, smiles
• Martha: holds Hal’s hand
• Door: opens and a bell jingles
• Open sign: turns to closed and sky outside gets dark

17. Page 39: flea removal

• Tony and Penny sitting on the floor of the bathroom, Marley in the bath w/ bubbles on his head
• Tony: touches Penny’s hand
• Penny: adds a little more water
• Marley: pants happily, shakes off bubbles

18. Pages 40 & 41: two-page: ending

• We’re inside a circus tent. Tony and Marley are dressed up in clown costumes. Tony trips and makes mistakes but it doesn’t matter because that’s what clowns are supposed to do. The audience – with Penny in it — claps wildly.
• A flea jumps across the words “The End.”

I found another version of the page-flip application that is simpler to edit. I used it to lay out my text and space for animations here. It was an easy step, but it makes the goal seem a lot more feasible!

The wireframe gives me a better idea of how big the animations will be, so I can continue to draw my assets accordingly.

We were asked to pick a site, describe what it does, some dilemmas it faces, and how it addresses them.  Then we were asked to think about one thing that, if changed, would make the site either better or worse.

——————————————————–

The N is a TV network for teens, under the Nickelodeon/MTV umbrella.  I work for its website (www.The-N.com), where viewers can watch shows they’ve missed and discuss those they’ve seen.  The site has a broader appeal too: it includes gaming, social networking, articles, and other media.

The site’s major goals are to get current viewers more involved in the programming, to attract new viewers, and to grow an audience of dedicated site users, whether they actually watch the TV channel or not.

Dilemma 1: Core Message vs. Broad Appeal
The first dilemma The-N.com faces is how to present a relatively narrow message to a broad audience. Aside from video and chat about the shows, what activities should be included or excluded, enabled or forbidden?

How do you stay on-message while allowing user involvement?  For instance, should users be encouraged to discuss shows that no longer air on The N?  What about shows on other Viacom-owned channels, or other networks altogether?  Where do you draw the line?

The N has approached this dilemma by offering features that are popular with their demographic on other sites.  That has resulted in a hodge-podge of features from fan fiction to fashion articles.

It also means the site is constantly playing catch-up with other sites.  In fact, it’s competing with an unlimited number of other sites, each of which might do only one thing well.

Dilemma 2: Safe vs. Sterile
The second major dilemma faced by The-N.com is keeping its users safe while facilitating interesting communication.

The site positions itself as a safe online destination for people under the age of 18, and it is.  All user-posted images and all message board posts are moderated.  It’s forbidden to post outside links, identifying information, email addresses or messaging screennames.

Personal messages are not monitored unless a specific user is reported.  “Real-time” chat in several applications goes through a smut filter, and full-time moderators are on the lookout for abuses.

The punishment for abuse is temporary suspension, followed by deletion of accounts and blocked IP addresses.  The-N.com runs a tight ship.

However, all this safety comes at an expense.  The-N.com’s forums are dull.  A certain amount of self-censoring seems to be taking place.  The conversations on The-N.com’s message boards are reminiscent the kind of fun that kids have when an adult is in the room.  The users have a sense that they’re being monitored.

Removal of Consequences
I like to imagine what would happen to this site if everyone who works there got up and walked away from our desks for a few months.  How long would it take for the users to notice that the consequences for misbehavior had been removed?  How would the site change?

Example 1: Less Moderation
One of our competitor sites, gaiaonline.com, offers similar activities to The-N.com, but with less moderation.  Images and links are allowed.  There’s staff presence, but no moderator presence – you don’t feel watched on Gaia like you do on The N.

One day on Gaia, I witnessed a user getting flamed in a chat room.  “DON’T TALK TO GOLFGUY97,” one user warned the others.  “HE’S A PERVERT.”  The user in question left that chatroom and immediately went into another, where I found him chatting up someone new.

In the short term, users can flout the rules.  But their victims can report violations, and the consequences for breaking the rules is still the same: removal from the site.  Users are empowered to look after themselves, but when all else fails, a system of consequences can be brought to bear.

Another consequence of the removal of pre-filtering is that message board posts go up immediately.  Threads frequently get up to the millions of replies.  Often they’re insipid, but sometimes a sense of experimentation leads to new ideas and activities.

User-planned activities abound on Gaia.  One of the reasons for this is the existence of an economy.  Users can hold contests, announce them on message boards, and give out rewards – currency or items earned on the site through hours of gameplay and chat (or by purchasing them with a credit card).  This behavior is totally emergent and completely addictive to both entrant and judge.

The equilibrium on Gaia between user-freedom and site control has led to an atmosphere of cooperation and experimentation.

Example 2: De Facto Moderation
For an assignment earlier this semester, I explored a site called gnomz.com.  That site started out as a French-language tool to allow users to create their own comic strips, and read and vote on other people’s creations.  The site asks its users not to post explicit or inappropriate content.

At some point, it must have become obvious that there were no consequences whatsoever for violating the rules set forth by gnomz.com (or at least, for violating them in English). English-speakers with a love for potty humor have taken over the site.

For my assignment, I posted two comic strips at around midnight.  The first one got commented within the hour – in fact, I got slammed for spelling “Princess Leia” the incorrect traditional way, “Leah.”  On further exploration, I discovered that the same commenter, grouchobeer, was all over the site.  He haunts the message boards – in one case asking a too-savvy newbie who he really was.  Grouchobeer’s avatar’s shirt defiantly reads “fuck.”

I was amazed to discover that one or two heavy users have taken over the English-speaking component of an entire site.  They have taken the helm, leaving comments on most new posts and filling the message boards with vitriol.  They set the tone for current users and quickly get new users into line – but the new line is grouchobeer’s.

Gnomz.com is a site with, effectively, no moderation.  It is self-policing – but it’s not a friendly atmosphere, and it has gone completely off-message.

Conclusion
So, what would happen if The-N.com relaxed or removed its moderation?  It would probably be less safe, but more exciting.  It would be self-policing – because it would have to be.

I’ll bet the first thing they would do would be to stop talking about TV.

In my job, I’ve run across one type of collective storytelling: role-playing games. I work for a TV network’s website — and our users love to use the message boards as a public place for collective storytelling.

For fan fiction, or what the users are calling role-playing, the key is to establish the characters first. One way to do this is to invite participants to create characters, complete with a bio and a picture, for anyone to read before they read the story or contribute. The other way to establish characters is to piggy-back off knowledge that everyone at the site has. On my site at work, that means characters from the shows aired by the TV network.

I think it would be fun to harness the characters everyone knows about — celebrities, as themselves. What I’d love to do (although I don’t have the programming chops) would be to call it “Five Celebs Stuck in an Elevator.” You pick 5 celebs from a list, and then you write a story about what happens when they get stuck in an enclosed space, and how they eventually get out (or perhaps don’t). In my imagination, their lines come out of their lil celebrity heads like speech bubbles, like so:

Elevator Pitch
I’m creating an animated storybook for older kids and adults. It’s about a circus performer, his dog, and the coincidental encounters they have on their way back to the circus.

Sample Page

Hal the truck driver was crossing the country, from Texas all the way to the East Coast. “All I need is my truck and the open road,” he said to the air freshener dangling from his rear-view mirror.

But he didn’t know if he believed that anymore. The stress of the job was starting to get to him. He was getting older, and his eyes weren’t what they used to be. A week ago, he thought he saw – no, he didn’t even want to think about that again. Could he be going nuts out here, all alone on the open road?

But driving a truck was the only thing Hal knew how to do. His only alternative was to go home to Martha and finally help her open that flower shop she’d always wanted. He had been telling her for years, “one last trip across the country and I’ll have enough saved up. Then you can have your flower shop.”

Maybe he really would retire after this trip and help Martha sell her flowers. Ha – that would be the day.

[Animation: What Hal thought he saw a week ago

• Hal in his truck, thinking about Hal in his truck
• A car passes him with 2 people in bathing suits, waterskiing off the back. Hal rubs his eyes.
• A huge, car-size frog with a ribbon in its mouth jumps across the road and says “ribbons.” Hal’s mouth is agape.
• The Mystery Mobile from Scooby Doo, a headless ghost driving]

Page Turn Mechanism

Free software called Pageflip: http://itp.nyu.edu/~ms1980/pageflip.swf.

Character Sketches

Influences

• the story: Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
• the format: The Book of Lulu by Romain Victor-Pujebet

Here’s a short segment of The Book of Lulu, as I experienced it.

How do you know the birthday girl?

Their responses here.

I’m working toward developing my outline into final text for my story.  This is (or is pretty close to) the final copy, divided up into pages, along with some preliminary thoughts on the animations.

Click me to download .doc.

Pageflip is a plug-and-play Flash movie that helps you create a multi-page book.  Perfect for my thesis project!

I downloaded it and checked out the .fla — and it’s completely, intimidatingly mystifying. I will master it, though, since I’m pretty sure this will be the backbone of my thesis’s layout.

You can play with it here.

I’ve been doing my research, and learning what I like and don’t like. Here’s what I’ve got to report on today’s animated storybooks.

• In most animated storybooks, you can choose between being read to, or being able to interact and play along. For my purposes, I always chose “play along.”
• Most have 10-15 background images (~800px x 600px), or pages, with text, characters, and animations laid over them.
• The words highlight, a word or a phrase at a time, as they’re read to you out loud.
• There’s some way for you to go from page to page, some methods more obvious than others.
• Animation happens at different times in the process:
  • While the text is being read
  • After the text has been read
  • Triggered by you when you click on items around the screen
  • Triggered when you click the “next” button, before exiting the current page (I’ll call these user-triggered or user-activated animations; they’re the ones that interest me most.)
  • Between pages as the next background image loads
  • In many of these, if simply left alone, the image animates slightly and may have some background music or ambient sound.
• The cursor is usually a specific item: a bee in Winnie the Pooh, a leaf in Pocahontas, a dog pawprint in 101 Dalmatians.

Disney Animated Storybooks

Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree

• The interactions are cute, but not always integral to the story – for instance, when you click on the teapot on the shelf, it dances and plays a whistling tune.
• Animations don’t follow the laws of physics: for example, when you click on a closed cabinet, it opens up, honey jars tumble out, and inexplicably roll away to the left. If you click the cabinet doors again, the animation repeats.
• Mini-games you discover along the way take you further away from the story. The way out of the game and back to the story is not obvious.
• The result is a very disjointed narrative.
• I like: the framed pictures that reveal five or six other pictures in succession when you click them.

Mulan

• More of a computer game than an animated storybook – you’ve got a central map, and you’re completing tasks in along a path toward the end. The story is an organizing principle for a bundle of mini-games.
• The authors assume that you’ve seen the movie. It refers to plot points but does not explain them.
• There are long voice stretches you can’t skip, even if you’ve heard them before.
• This story feels extremely disjointed.

101 Dalmatians

• Three of the dogs in the story take turns narrating. The dog’s face appears next to the text, and it’s read in his/her voice. I like that the text is separate from the background image.
• Clever navigation: each background image has some kind of door on the left of the screen, and one on the right. You move through this story like reading a book, from left to right.
• You also discover musical items that take you to music video type sequences.
• You discover games throughout the story and can exit the narrative to play them.
• There’s also an in-story game where you can help move the action forward by putting soot on the puppies to disguise them.
• Some of the pages are 2-3 screens wide, so you have to scroll to the right to find the door.
• The user-activated animations tend to stay pretty close to the story, so they’re not too distracting even if you click on all of them.

Pocahontas

• The most fully realized animated storybook of the bunch.
• The user-triggered animation is relevant to the story; it gives cultural information or reiterates what has happened in the scene.
• The automatic animations are elegant and lend this story the feel of an animated movie.
• Some of these pages are also two or three screens wide – not sure this would be obvious to kids, but it certainly makes the world seem more expansive and authentic.
• The icon controls at the bottom of the screen are not easy to figure out; little fingers would have a tough time clicking on the very thin back and forward arrows.
• Repeated images: birds flying in the distance, leaves twirling through the air
• Themes that don’t knock you over the head: both the Indians and the English keep calling the other side savages, and both beat drums as a call to war.

Living Books

Arthur’s Reading Race

• Some of the animations are a bit distracting, but the story is coherent. Maybe because it’s a very simple story.
• I liked: that there’s a cat hiding somewhere in each picture, and its role is to annoy Arthur’s dog.

Green Eggs and Ham

• It bothers me that, when you click on characters, they deliver extra dialogue not originally in the book. It reiterates or expounds on what has already been read.
• Sometimes a hotspot covers two characters – and the resulting animation involves them both. It’s confusing when you click on one character and the other starts moving or talking.
• I liked: when the animation interacts with the text – the mouse grabs a “u” from the story and uses it to collect rainwater.

The Cat in the Hat

• Some lines are read, and some are sung.
• Actors read each character’s dialogue; the narrator’s voice is a young child, usually saying stuff like, “…said the cat.”
• There are only about 10 pages – that is, background images, but the text might switch 4 times before the page does.
• I liked: the micro-games that happen inside the page. For instance, in one scene there’s a wastebasket and a ball that you can pick up. If you happen to drop the ball in the wastebasket, it triggers cheers.
• In Living Books, some of the words change to images after they’ve been read. You can click on the image to see and hear the word again.

Stellaluna

• This CD-ROM breaks out of the typical frame — each page is set up a little differently.
• Most pages are automatically animated and just a few contain user-triggered animation.
• User-activated animations are novel: one device is the cameo-type illustration that comes alive to show you what’s going on with a different character in a different place.
• I liked: Stellaluna has some thematic animations that are different every time.  For instance, you learn that when you click a flower bud, it will bloom.  But the way it blooms always surprises you.

Other

Kiyeko and the Lost Night

• Would not play on my machine; I’ll have to find a very old computer.

American Girl: Julie Saves the Eagles

• This is more of a Myst or Sims style game, where you unlock tasks by talking to people and gathering items and clues.
• The animation is very cute
• Frustration ensues when you can’t figure out what to do next.