Character Sketch of the Book:
This two-in-one flip book "Pell-mell" and "Lull" is part exploration into, part critique of, the increasing pace of modern life in terms of it's effects on our physical and mental health. It is not supposed to be anything terribly profound and hopefully it doesn't come across as being preachy – we can't, after all, avoid modern life and sit at home all day drinking tea – its purpose is maybe simply to bring an awareness to our own personal speed.
Animation (of imagery, text and other page elements) is used to address and play with these themes. This presents the flipper/reader with a couple of options as to how they can explore the book, which, in turn relates back to the theme – will the reader quickly flip though the pages, get a gist of what's going on and leave it at that, or will they take the time to actually open it up and read the text word for word?
The theme and how the book functions more or less informed the page layouts. After much testing it was decided that the images worked best on the outside edge of the page and the text (to encourage the reader to open and read it) is placed further inside. Sizing was also an issue that was determined primarily by the functionality, although it is larger than most flip books (because of the text) it is still a manageable size to hold in your hands, get a good grip of and flip through.
There are two texts within the book. The first, for Pell-mell (the fast book), is a short story written by myself about a character who lives life in a perpetual state of fast-forward and although I'm not entirely confident in my creative writing abilities, it was a fun exercise. For the second book, Lull, I decided to use an article from CNN that discusses the benefits of living a slower life. The animations that accompany these texts enhance the opposing messages of busyness and leisure, including the addition of clocks (instead of page numbers) which progress at different speeds depending on which story they accompany.
In terms of colour I wanted to choose two hues that were somewhat clashing to match the constrasting opinions in the texts, which I think the light blue and bright red do without being too jarring. I also limited colour usage within the page layouts, so as not to distract from all the movement, and decided instead to make a large colour impact on the cover.
Evolution of the Project:
This project has gone through many revisions, redoes and backtracks, especially when it comes to the text – originally it was static and there were page numbers!? Colour at the beginning was also non-existent, but I felt it needed just a little bit, both to highlight or call attention to certain lines or words of importance, and also just to give it greater visual appeal. The cover design, which for me was the hardest part – how do you sum up an entire project within such a small space?! – has also gone through at least three major revisions starting out as purely typographic, to text plus simple (line) imagery, to the final inclusion of the characters plus type – which I think makes most sense as it speaks more to what the book is all about and gives the reader a more accurate sense of the playfulness within the pages, plus visually I think it is more interesting.
In addition I scaled back on the random use of red type and decided to give the red words a purpose for their existence - subtext. So now instead of jumping around all over the place, the red words remain the same as the text scrolls up the page, but if you read them together they form a kind of bizarre nonsensical sub-story which again ties into the whole play on speed and taking the time to read vs. just skimming the surface.
I also decided to add some margins for the text instead of having it run right off the page because I prefer the way this looks and this also eliminates the weird lines that were appearing on the edges of the book.
Here are some sample pages from both books:
Making Choices:
I think the two most important choices I made for this book were the size and layout because they are really the main factors when it comes to how someone will experience the content. However, as I said previously, these decisions were more or less fairly straightforward, though I was considering initially producing the book at a much smaller size (half of what it is now). I decided not to make the small size in order to separate this flip book from the majority of other books in that genre and also to allow me more freedom when it comes to the text.
Compromises:
I definitely would have liked more time to experiment further with different typefaces and styles of the text. I feel like I didn't delve deep enough into that and instead was focused on drawing out all those frames for the animations – gah!
Also, if I had an unlimited budget for this I wouldn't mind getting some professional to produced my book box with a printed cover – which is something I've had trouble with when it comes to covering.
Pleasures and Frustrations:
Without a doubt, the most frustrating part of this project was laying it all out in InDesign mostly because there's no real way to preview the animation (I made do with rapidly hitting the down arrow key) aaand, if there were any changes to be made to the text, which inevitable there were (a lot of) those changes usually had to be made on all 66 pages... and that's even with using character and paragraph styles in InDesign.
Pleasures were definitely finishing those frames and seeing the animations printed and moving on paper for the first time – "ha it actually worked!" It was also nice to have extra (strike) time to work on this project, I tried to make as best use of it as possible, though it was hard not to have a critique for so long, but it allowed me to experiment and test things out more than I would have if class had proceeded normally.
In general I really enjoyed learning the more hands-on stuff like binding, box making, sewing and so on, because we don't get to experience the physical act of making as much – we're usually on the computer – but it's really satisfying to craft something by hand. And of course, the Coachhouse/Book Sale trip was lots of fun.
