Well, I started. Interestingly, I started work on my new interactive comic project the same way I began work on The Second Untrue Trilogy, last year: in Vegas, while my wife was attending an educators conference… I had three days where, during conference hours (roughly 8-4), I had almost literally no distractions from my work and nothing else I needed to accomplish and virtually no internet access, and I started from a blank page on a project I expect to take a huge chunk of time and effort. The final aspect of The Second Untrue Trilogy’s work wasn’t completed until almost a full year after it began, with the posting of the final episode of the audio version of Book Six on Podiobooks.com, and as I expect to explain in this post, the project I’ve just begun will probably take me even longer.
By the end of the first day, I had basically nailed down the core idea and the story structure I wanted to use, as well as some detailed characters and settings, some of them well-visualized for the comic. I had ideas about exactly how the possibilities of multi-touch interaction combined with some limited animation and the infinite canvas could be used to more fully immerse the reader in the story while also being invaluable to conveying the inner lives of the characters as well as the exterior spaces which represent such a significant part of the protagonist’s journey. The next two days were spent filling in the story details, outlining, doing research on recent history and on interstellar physics, plus some preliminary sketching, and by the time Mandy was done with her final session I had a plan for every “page” of the comic, good ideas about the “panels” they’ll each be composed of, and excellent ideas about the transitions / interactions between them. Continue reading Piling on the challenges
