Aesops Fable Intial Reseach for Fundamentals of Interactive Design

I commented on my tumblr that i was going to try and work 1 or two hours a day on the Aesops Fables brief.

Unfortunately i haven't quite stuck to that plan, but tonight i have commenced researching.

In this brief i am hoping to concentrate a lot of the work in to researching and prototyping, as from previous briefs i have found that if i research, then prototype, i provide loads of work that contributes to the marking scheme, if i just set out and create something i have less work to hand in at then end of the brief. Also in previous briefs where i have research then prototyped i have been happy with the final piece of work and i also think it has been of a better standard. So for this brief i am hoping to get a lot of research done, then blog my findings

Tonight I looked on wikipedia to refresh my memory about each fable. wikipedia only had brief outlines of each story so i am planning on visiting my local library to get out a book of Aesop Fables as although i know the outline of each fable when i am creating my piece of work i went something i can reference back to to make sure i am on the right track.

I have used flash before and am aware that you can create a page turning effect where the user, use's there mouse pointer to 'grab' the edge of the page and turn it over to reveal the next page.

Having not used flash for a while i set out to look at some examples of this, and came across this



In the above video* you can see an interactive book made in flash where as well as being text and pictures there is also video embedded (see 24 seconds in) also on one page you can choose the characters to view in more detail all on one page (see 1 minute in)

For this brief (this is not set in concrete and is just an initial idea) i am considering using the flip page method using The Tortoise and The Hare story. I am considering telling the story from the perspective of the hare and from the perspective of the tortoise. I am considering Using the dual character selection method shown in the video above, to let the user select who's perspective they wish to read from.

To achieve this method i would use externally loading pictures so when the user chose the tortoise it would external load a jpeg and clicking a next button would take the user to the story starting from the tortoise perspective

I would use the action script event handler

On (press)
{
Goto and play;

or take it to a new scene using

on(release){
gotoAndPlay("Scene 2", 1);
}

My aims for my next pieces of research are to

1) Get out the book Aseops Fables from the library
2) use youtube to look at video's of Aseops fables
3) Continue to gather and research flash techniques which may be useful for this brief

* Just a quick note regarding the video above. It is showing a .swf embedded on a web page. I used the screen capture program ScreenFlow. ScreenFlow is a powerful screen capturing program that lets you resize and edit the video aswell as using various techniques and methods of highlighting what you are doing. For my video above after capturing i have zoomed the video in two areas that I wanted to highlight to people reading this blog. The first is at 24 seconds I have zoomed in to show that there is video embedded into the page. The second zoom is at 1m 10sec to show the selecting of different characters from multiple pages. This is my first time using a screen capture program, and it proved to be very useful, as it was not possible to place the .swf into the blog (i couldn't find the url in the source code to embed, nor could i download it and upload it to my blog page)

I feel the video makes the page more media rich with out having to click an external link to go and view another page. I hope i will get more use from ScreenFlow as it seems to be a very neat and handy program