Change of plan

After deciding to base my Ebook around the story of my Auntie finding out the truth behind her family tree, I went into lesson to discuss this with my tutor. I started by telling them a few of the other stories that my Nan had given me which I felt were all too short to stand as a story on their own, However when I was telling these mini stories to my tutors they suggested that the story would be extremely interesting if I used most of the stories together to tell a full life story of my Nan. Once they had suggested this, I couldn't quite work out why it hadn't been my idea! 

So I have now decided to scrap the story of my Auntie and do a story of my Nan's childhood. Luckily she has boxes of old photos stored away which I will be able to look through and she has also written a book about her life which I have access to and will be able to take sections out of. 

My next steps with this new story direction is to gather the story and photos together as quickly as possible in order to prepare the questions that I am going to ask in the interview. After this is done I will start doing a story plan, record the interview and hopefully have a good idea of what my Ebook will look like, with some good mock ups of the colours and themes for the pitch. 

Accidental Story

While my nan and I were looking through her old photos and reading the stories she had written me, we came across a photo of my older sisters christening. The lady holding her looked very much like my auntie but my nan told me it was my Great Auntie Jenny.
When I mentioned that she looked like my Auntie Debbie, my nan told me a story about how funny it was for me to mention that.

Jenny had been my nan's next door neighbour when my nan and granddad moved into a house in Crowborough in August 1964. From that moment on, my nan and Jenny became best friends, and Jenny got promoted to an Auntie. Many years later my Auntie Debbie was sitting with my nan talking about all of her aunties, but when she came to Auntie Jenny, my nan shook her head and explained that she was not her real auntie, she was just a very good friend.
Debbie didn't take this very well at all and cried for ages because she really wanted my Jenny to be her real Auntie.
A little while later, Jenny was looking through her family history to put together a family tree and found that Debbie's Great Granddad's sister was Jenny's Great Grandma, so they are actually related, which could possibly explain why they look so similar!

Jenny holding my sister, 1992

Auntie Debbie holding Ava, 2012

This is such a simple story with a happy ending, but has a lot of elements that I could use to turn it into a book. I will need to keep searching through the family history to make sure that I have all of the correct information and possibly find some photos or possibly some video that I could use for this piece. But I feel that with the family tree creating the basis for this story, It could come out very well.

Family Stories

Knowing that my nan has lots of old photos and family stories I asked her to have a think about a few stories that she has photos to compliment. I then went round to her house to find that she had written seven different stories which she had written on envelopes that had photos inside. So we sat down and went through the stories to see what she had come up with. Here are a few of the stories she has given me...


Story 1:

"Mother and I on one of her visits to Mrs Bowden, whom she gave me to when I was 10 days old. Though she had to take me back when my Dad came home on leave. Some one told him what was going on and he filed for divorce and I was put into care at the age of three"


Story 2:

"Mother and I ages about three and just before she put me into St Annes, having been made a ward of court and actually given to my fathers custody, but he being in the army, agree to have me put away. He then abandoned me. At least my mother kept in touch, she didn't want me, but didn't want anyone else to have me. My cousin, Gino, told me , she'd planned to leave me there till I died, which happened to some of the girls, if their family didn't come to take them home. Some only went home when they were 14 and old enough to work and giving in another wage to the house and I know some who were sexually and physically abused by their fathers. Others put into service to scivvy for the rich and Dr family. Some, to escape became nuns. And perhaps to dish out the abuse, they themselves had received. Where I was left until I was about 17 years old, was where the word "care" did not exist"

My nan, with her mother. Aged three

Story 5:

"My mother and I, taken in Trafalgar Square. I was 18 years old and although you can't see them, she made me wear boys shoes and long grey boys socks and you can see, she still made me wear ribbons in my hair, this was before she took me to an Italian barber and told him in Italian, to give me short back and sides, I came out looking like a boy. She hated me and was jealous of me or maybe my youth and kept me dressed as a child while I lived that one year with her. I think my stepfather, Cescene was afraid of her, he left her 6 months after he made her take me out of St Annes, he was 12 or 14 years younger than her. Many times I heard her beating him up in her bedroom. Not very happy in this picture." 

My nan, with her mother and aunties. Aged 18

Ebook?!

First things first, what on earth is an Ebook?!

An Ebook is an electronic book or a digital book that can be read on multiple digital platforms including the Ipad.

"Ebooks can be anything from the digital version of a paper book, to more interactive content that includes hyperlinks and multimedia"
www.planetebook.com/mainpage.asp

After the class digging deeper into what we need to do for this project, I realised that the one bit I am stuck on is visualising what the finished product is going to look like, and I think this comes down to calling it an Ebook. When I first heard that it was an Ebook I instantly thought of a text heavy page which you turn to get another text heavy page with the occasional picture. This however is not the case with what we are doing, from what I have gathered from looking at other example of Ebooks (even though there are no accurate example for this project as we are doing something quite new in the field) I gather it will look more like a picture book with animation and video tied into it so that it looks seamless and becomes interactive. I have been shown a little on how to use Ibook author which is the software we will use to create the Ebook once we have all our elements together and I have started to see how we are going to make it work. We have also been shown a tutorial on how to make a photo seem more 3D which was really helpful and inspiring. After these few lessons on options we can use in our Ebooks, I have a much better understanding of what it will look like, however I don't think I will have a complete idea until I start using Ibooks more or maybe even until I start putting my project together in it!
So until then I will need to really get thinking about what story I am doing to give myself the best chance of being able to build it well. 


Some examples



This is an advert for "The Beatles Yellow Submarine", this book is available on the Ibooks store and while this book is coded and hugely complex, this gives a good idea of how you can take the Ibook away from being a normal plain book. This book shows how interactive and interesting the Ebooks can be. This has really got me thinking about what I can make my book look like and what I can make it do. 

Here is an example of documentary animation that I found very useful for this project.
This animation uses mainly photos which apear to have been cut out leaving a white edge which shows they are photos. The colour scheme is quite de-saturated which I think also really works well here and the important objects seem to be a lot brighter making them stand out from the background.
Although there is no audio telling the story in this piece the message is clear and I think works perfectly without spoken audio.

In this documentary animation the use of spoken audio is very strong, the animation would not work without it. From start to finish we are spoken through a story, with the passion of the words spoken it makes the whole piece seem more real. The colour scheme in this animation mainly suites the book keeping an orangey brown town, but the odd colour is thrown in to make the scenes work. This animation is very effective and tells a real story from start to end. What this animation also has is a credit roll at the end where it thanks the people taking part. I think this is a great idea and I will try and use this in my book. 

Brief

We have now been given our first brief of year two and although it seems a little confusing, after having class discussions about it, I now feel like I have a good idea of where I need to start with this project. 
For this new brief we have been asked to created an Ebook for the Ipad. This Ebook will be made up of animation, text, interviews, old photos and possibly some video. The book is going to be based on a family story, which means that we should be able to source our stories, photos and record an interview with ease. 
Although there is a lot to be done on this project along with a lot of research and investigating into my families stories, I think we have been given a fair amount of time and I am looking forward to getting stuck in. Luckily for me, my family has quite a few interesting stories which could all make for very interesting books, so what I will need to do is arrange a day to see some relatives and see what photos and videos they have to complement their stories and base my decision on the story that I find both inspiring and has enough photos to work with.
The biggest problem I see with this project is that I have never used Ibook software or After Effects before which is where we will be creating the majority of our work, for this reason I need to try and get my research and story set quickly so that I give myself as much time as possible to get my head round the software we are using. And although this is my biggest worry about the project it is also what I am most looking forward to, being able to use After Effects is something I have wanted to do for a while but have never known where to start and hopefully by the end of this project I will be confident enough to learn more on my own which will help in future projects. 
Over all I am excited for this project and can't wait to hear what my family come up with for me, I think my next few steps will be setting a time schedule, to optimise my time creating the final piece, research into Ebooks to see what does and doesn't work and also to get a solid story with everything I need including an interview, photos and possibly some video. 

Final website

After a few more tweaks and coding I have finished my website and am very please with how it looks. Here is what the finished site looks like. 

Building the site

On my static work section of my website I was planning on having a carousel showing my images, I had a look on various sites and found this one which seemed to be the most popular and exactly what I was after. (http://fredhq.com/projects/roundabout/)
After having downloaded the files and following the tutorial several times I found that I couldn't seem to get it to work. I then went about trying to find more and I came across a few but each time I tried, I couldn't seem to get them to work. 
I then decided to try and use an image slider/slideshow instead but as before even after following the tutorials I couldn't get it right. Reading the comments on the sites from other people I could see that it was a fault I was making, however, even carefully reading through the tutorials I seemed to be missing something. 
After a few days of this I decided to find another way of showing my work which didn't take away from the theme of my site. I then thought about making thumbnail photos into stamps and having lightbox so that they could be seen at a good size as well. 
To do this I first saved two versions of my image, one being the full image at 800px width and the other shrunk down to 125px width and with a stamp shaped border which I added in Photoshop. I then downloaded the code I needed for lightbox and saved it into my js and css folders as the tutorial asked me to. The next thing I needed to do was to link the jquery and css to the head of my html document as you can see below.

Once this was done I then needed to create a div which would hold the images, style it in css so that it was in the place I wanted it and then using this code I added in the two pictures making sure the one with lightbox was the larger image.

All I did then was repeat this with all of my images changing the css on each div to make them look different and this is the result.