Creation...

is hard. Inspired by some of the works I've seen, I decided to try creating my own piece of digital literature using Flash.

A few years ago I tried an experimental short story, intended to be a collection of thoughts, dialogue, emails, newscasts, and a speech that could be read "segmentally" in any order and still create a cohesive whole story. It didn't work very well once I printed it out; although I used different fonts to distinguish the different voices, people still wanted the "traditional" trappings of printed literature: reading from top to bottom, page one to page two, "he said/she said" attributions, etc. I tried rewriting it more traditionally with these trappings, but I found that made the story a little too saccharine, slightly less confusing, and a lot less like what I had envisioned.

Having seen the possibilities that digital literature had to offer in terms of layering, looping, and user choice, I thought this might be the format this narrative needs. After a quick tutorial from a generous and helpful colleague on how to make a ball bounce, change color, and disappear into the distance using Flash studio, I began working.

My first task was to create an opening worth following to the finish. One thing I notice about what I consider "good" digital literature is that it hooks you in the beginning with a premise that makes you care enough to keep interacting with the piece. One of my favorite pieces, Dim O'Gauble begins with text appearing and disappearing on the intricate layered background (which, having worked with Flash, I know contains "buttons" that trigger actions such as moving around the screen). The opening is mysterious, appearing from nothing and disappearing just as quickly as it entered, and itself introduces a mystery, inviting the user to try to unravel the "patchwork" of clues to make sense of these things "She didn't understand" that unfold as the user interacts with the piece, triggering movies and text actions.

“I saw myself reading the eulogy at your funeral”--The opening sentence was punchy on paper, but once I had finished creating it in Flash and people walked by to watch me test the execution of the layers in the first "frames" of my first "scene," I saw how much power the movement of font and timing of the reveal gave the words; flash enabled me to divide the sentence, allowing the first four white letters to gradually appear out of blackness in the center of the screen, then moving up as the rest of the sentence likewise revealed itself, swelling and contracting as if the words themselves were heaving. "Wow," and "Oh my God" were the reactions, and this was only the first nine words.

(Granted, making those first words move like that took me the better part of a few hours, but I suppose that is why they call it the learning curve.) The fact that I could control how the user read that sentence did, admittedly, take some of the control from the reader, but I was able to achieve a "reveal" (come on, out of body eulogy experiences need that kind of build up) that would be unavailable to me on paper, unless I made the publisher cut the sentence and begin it anew after a page turn. The first few seconds of my piece were actually accomplished by creating three layers acting independently: a background (black), a white text layer (the first four words), and another white text layer (the last five words). In order to make the words move in the manner they did (independent of each other, and yet in harmony), each segment had to be its own entity, and yet the layers had to be viewed together to create the full effect. I suddenly had a much greater appreciation for the idea of "layers," both in the physical and metaphorical sense.

And in retrospect, creating those opening frames was the easy part. I quickly realized that the segments I had written and even those I had revised would not play well on screen without some reformatting. The following sentences made a neat paragraph on paper, but to keep the user's focus and really punctuate the important ideas, I realized I would have to divide it and add images onscreen to "punctuate" ideas that would carry throughout the piece. Much as I did in my original typed piece, I decided a different font would be appropriate for giving the "thoughts" of the narrator, but unlike that piece, I felt little obligation to be true to sentence structure, instead deciding to utilize line breaks where I felt it appropriate; it reminded me of writing poetry, except that I didn't feel like I had to define myself by those conventions.

The possibilities continued when I played with adding an image layer. I wanted it to creep in, but in a happy accident of learning, I only put the image in for 3 frames (which, playing at 6 frames per second, means the image only flashed for a fraction of a second) and it blipped almost indistinguishably across the screen. While this wouldn't do for the final scene, I realized that I liked the idea of having that "dream/nightmare" image reoccur, appearing suddenly in the middle of the frame and swiftly enveloping the "stage" (the screen of view) before disappearing just as abruptly; in that way, I could reinforce the FEELING of the nightmare, and that all the threads worked together as pieces of this confusing whole. This also helped inspire what I hope will be sort of the "menu" screen, since the line it interrupted, "But I just kept seeing that image, as if it were a freeze-frame from the dream" really seemed to tie the pieces together; thus, I picked it as the center of the frame at the conclusion of the opening scene.

And after finishing the first scene (for the most part; there were some bugs with the last frames...which I will address later), I found myself overcome by another difficulty: how to channel all my ideas and learn how to make all the possibilities I wanted to try work. I began to look more into the tutorials online about how to create action scripts and buttons, and the next day was successful in making a working button that one could click to move from scene one to scene 2.1...only, I realized that to allow the user to navigate the piece as freely as I wished, I would have to learn more.

For example, when I retested my movie, I realized there was a bug in the last frames of scene 1, which did indeed "stop" as commanded, but instead of staying stopped, allowing the user to choose one of the buttons to navigate to a different scene, it restarted or ended all together (depending on which unsuccessful version I tried). After consulting with my resident expert, I realized I would have to research how to create some sort of "pause" action...or make the frame sequence long enough so the reader could choose an option. I wanted the user to have many options, with the ability to navigate between different segments in different "threads," but soon realized this would not be as easy as I'd first thought after creating my first working button. After working on scene 2.1, I also realized that my inability to "pause" also meant that instead of navigating between five "scenes", stopping or picking up as the user wished using buttons, I may have to create many more "scenes" and create many more buttons....

In retrospect, perhaps I was once again inspired by Andy Campbell, whose use of layers in authoring and in visuals to show different thoughts is truly expert. As seen in the first "scene" after clicking, two "voices" seem to be present in the static text (top left in big white, bottom right in small black font), interrupted by the event of mouse-over text appearing line by line (screen captured in nearly 100% visibility center-right). While I think complex actions like floating screens and other mouse over events are much too advanced for me, I can see how looking at the craft of other authors would be inspirational and helpful. I plan to look for more tutorials (both from my colleague and online) and see what I can find out about how other Flash authors created their effects to (hopefully) incorporate these ideas into my piece.

I also plan to read more about the effect of fonts and images on the way people read; although I intuitively understand (and know from experience creating/teaching layout, readings, and conferences on the subject of the use of these elements as graphics in publications), I want to know more about, for lack of a better term, the "science" behind these effects. Hopefully, this will help me better use such tools in my "creation" experiment.