So for our project we started developing the Wix website. Ashley did a good job setting it up. Now my job was to create content for it. Sound and video clips. I would come back to it in the later posts. Right now, the thing that caught my eye was one of the posts in Story Lab blog called ‘The Boat’ which is an interactive graphic novel.

The Boat has a very interesting layout to the website. It was in a form of a scroll. You scroll down to reveal new content and the story continues. Having inspired from that idea, I decided to do a few edits to the website giving that similar effect of scrolling.

Did it work? Did it not?

It worked in parts. The amount of smoothness and user-friendly i intended it to be, it did not live up to that standard. After hours of analysing the wix website, I realised that it was not possible to attend that level of technicality in a wix website. But I think it does the job fine.

Next Step?

Now, the website is going to be a huge pool of data and the viewer who is looking at it would be baffled and dazed at times, thinking what is going on. Just for that matter, we decided to apply the animation only on the reports and artefacts that are concerned with out story, so the viewer unconsciously would follow that particular reports.

Did it work? Did it not?

To answer this question is a bit hard right now. The website is not live and hasn’t been shown to a lot of people. But we are trying out best so the audience stays on track. I guess it is the nature of this story that somehow makes it hard to navigate this problem. But it works as well, as the aim is to create a large pool of data, just like it is in the real world and the audience would have to work for their supper.

Audience Loss/Gain

So the story is based a lot on content, mostly textual so the people who like to read might find it interesting. But those who are not a big fan of reading and are expecting a traditional story based model are going to be surprised. It will contain visual elements but it will be limited. So lets see how it plays out.

Things that need to be worked on in times to come . . .

1) Entry point for the story. How will the story breakout in real time?

2) Work around the different visual (video and sound) elements that would work to build a story and also stand on its own. 

3) Discuss if the story is closed or open ended. 

4) Purely from the storytelling point of view, how is Jack’s character developing as the story progresses. 

Navigate to the next blog post to know more. . .