What’s behind a slideshow…

Introduction
I was asked by my professor to do a post on my creative process for the project that I churned out for my finals for Essays in a changing world, at The New School (No seriously, that’s what the university is called).
If you are reading this, you are probably taking the very same course I took because I’m not important nor influential enough of a person for people to want to know my creative process.
To give you some point of reference, I had chosen to undertake the persona of a young, single-mother on her journey of motherhood for this course. It’s a series of short stories that culminated in a reflective monologue on the identity of ‘mother’ and idea of ‘motherhood’.
For the rest of this piece to make sense, you’ll probably have to actually go through my final project. You can download that here. It works just fine as a stand-alone read, but if you want to read everything that came before it, you can find all the collated essays here.
Persona creation
I’m not a single mother, I was raised by one.
So as a child coming from a single-parent family, I never quite understood the insistence that people had that I was in an unfortunate predicament. Growing up, people felt sorry for me just because I had only one parent. Now don’t get me wrong, I understand that there are many children in single-parent families out there that are unhappy and not doing well. But fact is there are just as many children in regular nuclear families who are just as miserable. It is one thing to have pity imposed on you, it is another to have people insist that you are unfortunate and sad, when you are perfectly happy and content.
So it was always on my mind to show people that it is possible for children to grow up loved and happy in single-parent families, and to demonstrate the subtle, subconscious discrimination single-mothers face.
I had written a draft piece of this story long before the course started, and it was locked in my ‘plot bunny dungeon’ on trello…until now.
The story draws heavily from my experience coming from a single-parent family, but at the time is as fictitious as it comes. I am not son, I am daughter. And although persona of the mother is a persona that is more like an alternate universe version of me than my mother, I never really saw her as myself. I wore her mind when I wrote, but she was not me. In fact, the child in the story was probably more me. In hindsight, that’s probably why I made the child a son, to distance myself from the character.
You would probably notice that neither mother nor son have names. The honest answer behind that is that…I am terrible at naming both people and things. Yet, to me names are incredibly important. They encapsulate an identity.
I suppose, to some extent, I wanted these characters to be relatable to anyone. A name would have given away too much. Cultural context, nationality, ethnicity… I liked the ambiguity of my characters and persona. The story is about their experiences and personality. The only identity they needed was that of mother and son, nothing more and nothing less.
The ‘object’
‘Finally!’
If that’s what went through your head, I don’t blame you, I tend to be a little long-winded and ranty.
When we were told that we could be creative with our final project and create a mixed-media project if we liked, I jumped at the chance. I have always wanted to create a more immersive, more interactive reading experience.
My inspiration came mainly from seeing Motionbooks on Madefire. There was a flow and rhythm to the storytelling, but you were still reading comics, except the little details that you imagine in your head, like the sound of lasers shooting, or the majestic castle, is materialized in the real world as sound effects and image.
Mixing image with storytelling, on a more intertwined level, beyond just having illustrations next to words, became something I was really interested in.
I wanted to be able to give my readers an aesthetic, or at least, a visual anchor of the atmosphere or scenario I had in my head. I wanted to supplement my reader’s imaginations and engage more of their senses when they read. To make the story more immersive.
The idea was to elicit more imagination, not less.
Reading is inherently visual.

Reading the word ‘boo.’ on a white background, you can insinuate that probably someone tried to scare the character.
Placing the word ‘boo.’ in white on a black background however allows so much more hints and cues to be dropped. The reader can imagine, or assume, that they are in a dark room. The white font could hint that it was a ghost that scared them. Maybe if the font was red…well it could anything from a vampire to a serial killer.
Visuals and images allows for so much more detail and subtext to be woven into a story. I am a sucker for symbolism, and one of the things that makes watching movies enjoyable for me was to pick out the little details and symbols woven into costumes and set designs… It’s like hunting for easter eggs in a Marvel movie.
But visual communications designer, or heck, any designer could probably explain all that and more, and do it much better than I can.
My point is, images allowed me to tell my story more immersive without having to describe every single detail in the room and take away from the story.
It’s not just imagery though, glorious technology allows us to embed audio flips, videos, GIFs! You turn a book into a movie without actually turning it into a movie.
So great, I knew what kind of artefact I wanted to create!
I am only limited by technology, time and…my actual skills.
I originally wanted to basically make a Motionbook, using Prezi. I would have been able to zoom into details, play with ‘camera angles’, layer elements in 3D and get them to fade in and fade out etc.
Brilliant idea.
Except I had a little less than two weeks to do this and did I mention I can’t draw to save my life?
So how could I prototype my idea, using tools that were within my means? (And also fulfill assignment criteria?)
I needed something that was interactive, that allowed my readers to control their pace of experiencing the story the way books do (and films don’t). The tool also possess the ability for me to embed media, but also handle a fair amount of text (at its core, it’s still a ‘book’).
At first, I attempted to use Microsoft Sway, because I like using new tools and…PowerPoint is lame. (There I said it.) But quickly became apparent that I wasn’t able to manipulate the media I embedded in Sway. I had very limited control over layout, sizing, and lets not get started on fade-ins and fade-outs.
So, I grudgingly went back to PowerPoint and managed to create what I wanted, sort of.
Devil’s in the details
As I said earlier, I am a sucker for symbolism, so I paid quite a bit of attention to the details in my piece and what additional layer of meaning they could add.
The most obvious one is the flipping-animation. My end prototype was less a Motionbook, but more an…elevated version of the children’s book we used to read, with words on one page and illustrations on another when it came to key parts of the story.
I still wanted the piece to feel like a ‘book’, and books had pages, flipping pages was what completed the book-reading experience.
Then there were font choices.
Aside from ease of reading, fonts also convey personality. I didn’t want to clutter the voice of the persona/author too much, but sans serif fonts seemed too modern and unromantic for such an emotionally strong piece. I found type-writers to be quite sentimental and hence chose a type-writer font.
But that was a secondary font consideration. When it came to font, I immediately knew that the ‘climax’ of the piece, the dialogue between mother and son was where I wanted to make a visual distinction between the voices. And fonts was how I could do so. A childish font for the son, and a feminine script for the mother.

You could probably suss out other font related choices I made like like placement of text, when I chose to use bold of itallics etc. So I won’t go into that.
The last detail that I do want to highlight however, is the animation of the text.

Creating the slideshow didn’t really take me all that long once I found all the stock images, but I probably ran through the presentation more 30 over times testing the flow and rhythm of the animation.
I wanted to highlight the ability to animate words because it allows us to visualize the dramatic pauses, verbal emphasis and even tone of voice when we read out loud (even if it’s only out loud in our heads).
I could add more dimensions to my word and really immerse my readers in the world I had created.
People don’t remember what you say, they remember how you make them feel.
The goal was really to take my readers on an emotional journey, and I’d like to think that I managed that somewhat, beyond what plain text could do.
Conclusion
I hope it comes across clearly that this post isn’t about how I ‘invented’ the presentation method/medium I used to present my story, but how I arrived at creating it using existing tools and methods.
Visual storytelling is nothing new, and I’m certainly not the first nor the last person to try it.
What I made is by no means a finished product. It’s a prototype, a proof of concept, made using the most basic of tools.
It was new, it was interesting, and it has a clean finish, but it is far from what I truly envisioned it to be. The images weren’t exactly what I had in my head, I would have liked the ability to create more of a scene/set, add background music and sound effects that would activate when the readers get to a certain sentence…the list goes on.
It’s got ways to go before it’s a polished piece of work suitable for publishing. But for a school assignment, it was enough.
That’s the whole point of school right? For you to experiment and try things, to workshop your ideas so that you can eventually create that masterpiece.
I hope this sharing has yielded some insight for you, or sparked some kind of inspiration so that you can create an even more amazing storytelling experience!
Thank you for sitting through this and all the best with your course!
