Adding Some Digital Magic (and a little Metadata) to Alice Hoffman’s “Practical Magic”
I love film, you could call me a film connoisseur…but that isn't really true. I love to sit front and center of a truly cheesy movie. I find too much joy basking in the glory of a 90s era Faith Hill induced soundtrack and successions of poorly timed zooms.
Having watched the film Practical Magic since I was very young, it has grown to be a nostalgic favorite. I finally found myself with time to read the book it was based on, and I of course thoroughly enjoyed it. I wanted something more though. Since it was a magical book about witchy sisters I wanted to see and hear something special that would bring me into that picturesque seaside town the sisters live in. I thought to myself how could I make this even more interesting and engaging for the user? Having Sandra Bullock personally narrate it might do the trick but I don't have those kind of connections so I moved to the next idea. I knew that I could create an Ibook that could really amplify all the unique and spellbinding aspects of this book.
I wanted to show other readers how interesting the story really is, regardless of its kinda cheesy film adaptation. So by adding extra features, clips and songs from the movie, the whole experience would be much more immersive and interactive. My objectives were to give the book the same aesthetic 90’s feel that the movie was very famous for having. I wanted the ebook to have its own aesthetic quality, that I feel like most digital forms from Google books or Amazon just don’t have yet.
Strategy
My strategy for designing this ebook was to first compile as much media and data as I could. I started by researching the book and reading the first couple chapters again. As I went, I grabbed images here and there of important characters and scenes that I knew I would need. I relied heavily on the visuals from the movie in making the ebook. There was plenty information and media online, including stills of characters from the movie that I did end up using in my glossary section. In my project overall I relied often on images that I pulled from other sites that helped represent and support really well the Practical Magic storyline.
I then moved on to moving over all of the text that I would need. I copied over about 7,000 words total (to test with) which added up to about 24 pages. The chapters in the novel are very long so I created artificial chapters (out of the first) and titled them their own unique names. In total I ended up having 3 chapters worth of content. From this point I wanted to write down everything I needed. My goal was to definitely include 3 audio snippets, 3 chapter branding, 3 different videos (I used gifs for this section because of some formatting issues with movie clips), 2 different pop ups, a witch hat and a broom (each had at least 3 different pop ups), and finally 3 different slideshow galleries (each with at least 3 images). Now that I know what my end goal was it was just a matter of finding the right content and implementing the 8 or so features into Ibooks.
Features
My audio snippets were fairly easy to insert. Practical Magic has a great soundtrack and Stevie Nicks famously created a song for the motion picture soundtrack. “If You Ever Did Believe” was written by Stevie Nicks and Shania Twain, and was released in 1998 with the film. Being a big Fleetwood Mac fan, I knew I wanted to include her song “Crystal” that also plays in the film. And finally I wanted to include the film’s theme song entitled “Practical Magic” by Alan Silvestri. I included all of the audio components very early on, in hope it would set a tone for the rest of the novel.
The chapter branding I chose to do was to take the first letter of each word of each chapter and change its font, color, and size for emphasis and style. For this I also added the same color to the chapter title. I wanted these colors to feel similar to those on the cover art of the ebook. For the cover I chose to do a floral sripted text with a sort of pattern of flowers falling. This references an important moment early on in the novel, specifically referencing a spell that Sally Owens casts as a young child.
The video portion I did run into some troubles with but was able to figure out a more simple work-around. I orginally wanted to include gif files as well as movie clips. I unfortunately had trouble getting the movie clip files to actually play. I would be able to get them moved over but they would only appear as images, so I ended up sticking to gifs. They were much shorter, and not the ideal option but the perk is that they are not full scenes from the film, so they do not distract from the reading nor do they spoil the story. I was able to put in 3 different clips, that all followed along to support the story. I also wanted to create some animtions in Hype and somehow get them in to ibooks editor. I did have some trouble with Hype however, having only used it twice before I was confused about the formatting, and how my animations would transfer over to the ebook, and then if they would actually be able to play properly. So I opted out of the Hype option, though I did have some preliminary sketches for small animations. My other concern with them however was that I wasn’t sure they would even be useful enough to include, since my skill with Hype is currently pretty limited.
I also did create pop-ups for my ebook. I chose to pull a witch hat icon and use it to represent “character information”, and I dispersed these throughout the ebook. The other icon was a broom that represented “film facts”. These were fairly simple to implement and I feel that they were very helpful to someone just starting out with the story. I also created all of the icons in the same size: 28pts by 28pts, to keep a uniformity throughout. The only issue I found to have with the pop-ups was that they would often affect the spacing of the line beneath it. So the line below was always a little further away. I wan’t able to find a work around here to fix the issue, but figured it was possibly just a flaw of the ibooks author program.
The slideshow gallery was fun for me because I was able to search around online and fan wiki pages to find content I thought would work well for the ebook. I had a few different galleries of images that consisted of 3 images each. All of my images here were either pulled from the film, or they were blueprints released by the construction company that built the Owens house for the film, as well as other important features of the novel. For example, the sisters often talk about their herbs they cultivate in their greenhouse, so I wanted to incorporate some really interesting and well done scientific-looking illustrations of Belladonna, Lavender, the Deathwatch beetle from the film amongst other images that I found searching around the web. For every image I used I did compile links to those pages for reference, but I was unsure if that was something that was submitted with the project. The only issue with some of the media was that the spacing around it was at certain times odd. In one case a media widget was seperated on to its own page, but this was simply because it was placed at the end of the chapter and over half-way through a page, so the program gave it its own page entirely.
Conclusion & Metadata
In conclusion, I found that dealing with the metadata of the ebook was not too challenging, and everything moved over fairly nicely when I tested it on my Ipad. I found that keeping track of all of my files and sources was key here. And Ibooks gives some really interesting and cool customization options for inserting your own metadata into your project. In truth, the metadata contains all of the special details and building blocks it takes to create a professional digital book.
The cover art was sized very well to completely cover the front. Most of the icons, galleries, glossary, and other media inputs were sized correctly and all assets worked in the testing phase. I learned from building this ebook that there is a great deal of potential for digital bookmaking. Most ebooks we purchase from Google play, Amazon, and Apple are static and somewhat dull. But if we have the ability to add fun and interactive features, we shouldn’t expect any less from companies like Amazon Books, Kindle, and Apple Books. It is a way to further engage the user in a traditional reading experience.
Christian Mercado is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction Design. This article relates to the “ePub 3.0” project in the DGM 2260 course and is representative of the skills learned.
