Introduction
We love The Simpsons for everything they have taught us about community, love, family, and beer.
Our group chose to make an interactive book about The Simpsons because we all were familiar and in love with the topic. Since the sitcom has been going for so long we knew we would have plenty of assets to work with as well.
Our group met about once a week out of class to make sure we stayed on track, help each other, and to be sure we stayed consistent. We thought this would mean the testing phase would be quick and painless.
The challenge was to capture the humor and tone in an interactive book. Another challenge was that we would be working with simply graphics. This was a challenge because to stay consistent with the look of the Simpsons the “wow” factor could not come form the graphics. It would have to come through the interactive elements and how well put together the book was. However challenging it would be, it would still be enjoyable with the Simpsons motivating us along.
Sketch it Out
We brainstormed different topics for chapters and pages for our Simpsons iBook.
We came up with the following.
1.Title page
2. Character page
3. Compare Simpsons and Flanders
4. Tree house of horrors.
5. Guest Appearances
6. Top 10 Simpson moments
Once we had our ideas written down we started sketching our layout templates for each chapter or page.
Some of these layouts ended up remaining pretty close to the original sketch. Most morphed into something quite different. One of them was forgotten about completely. Since we were in a group and working on different things at different times, it kind of just slipped through the cracks. Doh!
Gathering Assets
There was an overwhelming amount of assets needed to complete our iBook. Lucky for us there were four people in our group to divide and conquer.
I was in charge of gathering all the character images in high quality PNG format.
I would also need to find three audio clips and one video clip for each character.
We all thought that there would be ample amount of images audio and video clips due to the many years Simpsons had been around. We were right. There were ample amounts of images and videos. However, there were very many high quality assets.
Sometimes the quality would be high but because the asset was taken from shows done 15 or 20 years ago, they still were very poor resolution.
Then there was the problem of trying to stay consistent throughout the book. Some characters had thick black lining, some had thin. Some were a darker yellow, some had a tint more of orange in the yellow. There would be a perfect Homer standing just like I wanted him to stand but alas he was too small resolution. Even the style they were drawn in changed a bit as the years progressed.
Finally, making sure the images were all PNG was the last problem to face. I did the best I could and we were all pleased with the outcome.
Audio was easy to find. The hard part was finding the clips that would be just right. Some of them were perfect and some I had to settle with.
Finding video was easy as well. However, the quality of the video varied depending on the year it aired on television. I wanted all the videos to be under one minute long if at all possible. Using premiere I trimmed and cropped the videos and exported all files as MP4 files because that is a format that works in iBooks.
Into iBooks
I volunteered to be the keeper of all assets and to put the book all together. I was quite unfamiliar with iBooks and learned a lot because of this project. I learned the iBooks is not a very good friend when it come to alignment, grouping, rotating, and many other things. Don’t even get me started on Chapter cover art.
As a group we decided that the iconic Simpson clouds would be a great background to be consistent throughout the book. Rachelle had done a lot of work making the clouds all line up in inDesign. Now I had to make them align in iBooks. Once I figured out the inspector tool and where the adjustments were it wasn’t so bad.
Using my sketches I started making this character template. Simpson font was used for all the names. I found some good write ups of all the Simpson characters in wikipedia. Then I used a widget to put the text in a scrolling box. The video was also imported using a widget.
It was a good start. Or at least it was A start. Everything looked floating and isolated. I added a transparent box behind all the characters to try to solve the floating feeling. I messed with the opacity and shape and feathered edges for a long time. Nothing was working. I figured it would get better by adding a frame to the text. I was wrong.
After trying many different options we decided the clouds in the background were the problem. Clouds are for the birds!
Rachelle came up with a new back ground color scheme. I started overlapping bit of the character onto the frame to tie them together and get rid of the “isolated island”feeling that was brewing. I also made the names bigger and running down the side. I also made all the text look like it were on chalkboard to give added effect. Things were starting to look much better. To tie all three elements together I created a large image of the character and lowered the opacity to be placed in the background and overlapping all three. I didn’t like that we had two rectangle elements so I asked Ozzy if he could create a widget that would enable an image such as a donut or skateboard become interactive by touching it and a movie popping up to full screen. He worked on it for a long time. In the end the audio just wouldn’t work and we had to give up on the idea. I ended up just choosing a poster frame for the video and making it pop up to full screen when tapped.
The Couch Gag
This page was going to have different Simpsons couch scenes presented a slide show with only the characters changing and the room staying the same.
Swipe left and watch what happens. Rachel did an excellent job tracing the characters out. When I put it into the book I could adjust the PNG image sizes to match the couch perfectly. Everything was going great until we actually put it in the widget. We found out that the size of each PNG had to be changed to be the exact same size. The team members in charge of this decided for time sake to take the page out.
It was going to be the end of the book. Instead we decided to put a “class photo” with every character ever to be in the show.
I didn’t like the white border around this photo so I edited it to be all yellow and the title on the bottom as “The End” in yellow Simpsons font.
Interactive Widget
Rachel found a behind the scenes character origins on a website and tried to recreate it. It turns out that every Simpsons family member represents an actual family member of the creator Matt Groening. The original document had actual photos of Matt Grouping’s family and we were all so stoked to recreate it for our iBook. However, the photos were protected and we could not use them. So Rachel recreated as much as she could and e-mailed me the asset.
I put the image she had created into an interactive widget and made the drop down interactive text and place holders. The most frustrating part of this was that during the testing phase I could not get the title to show up on the iPad. We tried to create its own widget. We tried sending it front and back, we tried locking and unlocking. Eventually we figured out that it had to be put into the original image. I held my breath as I waited to see if doing this would mean I had to recreated all the drop down text boxes and place holders. It worked and I did not have to repeat all that tedious work!
Fun Facts
Rachelle made the character head outlines and I put it into a scrolling text widget. Again the title was giving me fits. We wanted the scrolling image and text to make the title disappear when it touched it. After arranging and rearranging all text, again, and again, I finally figured out that if I lined the widget box up with the blue rectangle behind the title it gave the appearance that the scrolling image and text was disappearing behind the rectangle.
Trying to Watch T.V.
Ozzy collected assets for the guest appearances and Tree house of horrors Pages. I thought it would be cool to display it on the actual Simpsons TV and have the controls on the TV actually control or navigate through the different short clips. Ozzy was unable to make the controls do what we wanted and he found one video compilation to show in the TV screen. He couldn’t get the sound to work when he made it into a widget. I figured the easiest way to do it would just be to put the video behind the TV png in iBooks Author. Easy fix. At least until we tested it on the iPad. For some reason the iPad makes the movie pop up in front of the .png image that was layered on top. We decided to solve this by making the movie pop up to full screen when tapped. Not as fun but at least it worked.
Chapter Art
As I put the whole book together in iBooks I noticed the option to put chapter titles in the table of contents. I wrote some in real quick and moved on with other tasks.
Fast forward a week…I decided to put some chapter art in for each chapter. I put one image in and started to try to layer in more. Nope. Not happening. Plus the dang chapter title and number would not go away. I could not delete it!
I researched and found out that there could only be one image (no layers) in the chapter art section. Fine. I put all the images into a Photoshop art board and flattened the image.
It still didn’t work. So I kept messing with it and realized it only took portrait not landscape. I went back to Photoshop and created a portrait sized image and only made the bottom half full of the flattened image. Once I put in the Chapter art section I just had to transform the photo to be twice as large and the only part showing was the bottom half of the JPG. Problem solved!
“The Family” chapter art was the character outlines from the “fun facts” page.
The Guest Appearances donut was too pixelated on the tablet so I shrunk it down and turned it into three donuts which I liked a lot better.
Since the chapter art was such a pain to deal with we decided to do one more chapter with a variety of fun pages. I called it the variety chapter and tried to think of something from the Simpsons that would relate. The closest thing I could come up with was the Kwik-E-Mart. I was thinking it was kind of…with a bit of a stretch…like a variety store.
I couldn’t find a high quality image of the store sign so I made one myself in Adobe Illustrator.
Testing
Our last group meeting we had an hour before two group members had to leave for a class. We had all but a few assets squared away. We had been testing throughout the designing process and that we didn’t have much work left. Kevin and I thought we would only need one more hour to finish the iBook. Four hours later we were done.
There were small little glitches to fix. For example, white lines appearing, a yellow glow on a widget, a title that refused to appear when viewed on the tablet, and fonts that wouldn’t cooperate with shadows.
Some big issues were the size and formats of videos and trying to crunch them and still have them cooperate with iBooks.
Kevin and I ended up leaving the school around 11:30 PM. Feeling relieved that it was all done and looking swell.
DOH!
One of my hardest lessons learned during this project… I did not backup my files. Guess what happened? I accidentally deleted my .iba file for The Simpsons project. Doh!
I kept getting a warning that my start up disc was getting full. I was having a really hard time doing the documentation because of it. Plus, I had lots of images and videos and old versions of the .iba file that were cluttering up the scene. So, I did a little housekeeping and deleted the newest version and kept a really old one. I didn’t realize the mistake until two days after I had emptied the recycle bin.
I frantically started looking up how to retrieve permanently deleted files. Nothing was working. I downloaded some program but they wanted to charge me $100 to retrieve the file. I was willing to pay it but some of the reviews said that after they paid the money, they still didn’t get the file.
I was so sick to my stomach. I called Kevin from my group and confessed my sin. I thought he was going to freak out on me. He was as calm as a cucumber and said he had done it before. Then he helped me try to recover it as well.
When that didn’t work he said he would just recreate it if I would send him all the assets. No way was I going to make him clean up my mess. So I recreated it. Ugh. Dear, sweet, Kevin helped me finish recreating it.
It felt good to organize and clean up my files though.
Moral of the story… back that asset up.
Conclusion
The Simpsons are fun loving , gloriously hilarious and light hearted. Creating this interactive in their honor can not be described in the same such words. I learned a lot and I’m glad The Simpsons were there making me smile along the way. It was a nice counter balance to the hair pulling and neck spasms that iBook author offered me.
