We Can Work It Out: Creating an Interactive Beatles iBook
The Beatles are perhaps the most legendary, influential, and successful musical group of all time. For this project, I, along with 2 fellow students chose to create an interactive iBook telling the story of their evolution, success, and so much more. Our goal was to create an engaging, entertaining experience that would be an interesting learning experience for anyone interested in The Beatles — from half-hearted music enjoyers to hardcore fans.
Design Process
When we sat down to plan out the iBook, we decided that we wanted to split it up into 4 chapters and base the styling of each chapter on one of The Beatles’ albums. We laid out the chapters as follows:
- Meet The Beatles - an introduction to The Beatles and Beatlemania
- Beatles for Sale - record sales, awards, and a timeline
- Magical Mystery Tour - instruments and The Beatles’ time in India, which kicked off their “psychedelic phase”
- Let It Be - the break-up and each member’s life afterward
As we started to sketch things out and gather content we realized that, unlike some other groups, we had an overabundance of content. This was both a blessing and a curse, as we spent a lot of time narrowing things down and removing ideas and features that didn’t quite make the cut.
Features
Timeline & Animations
The 3 of us worked together to build a timeline of The Beatles’ career. To make it more visually engaging, we wanted to animate some iconic images from their vast catalog. The ones we decided to use were the Yellow Submarine from the animated film and their bowl-cut heads from a poster for their film “A Hard Day’s Night”. I cut out the heads and submarine in Photoshop and then animated them in Hype.
Chapter Cover & Seamless Background
For the cover of my chapter, I attempted to recreate the album artwork of the Magical Mystery Tour album.
Why would I do that, you ask? So that I’d have a high-quality version that I could manipulate and extend onto the other pages of the chapter in a seamless background.
Instruments Widget
Almost as iconic as The Beatles themselves were the instruments they used. We wanted to showcase these instruments in a fun, engaging way that would also allow readers to see and hear them in action. I cut out images of some of their most iconic instruments and assembled them in Hype. Each one, when tapped, brings up a window with information about the specific instrument as well as a video of one the Fab Four playing it. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I was only able to include video of Ringo’s drum kit and George’s sitar.
“Let It Be” Chapter Widget
For the final chapter, which detailed the break-up of The Beatles, we wanted to have some sort of visual of them going their separate ways, so I recreated the album artwork for the Let It Be album and animated it to do just that. I created the animation in Hype, and also made the page interactive so that readers can tap each image to learn about what each Beatle did after the break-up.
Testing
Once we were finished, we sent our book over to our iPads to give ’em a spin. For some reason, the Beatles font didn’t carry over in some places and we were instead left with the wonky nightmare to the bottom left. Luckily, it was an easy fix.
Aside from some funky type issues and some other mild cosmetic things, we didn’t encounter too many problems during our testing.
Conclusion
This project was a great learning experience. It was a challenge to take a subject so ubiquitous and try to make something unique and engaging about it, but with a great team, it was possible.
Taylor Fletcher is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. This article relates to the final project in the DGM 2260 (Immersive Authoring) course and representative of the skills learned.
