Some pop-up videos!

There are some wonderful resources on pop-up books available freely on YouTube. Here is a seven minute video by the Smithsonian Libraries in collaboration with their exhibit on movable books. It details the process of making a pop-up book. 

Here is a 53 minute lecture by David Carter which he gave at the Smithsonian Libraries, talking about his work in book making. Tidbits include his work on a giant book for an exhibit, his work teaching children about pop-ups, and a lovely question and answer session in which he talked about a pop-up ap for iphone.

And finally, if you'd like to get started yourself, a one and a half minute video on how to make a particularly stunning pop-up card.

Enjoy!

Image sharing and idea sparks

Our semester is already in the swing of things; our colleagues’ productions are coming together, the Mary Baldwin Mlitt/MFA Thesis festival is fast approaching and Linden and I are working hard on designing for All’s Well, and really enjoying meeting with Jenny McNee every week. Some of the work we’ve been putting into this show is looking to find the best means of communicating our research, and we’ve decided to expand outside of this blog. We now have a Flickr account to share pictures of the things we are making as we make them, as well as many images of our sketches and plans for characters and costumers.

You can find our Flickr account here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/allswellindesign/ 
 

Additionally, Linden and I have dived into Pinterest, an online bulletin board or images, videos and project ideas. Not only has it been delightful to pin photographs and artwork which inspires our thoughts for this project it has also put un into contact with other pinners and their ideas and creations. For instance, one can make ordinary plastic toys look like ceramics with only the help of a can of glossy spray paint click here for details of that project: http://dreamgreendiy.com/2011/08/15/pinspiration-monday-white-horse/

You can find our Pinterest account here: http://pinterest.com/agenttam99/alls-well/ though you will need to sign up for Pinterest if you want to see it.

What is all this sharing and exploring doing for our process? It means not only that we’re getting lots of people to see at least pieces of our work, but that we can shape our ideas by the images we find. Some of our images are not based out of the words the characters say, (Helena will have stars because she is always talking about them) but the characters from other sorts of fantasy stories or fairy tales which the characters remind us of. LaFeu doesn’t share any lines with the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, but those characters remind us of each other, so we’ll give Lafeu a pocketwatch, and maybe have some clockwork decorations on his jacket and his hat. The healing of the King in this play may also draw some inspiration from the Lord of the Rings and the Two Towers’ movie’s portrayal of Theoden returning to health and the costume choices for the king before and after Helena heals him. These images will morph in our ideas for the play as we keep studying its roots and other productions, but finding inspiration in this forum, (and now these others) is an adventure for us both.

Pottermore and books

The visuals for the intro video to J. K. Rowling's newest adventure combine some fascinating ideas about books as they transition between tactile and digital forms. The animated books, cut and shaped into moving sculpture show paper texts as malleable through digitization. Who knows how many websites sport Potter fan fiction right now, but J. K. Rowling is taking the her readers' writing under her own wings. As she says, "Just as the experience of reading requires the imaginations of the author and the reader to work together to create the story, so Pottermore will be built in part by you, the reader."

What does this mean for books in the future? Many scholars have explored the expansive possibilities of digital texts, hypelinked footnotes, the kindle's dictionary on demand, comparative texts from different printings and editions made simple through the use of technology, but Pottermore seems to be something entirely new. Something part fan club, part DVD-special features, part video game, and part storylab.

The intro video with its movable books is a perfect introduction to such a phenomenon. Part nostalgia, part magic, part exhibition of technologies in action.