Archcomix

End of Term Interactions

There’s nothing quite like the race to the end of term to catalyse a depth-charge of creativity. The past few weeks have been busier than normal as I’ve spent hours hunched over final cut and flash (as opposed to the drawing board and scanner), busily hashing out my first mini-interactive documentary site (produced with fellow Knight Madhu Acharya), on Bhutanese refugees and their integration into the Oakland community. The screenshot above gives you an idea of the homepage layout, which in the final published version allows you to choose different chapters of the story to explore. I’m currently tying up loading/streaming issues with the FLV files, but aside from that I think it’s good to go.

Now that I’ve got to grips with Final Cut and Flash, I can move to phase 2 of my project, namely combining video and audio within comics pages to give online readers an interactive multimedia comics experience as they explore news events. Looking back at the “to do” list I put up at the end of January, I’m pleased to say that I’ve hit all the goals:

• Seda’s Interview, Pulse Interview and the Bhutan Doc are now all done and dusted
• I’ve finished my Bear Stearns Financial Crisis cartoon in Flash, just have to wrestle with pesky sound levels
• I’m delighted to say that Cartoon Movement will be running my Blackwater interactive comic, probably around May
• I’ve presented my interactive comic web app (using sample pages from the history of Pakistan piece) to the folks at Google news – more news on that front to come
• I’ve inched closer to finishing Hardhats, but have hit upon the bizarre hurdle that the more I trim and edit it, the more new pages need drawing. The goal is to have part 1 wrapped up by the end of March.

I’ll next week with news of some future projects, as well as some previews of the above – including my first experiment with text animation in After Effects.