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Rocking ‘The Boat’: Websites and Interactive Graphic Novels

10th January 2016 by William Corner Leave a Comment

Websites and Comics: Joining the Dots

Websites have more in common with comics than you might imagine:

both employ words and pictures in various strategic combinations within the confines of a (usually frame-based) layout,
both rely on the careful design of that layout to guide the eye from one element to the next,
and, controversially, both cater for shorter attention spans than commonly required for longform reading.

The relationship is close enough for comic theorist Scott McCloud’s book, ‘Understanding Comics’ (and also the sequel ‘Reinventing Comics’) to be held up by several web designers as providing greater insight into their field than many books on web design. While short comic strips such as those found on xkcd and The Oatmeal adapt themselves fairly well to the web, often presented exactly as they would be in print, attempts to transform the comic on the web have traced a faint line between enhanced experience and distracting gimmick.

McCloud, a widely-regarded authority on comics, wrote about this issue in a 2009 blog post where he drew attention to the self-referential experimentation of French comic artist Yves Bigerel, exploring how storytelling could be enhanced through a proper attention to the possibilities afforded by the web, particularly the ability to reveal elements and overlay frames in interesting and surprising ways. Bigerel’s DeviantArt showcase is illustrative of the playful, cheeky and subversive culture which has often surrounded the art form. The experiments were created using Adobe Flash, which, due to its proprietary nature and lack of mobile device support, has since been abandoned in favour of HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. McCloud does not agree with all of these ideas – his own key suggestion, touched on here in this TED talk, is to employ an ‘infinite canvas’ – expanding the flow of words and pictures in a way that is uninhibited by the conventions of the page or even the dimensions of the screen. A recent take on the infinite canvas can be found in Rachel Nabors’ proof-of-concept, ‘Alice in Videoland’. Nabors’ goal was to show that using the power of modern web browsers, McCloud’s ideas could now be implemented by people with a range of skill-sets without going too deep down the rabbit hole of one particular discipline.

Heightened Perceptions: Reality and Caricature

While I do not usually read episodic comics, I have read a number of so-called ‘graphic novels’, including From Hell, Persepolis, Maus, Palestine, Logicomix and, most recently, Alice in Sunderland. Most of these works are based on re-interpreting historical characters and events. The ‘graphic novel’ monicker has been applied to longform superhero or fantasy comics which aim at a more mature or sophisticated exploration of character and theme and there is some controversy over its use in marketing by publishers who may wish to disown the term, ‘comic’ altogether.

From reading my very particular selection of historical/biographical comics, here’s what I’ve come to believe: the freedom allowed in comic art to creatively reshape perception through graphic illustration, allows for a kind of heightened attention to how things are perceived in general. Since comics tend to visually re-shape the world more aggressively than photographs and live-action film, they function as a caricature of ‘realist’ perception (perhaps that is why they are sometimes seen as only appropriate for the untamed perceptions of children). This is why, for me, an animated film like Waltz with Bashir (which was made in part using Adobe Flash), can create a sense of ‘heightened perception’ – small details impact with an intensity that would be lost if they were presented in a more conventionally ‘realistic’ way (in the case of Waltz with Bashir this ‘heightened perception’ is thrown into relief with a sudden lurch into live-action documentary video). To look upon a particular railing or wine bottle, the dirt on a window or the crease of a brow, conveyed through the hand and eye of an artist, can provoke greater reflection on how we experience the world. This, of course, is no major news – it is readily applied to our reactions to impressionist or expressionist painting – in fact, any form of painting or visual art, but it is not always applied to storytelling through illustrations, which is why comics and animations have had a fight (in some countries, at least) to be recognised as ‘serious’ forms of art. Japan is, of course, often held up as a culture that embraces the impressionistic possibilities of graphic illustration in manga and anime, running the full gamut from science-fiction through pornography to romance and historical drama.

Creative Friction: Writing ‘The Boat’

And so we come to the ‘interactive graphic novel’, ‘The Boat’, commissioned by the Australian broadcaster SBS, and launched in Spring 2015. ‘The Boat’ was originally a short story written by prize-winning Australian author Nam Le and published back in 2008. It relates the journey of a Vietnamese girl as she is smuggled out of Vietnam and onto a refugee boat bound for Australia. The story is part of a collection, also called ‘The Boat’, a product of the creative friction of Le choosing to move against his instinctive rejection of writing ‘immigrant stories’ – a process which puts a meta-fictional spin on the ‘ethnic voice’ as being somehow inherently more authentic and therefore worthy of the attention of literary publishers. Is there any irony then, in the fact that a story embedded in a work of self-reflective post-colonial literature has ended up as a showcase for cutting-edge digital storytelling, commissioned by a national broadcaster? The project was commissioned for the 40th Anniversary of the fall of Saigon and was intended to give weight to the foundation narrative of the Vietnamese diaspora.

We should pause for a moment to consider why what might be considered more ‘worthy’ subject matter gets, quite rightly, green-lighted for web-based storytelling projects? Most likely it is because of the way that storytelling content presented on a website does not have the mass audience appeal of more ‘conventional’ digital media (videos, ebooks, mp3s) which people will pay to stream or download. Examples of web-based storytelling with high production values are often non-commercial projects funded by cultural institutions or straight-out advertising campaigns. An example of the former is The educational website for ‘Ice and Sky’, an expensively produced and freely available exercise in web-based storytelling, which explains the origins of climate change science (and which also happens to start with a boat at sea). In contrast, we have an advert for the Peugeot Hybrid 4 (a high-profile proof-of-concept advert showcased on many web design sites) and a Christmas campaign for Welsh public transport.

Motion Sickness: Animating Words and Pictures

‘The Boat’ provokes a strong sense of internal space and perception of the external world. This ‘heightened perception’ very much fits the creative re-shaping I mentioned earlier and is embodied in the hand-painted sumi-e style artwork of Vietnamese-American artist Matt Huynh. Sumi-e is the Japanese black ink painting associated with zen circles, bamboo stalks and cherry trees – a style which along with ukiyo-e woodblock prints, influenced both European Impressionism and the Japanese manga style of comic art. This makes the whole experience feel more organic than is usually the case with digital comics. Strokes are broad and free, suggesting motion blur and the physical and psychological instability of the protagonists. In a similar way to Waltz with Bashir, ‘ The Boat’ places photos of a real refugee boat and Vietnamese refugees at the end of the story, juxtaposing these realist archival images with the impressionist/expressionist presentation which has come before. ‘The Boat’ makes use of the HTML5 canvas element, which provides a standardised way of manipulating complex visual layouts on a web page. This means we are moving towards websites which require recent hardware to render a smooth visual experience in a similar way to the ‘system requirements’ of video games and you may find things flow rather less well if you’re trying to view it on a 10-year-old laptop. However, the adherence to core web technologies should mean that the boat will be available to view for as long as SBS continue to host it – one of the key issues in web-based storytelling is the longevity of the technologies used.

An important enhancement of the work is the use of movement created by the parallax effect popularised in ‘Snow Fall’ and taken further here with true 3D elements (using a JavaScript library called three.js). A usability issue levelled against the parallax effect is that it causes motion sickness – the effect is disorienting, but with ‘The Boat’, I imagine that this is kind of the point. The intention of a piece of dramatic storytelling on the web may well be to move in the opposite direction from the research suggested by User Experience design in order to actively confuse and disorient the user/reader. In some sections, sentences lurch into view at unexpected angles or materialise from the background. I am reminded here of the novel, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, where paragraphs and fragments of text are re-arranged on the page to create an unfolding and disorienting sense of space. Danielewski was working with the idea that the pages of a printed book could take on the visual fabric of film and with the ‘The Boat’ we glimpse the potential (and the problems) of animating words on the screen subjected to the motion they describe.

The use of reveals and ‘beats’, indicated by Bigrel’s earlier experiments, are deployed here, but occur when you scroll down the page rather than click, the images and words flowing into view. This downwards motion gives the strong impression that you are somehow ‘descending into’ the story, creating a new form of spatial and temporal relation to narrative. Moments of tension are created with the scrolling motion when, for example, a body is thrown overboard. Sound also plays a major role in the presentation – we read about what we hear and storms and songs fade in and out in synchronicity with the visuals. The title section states that ‘Headphones are recommended’, suggesting an introspective, solitary pursuit.

‘The Boat’ website is so fully immersed in audio-visual fluidity that it might just about escape the accusation of trying to digitally enhance any conventional reading experience. It could also qualify as embodying some of what Scott McCloud has meant by the idea of an ‘infinite canvas’. While this does not establish a new paradigm, it makes a provocative case not only for how a comic or graphic novel can be transformed by the digital medium but also for what can be done in the emerging sphere of interactive web-based literary production.

This article is part of a blog series about Storytelling and web design.

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The ‘Snow Fall’ Effect: Parallax Storytelling on the Web

10th December 2015 by William Corner Leave a Comment

In 2012, The New York Times published a web-based ‘feature article’ called ‘Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek’. The story, written by John Branch, depicts the real-life tragedy of an avalanche encountered during the dangerous pursuit of back-country skiing. There are graphic descriptions of the aftermath; it is compelling reading. There is a strong sense of the ‘natural sublime’; the landscape is vast, awe-inspiring and capable of large-scale devastation. There is also an element of voyeurism related to the human tragedy that perhaps cannot be detached from the innovative visual presentation. ‘Snow Fall’ became famous for pioneering a high-production-value longform reading experience on the web, transformed by various multimedia elements and a technique known as parallax scrolling. The article led to a figurative avalanche of ‘art-directed’ longform multimedia features and a swirl of debate about their effectiveness.

The Parallax View: Multi-layered Storytelling

While parallax scrolling has its origins in the multiplane camera effects of animated films such as Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, parallax as a visual effect in computer graphics dates back to 80s video games (‘Moon Patrol’ is credited with being the first to employ it). I remember being ten years old and standing in a department store, staring wide-eyed at an Amiga 500 running ‘Shadow of the Beast’. The side-scrolling background was created from 12 ‘parallax’ layers, each layer scrolling slightly slower than the one above to create an uncanny illusion of depth through motion – in this case, a green field receding towards the mountains. The visual trick was a technical achievement for the time, summoning a landscape greater than the confines of the screen.

As video game hardware has become capable of producing true 3D environments, the 2D speed-based parallax effect has fallen out of favour. In recent years, parallax has been revived in web design, where it is used as a way of adding depth to (mostly) vertically scrolling websites. It has become a frequent design element in web-based storytelling, more often in journalistic features than works of fiction. In 2015 parallax has been around long enough to have peaked as a trend – major websites like Spotify, which previously employed parallax on their landing pages, have since redesigned them to be parallax-free. A University study showed mixed results about the effectiveness of parallax in User Experience (UX) design. However, User Experience (UX) or User Interface (UI) design trends are often concerned precisely with use – their utilitarian focus does not always reflect the new user/reader hybrid – are you browsing a hotel website or reading about an avalanche? While Parallax is only one of many techniques used in visual storytelling, it has perhaps been the most prominent and controversial. As we become more comfortable with web-based storytelling, we must ask if parallax adds anything to the longform reading experience and what might develop from its use.

Portrait and Landscape: The Importance of Frames

Unlike Kafka’s Wound (the focus of my previous post), ‘Snow Fall’ is a steadfastly linear read; parallax only works when the user/reader scrolls (most often from top to bottom) to further the progression of the story. ‘Snow Fall’ uses Chapters as clear starting points for the scroll, but once started, the reader encounters transitions rather than page turns; the parallax effect is employed at the top of the chapter and at various intervals where the page breaks away leaving the eye dangling over an animated mountain range. Perhaps ‘Snow Fall’ became an archetype precisely because the expansive visual experience reflected the subject matter. The point of using an effect such as parallax should be to exploit the relationship between form and content in a process of ‘framing’.

The parallax effect is just one aspect of this framing strategy in ‘Snow Fall’. As the page scrolls down, we encounter multimedia elements that fade into and out of the white background. The story is accompanied by a range of animated map data. We view the story from multiple angles or ‘frames of reference’; from the formal and scientific viewpoint of infographic data to the intimate personal viewpoint of photo galleries and testimonial video – often very emotionally charged in tone. ‘Snow Fall’ includes raw audio of a Mountain Rescue radio operator reporting the deaths of members of the group to friends and relatives back at the ski resort. The audio is embedded beside the writer’s description of the event – this is a still strange multimedia combination of prose writing trying to describe something that is also included ‘as it is’. This comparative space between the thing and its description now extends from the static relation of photographs and illustrations to temporal audio and video.

‘Snow Fall’ won a Pulitzer Prize and attracted much publicity in the online and offline print world, to the extent that ‘to snowfall’ became a niche verb-meme in the digital publishing industry and a ‘Snowfaller in chief’ was appointed at The New York Times. Praise and criticism is well documented in the web design blogosphere. Bobbie Johnson, writing on behalf of the well-known digital publishing platform, Medium, wrote an article called ‘Snowfallen’ in 2013 with the subhead reading ‘Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should.’ Jonson was concerned that, in the wake of ‘Snow Fall’s impact, longform publishing platforms such as Medium would be expected to create more ‘innovative’ multimedia articles. We hear the familiar accusation of distracting presentation: “Can you even remember what happens in Snowfall? Do you remember who wrote it? What did the multimedia help you do?” These questions are best answered by reading ‘Snow Fall’ for yourself. Johnson goes on to point out the disconnect between form and content: “When you add multimedia elements, they have to work for the reader. They have to be in the service of the reading experience. They have to make the story better. Instead, they’re already starting to become the entire point of the experience.” The problem, as I see it, is that ‘Snow Fall’ fitted the ‘frame’ and that there is justified reservation about trying to fit other content into that same design.

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Johnson provides a useful crowed-sourced google spreadsheet of articles similar to ‘Snow Fall’ which gives you an idea of how the technique has been used elsewhere (as well as some earlier attempts at multimedia storytelling). Notable examples are music website Pitchfork’s art-directed ‘cover stories’ on Bat for Lashes and Daft Punk, both of which incorporate animated photoshoot imagery into a multiplane magazine-style layout, and a subsequent NYT article called ‘Tomato Can Blues’, which combines parallax with graphic novel-style artwork to tell the true story of a cage fighter who faked his own death. In the case of the Pitchfork articles and ‘Tomato Can Blues’, the ‘framing’ is far more portrait than landscape. Interestingly, ‘Tomato Can Blues’ uses the multiplane layering of parallax to create a sense of claustrophobia instead of expanse.

An alternative example of web-based visual storytelling can be found in ‘Firestorm’, created by The Guardian (a rival to The New York Times for innovative web journalism). ‘Firestorm’ is the story surrounding the smartphone photos taken by a Tasmanian family stranded out on a jetty during a savage bushfire. Once again we are immersed in a sense of foreboding for most of the read, which leads to the depiction of a natural disaster; in the case of ‘Snow Fall’, the avalanche, in the case of ‘Firestorm’ the Bushfire. ‘Firestorm’ is more multimedia heavy than ‘Snow Fall’ using looping video backgrounds behind sparse text. Because of the constraints of video we are back in more familiar screen/frame territory here – a more claustrophobic experience. While Firestorm does not use the parallax effect to depict its landscape, it still uses the scroll to tell its story.

Given the range of web-based templates, libraries and services available now it is relatively easy to reproduce the basic framing devices of ‘Snow Fall’. The makers of a web design tool called Skroll Kit were apparently sued by The New York Times after they posted a YouTube video claiming that the layout could be replicated using their tool in about an hour. Skroll Kit has since been sold to Automattic, the commercial arm of WordPress, but there are numerous online solutions for building a multimedia story, such as Atavist, Shorthand, Racontr and the WordPress plugin, Aesop Story Engine.

The parallax effect is capable of creating an immersive visual experience given the right content, but it doesn’t add out-of-the-box enhancement to visual storytelling. More often than not, when used without consideration, parallax can disengage a sense of continuity between form and content. The stereotypical parallax site wants to suggest expanse – parallax website templates often use stock photos of mountain ranges to showcase their visual effects in a strange echo of ‘Shadow of the Beast’ on the Amiga 500. It is vital that these types of effect are used appropriately as ways to frame particular content. However, it is also possible for the content to reconfigure the frame in interesting and unusual ways.

Perhaps one of the most visually striking recent examples of Parallax in storytelling can be found in ‘The Boat’, a web-based animated graphic novel commissioned by Australian broadcasting company SBS and based on a short story by Nam Le. ‘The Boat’ uses parallax, animation, sound and scanned sumi-e artwork. Here parallax suggests both the expanse of the ocean and physical and psychological claustrophobia. I will be looking more closely at ‘The Boat’ in my next blog post.

This article is part of a blog series about Storytelling and web design.