‘Tangled Threads’ was an eBook designed to act as a film storyboard, as part of Proboscis’ Sensory Threads project. Scripted by Karen Martin and Alice Angus, and illustrated by Mandy Tang, the book is a series of intricately rendered scenes and captions, but the real draw is how Mandy has incorporated pop-up inserts at the back which the reader can cut out and assemble, adding new layers of depth to the pages.

You can have a peek at the digital version below – minus pop-ups, of course – and read posts from Karen and Mandy explaining how it was made.

Download, make and read ‘Tangled Threads’ for yourself.

11am – 6pm, on Saturday 24th September, in the Whitechapel Gallery foyer.

Click on the picture below to view the Flickr gallery.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Du9XaMN5hM&w=640&h=390]

They’ve also animated scenes from Maurice Gee’s novel, Going West, using the actual pages from the book. This one beggars belief.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBec95Mv8G8&w=640&h=390]

These remind me of Karen Martin’s previous posts that featured similar concepts, particularly pieces by Yuken Terya and Brian Dettmer. Oh, what humble paper is capable of.

Xavier Antin has constructed an extraordinary printing chain made from a stencil duplicator (1880), a spirit duplicator (1923), a laser printer (1969), and an inkjet printer (1976) – spanning almost one hundred years of technology. Each uses a single ink from the CMYK colour model, which explains why the book printed through it resembles a series of hazy retro 3D images ; a disorientating, yet impressive effect.

Abigail Reynolds collages different images of the same building or scene, then cuts and fold’s portions of the overlaying paper to produce new representations with depth and occasionally dizzying perspectives. A similar effect could be created with eBooks, by printing on both sides of the paper, and manipulating the top layer. Getting the orientation right would be tricky, but the end result could be intriguing. Anyone up to the task?

Another gem which has been featured on www.fastcodesign.com, and something my brain is still trying to recover from. Created by Michael Hansmeyer, and constructed from 2700 laser cut sheets of cardboard with wooden cores, these columns were spawned by an algorithm fed into a computer, forming “computational architecture”, with up to 16 MILLION facets. It’s absolutely staggering. After being cut out, the sheets left behind form a negative, empty-space column. The image of this is unreal; it looks like the hallucinatory imaginings of an alien spacecraft, mechanical yet almost organic, something that wouldn’t be out of place from the trippy sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Blow your mind here.

These zines are tiny – no larger than a 10¢ piece. Apparently these are the smaller versions of Stephanie’s original Hamburger zine.

It would be great to create similar things by publishing an eBook with various ingredients that just need to be cut out and coloured in, then assembled. A cookbook for paper food – each page a different dish!

Stephanie’s burger zines are available here.

In answer to my question Google came up with a couple of examples of projects that claim to be bringing pop-up books to the iPad. The first is Pilgrim’s Progress by Tako Games. Although entirely computer-generated the video that accompanies this eBook suggests that Pilgrim’s Progress combines moving around a 3-dimensional scene that closely resembles a paper pop-up book (the ‘cover’ of the book is a very literal digitisation of an antique leather book) with some dynamic elements such as changing text within the text box. I found it difficult to tell from the video how much of this would be controlled by the reader.

The second suggestion by Google was Alice in Wonderland by AtomicAntelope. While clearly drawing on pop-up books for inspiration this feels like it is also pushing the format into new areas by exploiting the touchscreen to trigger events and, quite beautifully, using the built-in accelerometer and orientation sensors to control visual effects such as flying cards, Alice growing and shrinking and rocking the pigbaby to sleep.

While I have to confess that watching the Alice in Wonderland video made me wish I owned an iPad so I could play with this, I also wonder – if every book feels like an electronic device then, however visually compelling the eBook, won’t this somehow feel like a sensory reduction of the reading experience?

While Alice was out getting lunch I took some sneaky photos of the 3-dimensional illustrations she’s been working on. The drawings for these come from the ones made in Brixton and Coventry for the Empty Shops Network tour. Parts of them have then been cut out, folded and re-attached to give a diorama feel.

I’d love to see my pop-up eBook experiments and Alice’s drawings come together some day to create a colourful hand-drawn eBook pop-up extravaganza.

This week bookleteer has been supporting the project Seven Days in Seven Dials: a week in the life of London’s Culture Quarters organised by Dan Thompson of the Empty Shops Network. Over the past days more than 30 young staff of 9 arts organisations based in Seven Dials, Covent Garden, London have been working to put together a temporary exhibition at 18 Shorts Gardens. The exhibition opens tomorrow (Saturday 10 July 2010) and runs until Friday 23 July.

Working with professional podcasters, photographers and artists the participants have been exploring the history of the area, cultural and historical links between the organisations involved in the project, and individual experiences of the participant’s day-to-day activities within their organisations. There is a short video on YouTube that gives an idea of the work they’ve been doing and the fun they’ve been having.

Alice has been in Seven Dials all week along with Karine and Shalene from Proboscis to show participants how to use bookleteer and helping them transform their material into eBooks and StoryCubes.

Read more about the project on artistsandmakers.com and see pictures of it on Dan’s Flickr stream.

I’m only at Proboscis one day a week and what with blog posts and organising the Pitch Up & Publish on Augmented Reading my own eBook-and-Story-Cube-as-object experiments have taken a bit of a back seat. This week though I found time to work on my pop-up eBook and have now completed the two eBooks that contain the pop-up bases and the pop-up figures.

All of the pop-ups I’m using are downloads from Robert Sabuda’s website. To put them into the eBook I had to cut all of the pop-up base images in half because they will span two eBook pages. These split images then had to be aligned vertically and horizontally so that they were at the correct spacing for the pop-up figures. This is the point I’ve now reached.

The cut-out butterfly figure ready to be attached to the butterfly page in the pop-up base eBook

The idea is that you will download both eBooks and cut out the pop-up figures and fold and stick them onto the right page of the pop-up base eBook. I’m also going to be putting together an eBook of instructions for you to follow. But that’s something for next week..

As you can see from these pictures I’ve started playing around with fitting my individual pop-up pictures into the more linear procedure of a book. I’ve used the quite unimaginative title of A Walk in the Country to provide a narrative to the pictures.

Butterfly and Tree pop-up pictures in the eBook

The photos above are of my original pop-ups pictures from here glued into a blank eBook as I experimented with size, position and story. The photographs below show my first attempts to convert this into a shareable eBook that you will be able to download and make-up for yourselves. In fact, two or maybe even three eBooks will be needed to make one pop-up eBook.

The first eBook has the bases of the pop-ups printed directly onto the pages – you can see this below. The second eBook will contain the pop-up figures. These will need to be cut-out and stuck to the pop-up bases. Instructions on how to do this will either be in the eBook with the pop-up figures, or possibly in a separate eBook  depending on how many instructions are required. Currently I’m trying to think of how to make this whole process as straightforward as possible.

Base for the Butterfly pop-up and Birdhouse pop-up printed as an eBook with cut-out butterfly and bird figures

I’m also mulling over how much narrative to add to the eBook. Leaving the pages without text would allow you to write your own story around the pop-up pictures and I like this idea very much. Another option is to colour the pop-ups and the eBook pages then scan these pages in so people can download and make-up a complete ready illustrated pop-up eBook. Or maybe I’ll offer both options..

My tests for making a pop-up eBook.

Inspired by Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhardt (who I wrote about here) I’ve been working on making a pop-up eBook. I chose the loose theme of ‘A walk in the country’ and selected pop-ups from Robert Sabuda’s website to fit this concept. All of the pop-ups are labelled ‘easy’ except for the pig where I tried out an intermediate level design (woo!). And they really were easy to make. The base and the figures are provided for you to print out and then step-by-step instructions are given with photographs to guide you through the making up process. It would be difficult to go wrong!

At the moment the pop-ups exist as individual pages and my next step is to fit them into the eBook format. Because of the way that eBooks sequence the pages I will need to cut the bases in two so that they span the whole width of the eBook when it’s open.I’m planning it as two eBooks to download, one will have the bases and one the figures. Cutting the figures out of book 2 and adding to the bases in book 1 will complete the pop-up. Keep reading the bookleteer blog to find out how I get on!

9 – 5 is a book of hand-cut images showing the shape and colour of a tree transforming through the seasons. Alongside this three miniature books nest inside the book cover illustrating smaller transformations of the tree at different speeds and times. The image below is not actually from the book because I couldn’t find any accessible photos of it. Instead these two pictures are from Chisato’s Season series and similar enough to give you some idea of the beautiful colours and delicate nature of the work.

Two untitled images from Season series

queue is designed as a pop-up book and as a fold-out pop-up scene. As a book each page shows a single car that, once unfolded, line up to form a traffic jam.

queue as a fold-out pop-up scene

The last project I’ll write about is branches which combines elements of both of the above (and do check out Chisato’s website because there are many more fabulous works to see!) branches is a pop-up book that explores the transformation of a family of trees in different seasons and of different generations. Like queue, branches can also be viewed as a fold-out scene showing all of the trees simultaneously.

I find these books completely inspiring and after looking at these I’m impatient for my next session of bookleteer experiments (last week I played with pop-ups and I’ll write about the results of that soon). I would love to see what Chisato would make out of the bookleteer eBooks and StoryCubes..

All of the projects I describe here (and more) are on Chisato’s website..

From Alices Adventures in Wonderland by Robert Sabuda

I came across the work of Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart when I was investigating the idea of making an e-Book pop-up book. Robert and Matthew’s books don’t just pop – they also spin, slide and grow! While the subject of the books is often aimed at children the construction is most definitely for adults. The pop-up of Alice growing inside a house, or the tornado spinning across Kansas in the Wizard of Oz have me mystified!

The spinning tornado in The Wizard of Oz by Robert Sabuda

From watchingthe video I learnt that Robert began by making white pop-ups and this became something of a signature style for him. The construction seems simpler in these books and is matched by the simplicity of the style to create something I think is  beautiful.

You can find their all their books on Robert’s website and Robert and Matthew reveal a little more about their craft in this video here..