March 2009

M.S. Corley redesigns Harry Potter a la Penguin Classics.

Although it is Sunday, we had not planned on reading comics until Storybird tipster dger pointed our beak to Joel Johnson’s blog and his post on Wally Wood’s “22 Panels that Always Work.” (Large version here.)

We had seen Wood’s panel before and, like many, assumed he used it as a catalogue of ideas to mentor other artists. But Johnson, who purchased a hi-rez scan of the original paste-up in New York, contacted Wood’s previous assistant to ask about the origin of the document.

Ironically (and rather understandably), Wood didn’t so much use the manual to help other artists as he did to reduce his workload by avoiding unncessary choices. Larry Hama, Wood’s assistant, explained:

I don’t believe that Woody put the examples together as a teaching aid for his assistants, but rather as a reminder to himself. He was always trying to kick himself to put less labor into the work! He had a framed motto on the wall, “Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.” He hung the sheets with the panels on the wall of his studio to constantly remind himself to stop what he called “noodling.”

We are now wondering if such a pithy visual guide exists for building startups focused on collaborative storytelling.

We are smitten with Tom Gauld and Simone Lia, illustrators both and owners of Cabanon Press in the UK.

We direct your attention to Exhibit A, Tom’s Characters for an Epic Tale:

Tom’s wit is only surpassed by Simone’s warmth:

If your cruel, hardened heart hasn’t come to life yet, we leave you with the masterstroke:

Many thanks to Creative Review for the profile and Michael Nobbs for the tweet.

Our inaugural post describes Storybird as “collaborative storytelling.” But what does that mean?

If you read the FAQ on our soon-to-be-launched service, you’d find:

Storybird is a social media service that uses collaborative storytelling to connect kids and families. Two people author a Storybird—one with words, one with pictures—and then share it with their network. The final product can be printed, watched on screen, played with like a toy, or shared through a worldwide library.

If you turned those words into pictures, it might look like this:

Storybirds are a process that works like a game, media that can live on any device, and objects that we can share among family and friends.

Early on, we were asked “why not just call them books?” Well, Storybirds aren’t always books. Sometimes they live solely on the web. And, if they ARE printed, they could just as easily be sequential postcards you mail to your aunt every week or a poster series.

Storybirds aren’t purely stories, either. Making a Storybird is often like playing a game, with two people taking turns riffing on each other’s ideas.

Really, Storybirds are a new form factor. They combine aspects of games, publishing, and social media.

When we’re in elevators and, you know, have to give an elevator pitch? We say “you read them like stories, play them like games, and send them like greeting cards.” That seems to work.

(Teenage Witch courtesy of the amazing Sebastiaan Van Doninck from Antwerp, Belgium. More on his work—and generosity—in a future post.)

The trailer for Where The Wild Things Are hit the internets today, causing us to wonder about the task of adapting Maurice Sendak’s classic for the screen.

We pecked around and found a giant interview with director Spike Jonze on Ain’t it Cool News from last November that contained a few gems:

One of the things I was worried about is that the book is just so beloved to so many people. And as I started to have ideas for it I was worried that I was just making what it means to me, and what the book triggers in me from when I was a kid. And I’d be worried that other people were gonna be disappointed, because it’s like adapting a poem. It can mean so much to so many different people.

And Maurice was very insistent that that’s all I had to do… just make what it was to me, just to make something personal and make something that takes kids seriously and doesn’t pander to them. He told me that when his book came out, it was considered dangerous. It was panned by critics and child psychologists and librarians, because it wasn’t how kids were talked to. And it took like only two years after the book was out that kids started finding it in the libraries, and basically kids discovered it and made it what it is. And now it’s 40 years later and it’s a classic. So he said you just have to make something according to your own instinct.

This part is lovely:

Kids are complicated, and they’re in touch with all those feelings. I didn’t want to make a movie that was just sad, or just heavy, or just anxious. I think I tried to make a movie that had a lot of the other sides of kids too; there are also soft feelings and sweet feelings and I think I tried to make the movie have Max’s imagination, Max’s sense of play, of love and hope and caring, but just let him be complicated, and the world that he goes to in order to figure out what’s going on be as complicated as he needs it to be.

And on the five years it’s taken:

It’s so long and it’s so complicated. I think by the time we got to Australia and were shooting it, the realities of what we were trying to do set in. It was exhausting and insane to be out on these cliffs in southern Australia where there’s 60 mph winds, and you’ve got all these guys in suits, and you’ve got this little boy who’s freezing. When I was writing it, I kind of knew it was complicated, but I kind of just had to be willfully naïve about that to not get bogged down.

If you loved the trailer as much as we did (Lance Acord’s photography is stunning), you may have noticed a slightly different cut of The Arcade Fire’s Wake Up which, according to the savvy folks at The Playlist, may have been prepped just for the trailer.

We like Derek’s post about the amazing capabilities we’ve been given to create, make, or contribute—something.

There has never been a better time to be making media. There are more tools to help than ever. There are more media consumers and media producers than ever. The world is more literate and media savvy than it’s ever been.

Our bird’s eye view: production costs are near zero, as is marketing. Distribution is global and always on. And interaction fidelity via social networks and platforms means we can easily interact with the people for whom (or with) we create.

Creating—something—doesn’t have to be much. It can be an avatar, a blog, a tweet, an upload. But it’s the first step away from passive consumption and towards active participation. It’s an inch closer to community and citizenship. And it’s virtuous: you get what you give.

We have no idea what artist Irina Troitskaya is saying in this delicious editorial (if you speak Russian, we’re blog@storybird.com), but we like how the bird appears to have foiled the fox. (We have always suspected fox wasn’t too bright, particularly after we got hound drunk at the new year’s stag party. The stories he told.)

Your very own Mr. Moggie pop-up house is just some scissors and glue away. Katie Hanratty’s blog, via Little Chimp Society.

We ♥ Thierry Martin.