Thinking About Ideas for my Ebook

After getting the brief and discussing it with my family, we have agreed that researching my grandfather would be a good choice for an ebook, as he was around in the Second World War. War times would be an interesting period to research and make an ebook about, as there was a lot going on at that point in time. As my father had compiled a big folder of information about him for his funeral, it will also be easy to find a lot of information about his past, so I will be able to do a lot of research about him from this, and hopefully find a great story to tell.
As for people I can interview, for this story, my nan would be a great help as she can also give her side of the story as well as narrate it.
So, I will be getting this folder shortly and having a look through it to see what I can find.

Looking at Existing Ebooks

To get an understanding of what my ebook could look like, I found some existing ebooks to get some ideas on how to make a layout or how to tell my story.
After Googling fora bit, I found some good examples of ebooks, although many ebooks are for children as the interactivity makes it easier for them to understand the story.

This is a trailer for Alice in Wonderland, that was remastered for the iPad. It is a good example of how interactivity can work in an ebook. A lot of the interactivity in this book comes from the reader moving and changing the imagery in the book. The illustrations are also well done to give a better sense of the story. The interactions include a lot of motion, where you have to move the iPad around to change what happens to the pictures. This kind of interactivity works for the the target audience, which would be children.

This is another ebook aimed at children, through it seems to be much younger children (around the ages 2-6). The illustrations in this ebook are much more cartoon like, and has a lot of tutorials to tell kids what to do with the interactive parts of the book. There are also extra games and features, such as puzzles and even an editor to let children make their own stories. I would say that the interactivity and drawings work well for the audience.

This ebook is based off of an informative book, which is brought to life by this ebook rendition. It helps explain things further with the help of diagrams and illustrations. The amount of interactivity in this book is much greater than the ones aimed at younger children, as this one allows users to change parts of the diagrams to show different information, and makes it easier to understand for younger readers. This book really shows the capabilities of ebooks, and how they can really bring out the best from the original text and can make it more accessible to others.

Here is another informative ebook which really shows how the ipad can make learning more interesting. It is about showing things that happened through time, and as such, there is a timeline where you can quickly choose what to learn about, and like the other informative ebook, uses illustrations to compliment the text. There are also animations to make the information more interesting and accessible.

Project Brief

For this project, I will need to create an ebook that will work on the iPad. In the brief, it says the subject matter of this ebook should be based around something to do with my family, whether it be a story about a family member, or about a place that one of them lives at. We should record the audio for this ebook as an interview, and this piece of audio should be no longer than 1 minute. We should also make an introduction sequence for our ebook.
This is the requirements for the ebook from the brief:
"You will source or generate text, images, sound, moving image and animation. The ebook must contain at least the following:
- A title page or cover which may be animated
- Text and images
- At least one audio interview with a family member, edited to tell the story in 1 minute or less
- Animated visual elements to accompany the interviews"

We will be using Adobe After Effects to create the animations for this ebook, as well as using Photoshop and Illustrator to create images. 

This assignment requires the following:

"- Attendance at pitches and crit presentations is compulsory
- Sketchbooks must be available for discussion with your tutors in every lesson and must be updated at least weekly throughout the project
- Blogs must be must be updated at least weekly throughout the project
- The pitch must be in the form of a presentation, prepared in advance of pitch session
- Production will be complete by the crit, so a full product is shown in the crit session, though changes and improvements can be made between crit and deadline"

 The pitch will take place on the 22nd of October, crit will be on the 5th of December and final submission is on the 12th of December.