For this paper engineering project Steve asked us to decide on a fairy tale and produce a pop up book on that tale. Before we did this however Steve brought in some examples of interactive / 3d books to inspire us :
These two in particular stood out to me, I liked the dark but delicate cuttings out and this is where I got the idea to do Rapunzel. I decided on this fairytale mainly through the visuals I had created in my head. I thought the long flow of hair, bricks in a building and a forest scene would look magical in a pop up book, so this is when I started testing and sketching ideas.
Firstly I hand drew a tower with some vines wrapped around it, then I decided to move on and produce some visuals on photoshop (before I moved to Illustrate)
What I wanted to make was an A5 sized book, and once I had written out the story I divided it into 5 separate pages, to convey the story using different visuals for each element and key part. Below are my designs on Illustrate for a few of the pages:
The designing for this project was really interesting for me, I was able to chose specific elements on each page that I wanted to pop out, for example the page above the music notes would be cut out separately and stuck down to make them pop out. I wanted to make the book colourful which was a change of plan slightly compared to my first idea as I wanted to have one page and put a market twist on it!
I became more confident using Illustrate with this project which I'm really happy about as that was one software I didn't particularly like doing, but now would be happy too.
When it came to making my book I intended to print it out on normal a4 paper, then get some thin cardboard to stick the 3D elements too in order to make them stand out more, however when it came to printing I had some difficulty. I exported the file and sent it to print, however only 3 pages came out at the correct size, the others came out very small. So I tried again, altering the settings as much as I could and still didn't manage to get it how I wanted it, and the deadline was looming.
What I decided to do was make use of what I had, although this project and aim was to make a 3D pop up book, I think I focused too much on using illustrate to build my confidence, that I over estimated A; the amount of time I had and B; the amount I wanted to complete. I think if I set myself a goal of one pop out I would have completed it, but because I had larger ideas I thought I would push myself out of my comfort zone and produce a whole book.
I wouldn't say i'm pleased with my 'book' what so ever, however saying that over the past 5 ish weeks I have built my confidence using Illustrate and would now be happy to do a project just using that software which i'm very happy with. Perhaps digital books are my forte, but if I were to do this again I would reduce the amount of pages and make better use of my time!
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