How will users interact with mobile entertainment on this new hardware format?
How heavily could we animate the illustrations before the product became unrecognizable as a graphic novel?
As I was brought on to first focus on the project to organize the completion of design assets including script, illustration and animation, this question is what was driving leadership to make strategic decisions.
We had experience with entertainment products for iPhone, but the iPad format was different enough to require an open mind. I was lucky enough to be working with stakeholders that weren’t going to make the mistake of “design for the phone and make it bigger”. That said, we didn’t know what we didn’t know.
We were fortunate that the artists and creative director landed on a “just enough” approach to animation that allowed me the time to develop multimedia interactive features that added another layer of value to the product, and the potential for future products.
How did two separate startups manage to work together?
How much of the advanced gyroscopic features could we use before it interrupted the subtlety of interacting with paginated content?
Did we have the talent on the team to answer these questions?
The creative and developer teams were run as separate businesses, but formed around the same time to leverage the new market opportunity. As the leadership of both organizations had their own business driven priorities, I knew that without a win on this product the bet each startup was making would be lost. This product was the keystone of each business model. The tech side was investing in the platform, and the creative side was investing in the team, vision and production pipeline to be able to crank out work once smart practices were established.
We had some significant trouble stabilizing the creative team after some subcontractors failed to deliver on their agreements, but once the issue became evident the in house creatives had hit their stride and we were able to recover lost production time.
The developer side started making some UI decisions that didn’t match the polish on the rest of the product experience, so after some very difficult negotiations I freed up some of the budget to bring in a UI designer to make some very simple decisions about how the interaction should be programmed. This needed up saving us tons of time on testing later in production.
What made this a multimedia project?
Aside from managing production and stabilizing the business relationships, I took on archival media sourcing and writing creative dossiers on each character to fit the time and place of the story that was based on real events.
I sourced archival film reels, radio broadcasts, and photographs all in the public domain, that suited different moments in the script where readers could click deeper into the story. This added a layer of documenhtanty storytelling to the product that I still cherished from my time on The Key of G.
The product was launched with interactive folders that readers could open and enjoy, spreading out the contents like they were in a real archive.
In order to see this thing across the finish line, I recruited and contracted a PR team, usability testers and a sound designer (who I still work with today).
A highlight of our market development was handing an iPad to Scott McCloud, author of Reinventing Comics. He literally sat down on the floor in a hallway and talked to us for an hour about what he saw.
As I was in contract negotiations with the writer for our next title, the creative director decided to fold the business, as he didn’t enjoy the life of a startup founder. I decided that was enough of Silicon Valley and I left for New York for grad school and down time on braiding together everything I’d learned so far.