Week 3 has been one of late nights, and difficult code. Harking back to my web design days, I was eventually awake until 7am as I tried to work out a way to make Apple’s iBooks Author present my graphic novels in a way I wanted – full screen, and able to zoom images larger than full screen in order to see detail.
It may sound bizarre, but there’s no facility within the authoring program to do this natively, rather one has to mess around with HTML widgets to get it to work. Even then, having found a javascript system which gave me the pan and zoom I wanted, it still didn’t quite work. The solution was pretty neat, if I do say so myself. If I don’t go with this for the immediate term of getting The Metaning published, it will be a solid foundation for a collected edition of Surfing The Deathline, as it will let me provide the ability for the reader switch the view to the original sketches, or different revisions of the script.
At the end of the week, I’m now exploring the “fixed layout” option for Epub2 format. It may give me the specific implementation I’m after, but it’s also possibly an ugly one.
I had my first class of the artstart programme, Camera Craft 2 at the Australian Centre for Photography. I’m not sure how to feel about it to be honest. It’s a required class for the Lighting class I’ve booked through them, but there’s no actual camera instruction involved, indeed, we don’t even need our cameras for the class. I think I’m going to have to be a bit more insistent with them about getting a complete course breakdown for lighting, because if it turns out to be predominantly theory, rather than a practical instruction in the setting up & use of studio lights, and if we’re not using our own cameras for it, then I suspect I’ll have more value in using the money for in-studio consulting.