I know I’m making a book for FYP, and I knew this way back during the summer when I was deciding what to make for B’s birthday. I decided to kill two birds with one stone and make him a book that I could also use as a personal experiment for a possible FYP outcome.
This project, part birthday present and part FYP experimentation, is called The Abandoned House. It’s a simple empty mansion story in the style of the choose-your-own-adventure Fighting Fantasy series. It incorporates puzzles to solve and codes to break to reach the goal, which is a thumb drive containing an EP of song covers I recorded with a couple of friends for him and a behind-the-scenes video of how the four of us recorded the mini album.
I even bothered to make album art for the mini album using a candid photo of B which I took before the semester started. I had a lot of fun making this and I wanted to bring the same spirit of fun to my FYP by reflecting on my making/conceptualizing process. I noticed that when I was working on The Abandoned House I paid very close attention to the details of my bookmaking and my narrative and even though I experienced so much frustration making sure the paragraphs of the story were all properly linked, it was a very conscious process with quite a rounded and rich outcome compared to when I tried to lock myself into my old FYP idea last month.
One of the main takeaways I have from this project is the feeling that it may not be such a bad thing to incorporate tech things into my outcome after all. I showed my mother The Abandoned House after I finished binding the pages and cover and she liked the idea of the embedded thumb drive. (I built it the same way I built my Dictionary last semester.) She suggested that I could use QR codes in my FYP to make the experience more interactive and immersive.
I’m an analog girl but I think I should challenge myself and keep up with the evolving pace of mixed media art especially with regard to book design. I’m really horrible at logo and brand design but I feel like all the books I’ve been making lately have an element of my personal touch to them that my branding work lacks. After two years I have learnt that I don’t enjoy brand design.
I was also reading Xiao Yan’s FYP report about her bookmaking/narrative-making process and it reassured me that I’m on the right track. I’m going to post again later today about book design ideas I have for my FYP. There’s a certain look and feel I’m moving towards and it involves gold foil.