Commissioned by Roscommon County Council Library Services to work in collaboration with family learning programme Project Designer, Mary Duignan. She was responsible for the overall concept and for creating the artwork with the mothers and children from different backgrounds. Our job here at Black Hole Studio was to enable her idea to be made a reality. Working together we figured out the best way of working considering that the families would be meeting to make artwork on paper for the project. It was decided to capture all of this work by scanning each and every piece needed for the final layout and put it together using Adobe InDesign, which also allowed us to make an online interactive ebook. The book was to be in three languages representing people form the different cultures that took part in the collaboration, which meant working with multimedia to include them. Particularly troublesome was the Arabic as this is written from right to left which meant the Adobe World Ready Composer had to be utilised and although a great tool, it was just a little frustrating trying to fit everything together that worked well on the page when any of the Arabic text was changed, but we got there in the end.
Scanning the artwork
Once all the images were scanned and the lay-out was finalised for the hard copy version it was time to go back and prepare the same book, but this time with an interactive theme for the online version. A lot of animation had to be added as well as hot-spots to enable sounds and action to work together. As it had been decided to work in three languages we needed to have the text spoken in three languages as well. Working with interpreters we translated the english text and got voice-over actors to read the text for us. We required a delivery method for the three different languages and we came up with a simple solution of colour-coded dots to represent each one.
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Check out the interactive version below!