Storyboard Notebook
Published by Christy Dena April 30th, 2005 in HCTI, hyperfic.
Eastgate Systems have brought out a blank notebook with storyboard boxes for sketching screen-based ideas whilst on the move.
These durable and well-made Italian Moleskine notebooks are filled with heavy, acid-free paper that is lightly ruled with storyboard frames — perfect for sketching narrative ideas for new media. Some pages have 2 frames per page, others have 4 frames. The rules are light — you can draw outside the box — and graceful. The paper is perfect for writers — smooth, solid, elegant, and durable.
The notebook is further described as the ‘perfect travel journal for visual thinking’. I think the boxes are a great idea, though somewhat of a novelty: how did lined paper or blank paper stop or inhibit visual thinking? The idea of having a framing that is dedicated to a square, to a box, to a screen is interesting and is perhaps a sign of the movement away from Walter Ong’s secondary-orality to another?…
It’s interesting that the codex book proves the best method for thinking visually on the go (though I must admit a weakness for all things Italian).
Meanwhile, I’ve recently had a much better experience with Jeremy’s method of using notecards for composition of hyperfiction has worked much better. It seems the notecards are easier to rearrange, add to, etc., all the things I tend to like about hyperfiction in general.
Jeremy, do you want to describe the process?
Mark, I’ve actually been doing a bit of thinking about Eastgate’s paper-business in general (I’m on their mailing list), and I think perhaps I’ll flesh out a few of those threads of thought into a full post. I’ll pass on detailing my index card system here for now, but you can find quite a bit by now on methods of index-card composition by searching the usual suspects for “Hipster PDA” or “Personal Analog Assistant” - both indicative of the bleeding edge neo-luddite-chic that this comes out of, and worthy of comment - Eastgate and the stationary store revival make mighty strange bedfellows, but I think on closer examination it all makes perfect sense.
Now to do the closer examination. :)