Sascha Martin’s Time Machine: Mapping His Second Adventure

Sascha Martin’s Time Machine is an all-encompassing disaster for Sascha’s school.

And the best way to show an all-encompassing disaster is from high above, where everything can be revealed in a single image.

We’ll have a spread or two that do just this, as well as lots of close-up images like this one, and the one below, showing how the characters react in their individual moments of truth.

But a bird's-eye view means we need a map … a map of the school, and a map of the area surrounding it, so that each element of Sascha’s latest catastrophe can be placed precisely within the overall chaos.

Sascha’s school is based on a typical Sydney public school with a mix of building types, asphalt playgrounds, grassed areas, and a playing field at the bottom called The Oval (despite its shape). The school’s surroundings, however, are quite fanciful. The school borders a creek that feeds into a river nearby, and there’s a big area of undeveloped land known locally as The Wilderness, which surrounds the homes of Sascha, Luca, and their non-friend Mary-Alice.

But there are streets and houses too, a park, the local shops. And a haunted house.

We want our map to be an artwork in itself, intriguing and wonderful and stirring to the imagination of children. It will span two pages, and in the Kindle version (free to anyone who buys the print edition), the map will be interactive: children can tap on sections to enlarge them, to find information, or even uncover details hidden beneath the map and its text.

That’s the plan, anyway. We're still discussing what to include and where to place each element of Sascha's world.
In the meantime, here's a preliminary sketch that I love by Manuela.

She's even included the snooty new-money area with cafe tables by the lake and backyard swimming pools; and you can tell her architectural background from the cool way she's drawn the houses.

Kindle Development Work: Region Magnification
Well, my Kindle Fire tablet arrived this week, and I’ve finally been able to begin experiments with the interactive features explained by R. Scot Johns in his eloquent tutorial, How To Make Kindle Comics & Children's Books.

Our picture-book, Sascha Martin’s Time Machine, will be displayed two pages at a time on a very small screen. Even the Fire tablet I’ve acquired (and it’s larger than Kindle e-readers), has less real-estate than an open paperback novel, let alone a large-format children’s picture-book spread. So if children and their parents are going to be able to read our book at all, we need to make it easy for them to enlarge the text.

R. Scot Johns explains this very well, and I’m pleased to be able to report that my experiments with magnified text are going very well indeed.

The image here is of a spread from the first book, Sascha Martin’s Rocket-Ship, as it appears on the screen of the Kindle Fire. It’s a very small image (400 pixels is as wide as we can go at GoodReads) of a very small screen, so the text at its initial appearance is a challenge to make out.

The second image shows the same page with some of the text magnified. It’s much easier to read, even here in this tiny screenshot. On the tablet screen, the magnified text is as clear as crystal, and it's just a matter of double-tapping on the piece you want to enlarge. Then you can swipe back and forth between the text boxes, each one magnifying automatically until you dismiss magnification with another double-tap.

Zooming text may be the simplest use of Kindle’s Region Magnification, as Mr Johns asserts, but it took me some time and a lot of focused effort to become relatively comfortable with it. I certainly haven’t mastered the technique, but I’m confident now that I can use it to make Sascha Martin's Adventures readable - and enjoyably so - on the Kindle platform.

Next post: Tweaking the Character - Manuela's changes to Sascha Martin.