The Temporal Canvas
I want to end this presentation by showing a recent experiment that gets at some of the territory I’m personally interested in exploring with digital comics.
The first panel contains a video I shot back in 1992 with my first video camera, of me walking around a lake in my home town. The second panel contains a video I shot in 2014 of me walking around a lake in the city where I live now. Next I add a third panel, an interactive panel, that prompts me to use my fingers to take steps. Each virtual step I take animates the motion of the other panels, first of the older footage, then of the newer footage, and then both of them together, synchronized.
Here we’re seeing a temporal map that fuses both serial and parallel forms of time, that drives diagetic time with non-diagetic interaction, that makes use of rhythm and musicality, and perhaps hints at a story yet to be revealed. What are we walking away from? What are we walking towards? These answers remain to be discovered.