Evolving Photostories

So perhaps my favorite aspect of the doll hobby is making photostories with my dolls. Sadly it's a part of the hobby that has definitely dropped in popularity. Reasons for the decline could be many of course, but I've wondered lately could the format be improved from the "classic" photo with text below it approach.

All of my stories have been in said "classic" style. I'll use episode 1 of my Hesvar series of stories as example for this post. Note the story essentially doesn't change, so just go through the first few photos to see the different formats being discussed.

Here it is in classic format on my website.

BJD Stories - A Strange New World

One route that seems to be somewhat positively received is the comic model where the text is in speech bubbles on the photos themselves. I tried converting a few stories to that model and I do enjoy the presentation. Here is my attempt for this same story presented here on DoA as I never made this model directly available on my website. The story did need to be altered somewhat to fit the presentation.

/threads/hesvar-comic-1-a-strange-new-world.857403/

One repeat complaint I received about this format was the amount of the image blocked by the speech bubbles. Also it can be hard to keep the text size appropriate on various sizes of screens. Personally it became obvious in converting a few stories that my style would likely never adapt to this format as I somewhat take photos then write the story so planning for dialogue room wouldn't work for me. Plus honestly it's a lot of work to draw all those bubbles and make any edits to the text if you want to change something.

So as a next step I wrote a web app that would display my older stories like Japanese RPG video games or visual novels. No story changes required just come code to parse the text into appropriate chunks to display. Originally I had the text in a box below the screen to avoid the blocked image complaints. But phones simply have no room for a photo and a text box below it in landscape mode so I changed to having the text box on screen in a translucent section. I also made the text animate as it fills in like many of the games the presentation is based on.

Here's an example on my website. This requires a modern browser.

BJD Stories - A Strange New World - Visual Novel

If on a phone and the address bar is in the way click the full-screen (maximize) button to hide your address bar. Don't worry, the button hangs around so you can easily exit full-screen mode.

This format didn't really seem to move the needle much at all. A very meh response at best.

So I decided to combine the two ideas. (I'll admit this is an idea I've considered for years, even before the two above recent attempts.) I've made a new "live comic" presentation mode. It pops up various types of bubbles anchored at appropriate locations on the screen as the story progresses. To address the blocked image complaints I made every new image display with no bubbles at first and also have a button to hide the overlays so the whole photo can be seen whenever desired.

Example on my website below. Again requires a modern browser and same address bar notes as above.

BJD Stories - A Strange New World - Comic Edition

Now granted I just spent time programming this so I'm no doubt biased, but I feel this mode really brings the story alive like none of the other methods do. That it actually draws attention to parts of the photo not just obscures it. Again, obviously biased observer though.

To address the screen size issues I mentioned with hard drawn speech bubbles the bubbles don't just scale with screen size but actually reformat and reflow the text. Even dynamically. If you change your browser size of rotate your phone the bubbles will reshape and the text reflows always making sure the start of the previously displayed text is still available. I also wanted to make it accessible as possible so it can be completely controlled from a keyboard and the font size and bubble color scheme (black on white or white on black) and opacity can be chosen in user settings. The text animation from the visual novel mode is still available as well. Just set the Animation Delay to something larger than zero in the settings.

This format doesn't require changes to the story itself, but it does require some annotation to suggest where the bubbles should be anchored and how they should reflow. It's a bit of an art itself trying to make them look good at both small and large screen sizes.

So those are my attempts to evolve the photostory format. I'm quite pleased with the last one. Do any of them appeal to you more or less than others? Where would you take the format? Or where have you taken the format? Please share.

 

Thank you. I'm really enjoying the last one especially myself. (The automatic "action" parser is pointing out some inconsistencies in my writing style though. )

Thanks on the stories. I hope you'll read beyond the two I converted to manual comics some day.

As to doing it my chosen way, of course I agree with that sentiment and right now I'm leaning towards the live comic edition although the classic format will always come for free. However I also very much enjoy interaction with readers of my stories. So if a particular format draws more readers it's likely to bring me more happiness. (Assuming more readers leads to more comments / interaction which is not a given.) So I opened this thread genuinely hoping to find out if there was some thoughts on reviving interest in photostories in general.

Thank you.

You're welcome. I'm glad you find the comics readable. When I designed the system to shape the bubbles I favored locality over width which I works better for placing the action but I worried might impact readability a bit.

If by scrolling you mean the animation effect it can be enabled or disabled in both the visual novel and live comics apps in the settings. There's a time between letters option and 0 disables the animation completely. I made that the default on the comic version.

 

Still working on driving the format forward. I've made several tweaks to the comics engine. One of the most apparent is how it handles "long" text, at least relative to bubble size. If text has to be split into more than two bubbles it now basically overrides the size limits set by the stem and the edges of the photo and just makes a larger bubble to contain more text, disabling the stem if it gets obscured. This really makes a big difference with smaller screens and larger text sizes. (Or long rambles as I'm prone to do in my dialogue.) I should also let me place bubbles more naturally for large screens, where the effect on small screens will now be to show a small bubble showing the actor/placement then expand to a larger one if necessary. Before if I placed it best for the small screen it was often a bit awkwardly placed on a large screen. (It will of course always be a compromise.)

I reworked the reflow code so that text gets split more evenly amongst multiple bubbles. Should get rid of the large bubble followed by one word bubble effect.

I've also given myself the ability to override any parser decisions and force a text "part" to be rendered however. I had to do this as there's just no way a simple parser is always going to convert actions to actor correctly. "Pris did this" vs "She did this", "Pris did blah with Ellie". Who's the actor taking the action and speaking following that. Not easy. It's the work of very large machine learning natural language processors.

I can also use this to change bubble position on what in the "classic" format were paragraph breaks.

Here's a story that highlights some of the changes if anyone is curious.

BJD Stories - It IS the Vespins! - Comic Edition

 

Is this a time for that saying "People of the world with canes unite! Together we'll trip up the world!"?. (Yes, I use a cane.)

I'm glad to hear it's working for you though. I'm really liking it. It will definitely be my preferred format going forward.

Good to know there's an eager fan out there. I'm trying to add more life is just getting in the way. Breaking out all that is required to do a story is much more an ordeal than just adding some bubble notations to the backlog of existing stories. (And I enjoy rereading them once done as well.)

 

Well for those interested in the technical side of things, I've made some changes to the comics app. It's now top aligned rather than center aligned (just seems nicer with changing photo sizes). But the bigger change is I've added drag zones to the outer edges of the screen. (The outer 20% on each side actually.) You can now move through the story by dragging mouse or finger along either edge instead of clicking. Seems a bit less tedious, but the click method is still there too. Drag sense follows the typical touch/mouse paradigms, so touch you drag up to move forward, mouse you drag down to move forward. (I debated the mouse sense, but it keeps it in sync with the scroll wheel this way. Think of it like dragging an invisible scroll bar.)

Since it's so much easier to quickly go forward/backward with this change I also made going back show the uncovered image just before it goes back to the previous one. (Going forward has always shown the image initially uncovered.) Makes it easy just scroll back to the blank image literally w/o lifting a finger.

Why only the outer edges? Because of the stupid mobile browser address bar issue. I had to leave space for people to be able to drag the "screen" to get the address bar to go away. (Or you can go full screen on most non-apple devices and apparently a few random apples ones too.)

Untested on apple devices as I have none, but tested working on firefox and chrome on desktop/android.

Random old already posted on DoA sample story in new version of app.
Dysfunctional Dollfie Theater: Treacherous History

 

Good to hear it's working on an apple device. Thanks for letting me know. Just had to tweak it a bit as a certain android device would no longer register single touches to move forward/backward in the drag zones.

Hopefully you found the drag option helpful.

(Totally unrelated to the evolution of photo story display, but just in terms of my site I finally added the last missing feature from the classic page to the comic page. Photo and post tags are now available in the comic page as well.)