Out of the Sewers with the TMNT
Creating an interactive iBook with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Everybody loves the Ninja Turtles and if you don’t, you should.
I was recently assigned a group and we were tasked to create an interactive iBook of our choosing. After discussing what to create our iBook on for a few minutes, we decided on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The Ninja Turtles have gone through a lot of iterations over the years, as well as created on many mediums. The Turtles started out as a comic book, then a TV series, toys, video games, movies, another TV series, another movie……you get the idea. With so much content, what do we focus on? Do we focus on the TV show or the comics? What about the movies and video games? We know we wanted to stick to the roots so we ultimately decided to keep the main focus on the early years of the turtles (comics, video games, etc.), but we also pulled from all parts of the franchise to help show the full Turtle experience.
Style Guide
Creating a style guide for this project was pretty easy. For our fonts, we went with a font similar to the original TMNT logos font for the headers, a comic book font for the body, and an 8bit font to use in various other places where we thought it would go well. We didn’t use too much color outside of our images but when using the Turtle font, we also used the TMNT green from the original TV series.
Design
Our original plan was to follow the theme of the original comic books. We wanted to keep a comic book theme throughout our book, but this quickly changed. We then decided to focus on the original NES video game.
We did a little research and were able to find a map of the first level of the original game. We were able to break this out into 7 different pages to use as the background. But before this, we needed an intro page. For our first page, we tried to mimic the intro to the game, but we also wanted to give it a little bit of a spin to make it our own. We had the TMNT logo and some text that said “push start” but we also added a sewer cover in the center. We turned this into a Hype feature that we when pressed, would roll away and fill the whole page to make it seem like you were going into the sewer. We then had a small character intro like the game. When that intro was over, you were taken to the first actual page.
With the sewer level as our background, we took the first 7 pages to introduce our characters. Each page had 2 boxes meant to look like comic book panels. One would hold a slide show of the character and the other would have a brief intro about them. Since the Turtles have gone through so many iterations over the years, we focused on the four main TV series. The characters we chose were the 4 Turtles, Splinter, April O'Neil, Casey Jones, Shredder, and the Foot Clan.
Our next page was a still from the video game of a TV screen. Inside the TV screen, we placed the trailer for the first TMNT movie from 1990.
The next two pages were designated for pizza! The Turtles love pizza so we HAD to make some sort of mention of it. We were able to find an infographic that showed every pizza that the Turtles ordered in the original TV series. We cut 10 of them out and pasted them on our two-page spread. We then made each of them clickable with pop-ups to shows all of the weird toppings they put on their pizza.
The last section was a timeline/history of the Ninja Turtles. We started with the first sketches drawn by the creators, and ended with the most recent movies. We messed up on this and forgot to add the most recent TV series that first aired in 2018, so we should have done one more slide.
Our last slide was just to wrap everything up. It was a video clip of the ending to the 1990 movie where the Turtles celebrate their victory over Shredder and adopt “Cowabunga” as their catchphrase.
Meta Data and Other Details
We finally had everything put together into our iBook author file and I discovered that we completely forgot to do anything with a book title and the table of contents. So if it seems like it was just thrown together, it was. The book cover was just an image that we found on google during our initial asset collection and the table of contents images are all images related to each section that I found last minute.
The metadata was pretty simple with the project. I decided it was not worth it to recreate the TMNT wheel when it came to the metadata. The title of the book is just “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”, and the authors are the original creators of the TMNT. I included a short intro about the Turtles under the comment section and added your typical TMNT related tags.
Challenges
We had quite a few challenges during this process. The first would be with our slide shows. It took us more time than I’d care to admit trying to get the slide shows to work. After getting some help, we were able to fit our images into the slide show widget without them being cut off. Our second problem with the slideshow was the quality. Although we were using very high-quality images, when we shrunk them down to the size needed for the slideshow, the got extremely pixelated. You can see this in our final product. If we had more time, this is something I would have loved to go back and fix.
The second problem we had was how I laid out/organized the pages of the book. Without realizing it, I initially created each new page as a section. This means there was 1 chapter with 20 different sections underneath it. This worked fine without any problems until I looked at our table of contents. It was such a mess that the only way to fix it was redo everything. What I had to do was copy and paste all the content from the section pages, and add them all to new chapter pages. This also meant realigning all of our seamless backgrounds. Unfortunately, iBook Author doesn’t allow you to simply right-click on a page and change it to something else. You can only create new pages and delete the ones you messed up on.
I already mentioned this next one but forgetting the book cover and table of contents was a huge bummer. We had a great opportunity to make some quality content but instead, I had to quickly put something together the night before it was due.
Conclusion
Overall, I feel like our project turned out really well. It definitely turned out better than I had hoped. If I had more time, I would go back and fix all the little bugs and really make it a professional project. I feel like we covered the important parts of the TMNT franchise and were even able to have a little bit of fun with it.
COWABUNGA!
