Tag: audio

July 23, 2017

DVD Books

I’m one of these people who loves real books.  The smell, the weight, the way my finger anxiously waits behind one edge of a page while my eyes finish it quickly – I’m immersed in the writer’s world and feel like the book surrounds me.  To me, nothing will ever replace the printed book.

I’m also a computer programmer; I understand that as the paradigm shifts with new technology some things go extinct.  We shifted from room computer brains to a tiny chip stuck in a device that fits in our palm – and this tiny smart phone is smarter than the room-sized computers!

Thus, I am a paradox.  I collect and buy print books but publish ebooks.  I love writing using colored pens in notebooks but I can format .docs and .pdfs for ebook and print submissions (everything is submitted electronically now).  Remember typewriters?  I skipped those completely.  So I’ll explore any method of presenting my books to my audience.

I have audio-books (The Home Edge Readers) as the short lecture format was easy to read.  The purpose of this custom series is to teach students new terms – so audio was a good idea as they can hear the terms pronounced.  My father is a wizard of production; he produced these.

He had another wizard idea and asked for all my rough pictures and illustrations for Long Tail.  I emailed them to him and he produced a DVD Book.  Basically, this is a DVD (plays in any normal DVD player) with the story coming up as one page on a screen with illustrations, printed words, background sounds, and audio text.  (“Grandma Pearson” reads the story as the words are on the screen.)  My girls loved this!  (It is now what Lucas calls “grandma chicken movie.”)

Vivid colors grab the audience’s attention.  There are rooster crows, farm sounds, running feet, and other background noises as the narrator reads the text that is printed on-screen.  Older children read along (like a sing-along-song video) while the activities and changing screen images keep the younger ones’ attention.

Further projects are on the way, but for now “Long Tail and Red Hawk” is our pilot DVD Book.

It’s another way to read a children’s book.  I like to compare it to a graphic novel with narration.

It’s entertaining, short, and fun.  I even catch my teenager sitting on the edge of the couch or leaning behind it, pretending she wasn’t watching the “kiddie movie” when she sees us notice her.  For about fifteen minutes, they enter Long Tail’s chicken world and they are hooked!

Learn more about it (and try it!) here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/187678255/

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart