The Book of Immersion began during lockdown as a musical, which is still in my head. I always see the characters in a band dancing and performing with their instruments.
The band, Tale Teller Club, was integral to the entire project as it featured the book's characters. Flex and iServalan are the novel's main characters, so they were developed as characters even though iServalan did not t appear until the very end of Volume 1. Vapor Punk is the narrator who starts each strata or chapter with an analysis of human and machine idiosyncrasies.
I took the opportunity of a world shutdown to experiment with the sci-fi fantasy genre and to integrate the music within the chapters. Sometimes it worked but mostly it didn't. I wanted an online experience that immersed the viewer into a sensory experience that used audio, emotion, and visuals to allow the viewer or listener to take a leap of imagination.
I discovered (after a few years) that writers have always done that. When I read a book there is already a narrator in my head triggered by the voice of the protagonist. There is audio too. When one reads, one hears the environment or the stage where the story is set. I asked myself 'Do I need all this singing and dancing?' It was very time-consuming to animate even short chapters, and even with AI, the process is ridiculously expensive. Besides, writing a sentence and pressing a button is wholly unsatisfying for me as a creator. I was even using overpriced website streaming with no benefit to my story at all.
But I am a musician and this immersive audio-visual storytelling idea still obsessed me. I didn't want to completely let go of the dream. Plus I still wanted to incorporate the characters into the real-world experience of being in the band. Their characters were becoming increasingly established as they existed as imaginary characters from the novel and as created robots with particular voices in the Tale Teller Club electric orchestra. I was using specific plugins for each character to give them their sound. I was not deviating from their android voices and performance styles. As for the music, I was being increasingly experimental and cerebral as I experimented with things like vagal stimulation and binaural beats.
Today, three years later, I am about to publish the book. I finally decided to publish the words on their own with a more interactive option which will feature the film, words, backing track and art in a PDF which is a sort of unsung hero in my eyes. Interactive PDFs are easy to publish online and offer what I was aiming for back during lockdown when I was trying out all sorts of expensive 3D creator apps. It turns out I was coming at the project with a sledgehammer when all I needed was to look at the history of storytelling and figure out how to bring the well-tried and tested methods of film, song, etc. into a seamless modern digital scenario.
The simple book, ie just words, is coming out in early April. The immersive audio-visual version will follow later. There is also a coffee table version with the artworks and film stills.
You can read individual chapters (strata) on Kindle for free.
Sarnia de la Mare FRSA
#immersionbooks #taletellerclub #bookofimmersion
