The guilt at the end is pretty interesting too. You also reveal some selfishness – Do I stay with the boy or go to the meeting? Of course you choose to be timely and go to your meeting.

I like the snake a lot too. What’s Jimmy Mo doing in there?

At the beginning, I was definitely completely focused on text, as I would have been had I stumbled upon this story on the internet a week ago. A few pictures in, I realized my mistake and really started to focus. Your choice of pictures and layout of text definitely changes something immense. There’s a tone there that doesn’t come from the words themselves. I know (and I promise I was thinking this before reading Annabelle’s and Abhishek’s posts!) because after the first black slide, “I barely breathe,” I felt my own breath catch at each following black slide.

I’m particularly curious about the third slide, about the rearview… mirror? It’s neat how the pictures look fragmented, like they would in a rearview mirror, but I can tell there are words back there behind one of the pictures. What do they say?

Replay time!

You capture the human tendency to leave abruptly, and cement it into the reader’s mind by using the black screen as a background. For me, this slide came to mind in the last two pages of the piece. It all came together….when you actually left, were you thinking anything? Is that what the picture-less slide indicates?

These are the types of questions that come from this work, and one of the reasons why I really enjoyed it.

-Abhishek

The images and text work well together, but I find the “I barely breathe,” “I don’t want to be late” and the “so I leave” slides the most powerful. It’s amazing what blackness can do after seeing all those images. I found those slides to be more personal and they mark necessary but unforced pauses in the story.

Nice work with the text layout, too. I particularly liked the “headlights snapping on.”

I like how you mention different forms of water — the rain, the channels, the tsunami — and how, for a moment, they made you think about ad helped you escape from the mainstream bubble.

In a way, you’ve also conveyed the feebleness of human nature, and that’s powerful in itself.

Do you have more?

I am, of course, delighted by your post, Alan, and Dominoe–what a great story and well told. I’m looking forward to writing and reading more of these.

Martha, Gardner and Eli–thanks for the feedback. It’s really helpful to follow how you read this experiment. I’m so pleased that you found yourself slowing down enough to take in the images as much as the words. I really do think there is a future for this kind of storytelling, and I am playing around with it as much as I can tear myself away from all the things I must do. Eli, yes, absolutely, do some of these as part of your thesis. I can see it.

Now I am off to Ireland for a week–with my camera and computer and pen. I’m interested in how this work becomes shaped by where I am and how images pull me into story as much as the stories I hear along the way.

~Barbara

Please keep playing.