The Day Life Got Tough

Jim Kosem's The Day Life Got Tough is a magical, animated book, with big letters printed on paper, but brought to life as you turn the pages through the story with projected animations that follow your progress through the book. The story not only goes forward, but once you reach the end, starts going backwards and then ends back at the beginning... which is also the end of the other story. Stories that are multidirectional and end up folding in on themselves require new kinds of books to tell them. The Day Life Got Tough is an exploration into how writing process, narrative structures and inventing new formats affect one another as told through the universal story of a journey.

Video.

How does it work?
A system made of a camera above the book and a camera tracking software in Processing recognizes where you're at in the story by looking for certain marks on the pages. This information tells Flash where you're at and which animations ought to be projected onto the book. The Flash program also tracks your progress, so that when you reach the end of the book, it know it has to start going backwards. At the end of the dog's story (the backwards one) it starts back at the beginning of the guy's story (the first forwards one when you open the book), so the story kind of folds in on itself.

The idea of the "The Day Life Got Tough" story-wise was the universal theme of a journey and that everyone has bad days. The guy whose story you follow on the way forward through the book just has a really bad day and things start getting progressively worse. Jim explains: "We came up with the idea of being able to go backwards through a story (and time) to explore the notion of how things would change if you could go back in time almost, and then how you would do this with a different character, in this case the dog, but in the same context."

"One of the goals technically as well was to have the book only as paper (no wires, no electronics) and to augment it, which adds a bit of a magical quality to it. The paper is also coated which adds kind of a nice glowing effect too. I think of "The Day Life Got Tough" as more of a platform than anything, just a new way to tell stories, and technically it could all eventually be housed in a lamp lets say and you could put just about any book underneath and it would be animated. Most importantly, as a new platform one could start to write all kinds of new stories utilizing this multi-directional device, which is the eventual goal."

Illustrations by Adam Simpson.
Images by Jim Kosem and mine.