Our initial idea came from browsing Flickr. We had decided that our target users would primarily be photographers or artistically inclined individuals who liked to take photos. A browse on Flickr revealed that many people enjoy storytelling through image - specifically within a set amount of photographs. We picked five as to include the five points of narrative.

We debated ways we could interact with our users and further still, combine the three types of application we explored. How could we take control of the project, yet still leave enough scope for people to be creative? Would we control the narrartive, or would the users? Were we going to provide any form of service, or just a playful interaction?

Although predominantly aimed at comic book artists, the book "Visual Storytelling: The Art and Technique" (Caputo and Steranko, Watson-Guptill, 2002) provided a good insight into visual narrative and formed a solid starting point for our ideas. As we were aiming to create a visual narrative, users needed to express purely with images, everything that was not going to be communicated with words. As a result, to attain truly effective visual storytelling, it needed to be compelling, dymanic and have the appearance of reality.

Tradtitional narrative, as advocated by Freytag, can be broken down into a five part process: normality, disruption, enigma, return to normality and conclusion. It is upon this theory that we have developed the interactive project Imago Nova.

Imago Nova is a narrative based on five sentences interpreted in five images. The sentences are sent weekly and can be received on any of three different mobile mediums; mobile phones, e-mail and PDA. The series of five sentences forms a basic narrative. Each sentence has an apparent genre but is open enough to encourage inspiration and can be interpreted in many ways. The user receives one sentence at a time and has approximately one week to submit their photo. The user uploads their work to the website and the photos migrate to form a flash application which randomly generates sequences of photographs. Due to the narrative basis, this creates hundreds of unique and fascinating stories indirectly created by the users. Viewers can also choose to browse photographs by user.

We hope for it to expand into a community, appealing to photographers and creative individuals. It is a desirable project that could potentially expand and become well regarded in creative circles. As new stories will only run when we choose to initiate them and will only run for five weeks, users will want to participate and will feel special and important whilst doing so. Users need very little technology to get involved - some way of receiving the stimuli; mobile/e-mail, and any kind of camera for capturing their images.