This is a story...

My web story tells of Mr William Shatner and his journey to discover why he has woken up in heaven after a death he can not remember.

Originally my tale was essentially going to be a 'pick your own adventure', but after storyboarding it I realised it would take too long, and more importantly, it detracted from what it should have been focusing on - the adventures of Shatner.

My first step was creating a collection of images to use in the story. For the sake of swiftness (ironically, as you will soon discover) I decided to use some basic images which I would manipulate according to the scenario. The task was not easy however, taking 6 hours to collaborate the required objects.

Since the journey occurs through heaven and hell it is a psychological venture and deals with the thoughts of many groups - from the people who are waiting to enter the Pearly Gates to the devil-penguins drafted to overtake Heaven. As you would assume from the previous statement it is light-hearted, but it has still been quite hard to come up with ideas that don't distract too much and at the same time didn't feel forced. To accommodate this factor I have put captions where the links are placed that subtly say that while they lead the viewer on different paths the main story still follows the obvious road. The links themselves will navigate to such things as verses statistics between the angels and demons, propaganda posters, a song, and at the end an alternative ending.

Addendum: I was going to add the DHTML later when I had confirmed which scripts I was using, but it took quite some time to actually find ones that would work. I had a couple of problems with certain ones, even when I copied and pasted them unadulterated into my page. Thus some are pretty underwhelming but some of the ones I wanted worked perfectly. From the start I wanted flying objects on one page, and the demon penguins work well. I mainly used text effects so as to not disturb the layout of the page, but at some points I have used some page effects such as stars flying around the Pearly Gates.

In the end it has taken me roughly 27 hours to finish this project, and I feel this is because I tried too hard. Instead of creating images in Photoshop to work around I should have gone directly into Dreamweaver. I expect this way too I wouldn't have had so many issues with dhtml, and in some cases been able to provide more professional effects. I hope both quantity and quality on the site are adequate.