Synopsis: As Nawlz.com wraps its first season with issue #14 online on July 23, 2009, Jawbone.tv catches up with series creator Sutu to find out what’s next for the interactive cyberpunk adventure. (You may also be interested in watching Sutu's three-part overview tutorial video on the making of The Nawlz.)
Since its debut last year, 'The Nawlz' has eluded classification. Is it an interactive novel, a digital comic book, a website, or just strange animation? Regardless of how you label it, the Flash-based experiment has clearly broken new ground exploring how the Internet can provide immersive story experiences.
For those of you who haven't yet absorbed The Nawlz, the story centers on virtual realities and hallucinogenic drugs, with user interaction dictating the pace. To truly appreciate (and to fully understand what's happening) give yourself an hour or two at www.Nawlz.com. Plop in front of a big, fat monitor, jack your headphones and explore the lush, sprawling canvas in full-screen mode as you sniff out hidden navs and advance with a sense of reluctance … like peering into a dark closet, afraid to turn on the light.
The Nawlz is the creation of Australian artist Sutu, supported by a small handful of global collaborators. We met with Sutu on several occasions, finally chronicling the creator’s unique approach to storytelling and the technical process of creating an interactive comic (or whatever you prefer to call it).
(You may also be interested in watching Sutu's three-part overview tutorial video on the making of The Nawlz.)
Where did the idea for The Nawlz originate?
"The birth of it, probably from the idea of wanting to do some kind of sci-fi comic, probably first came into mind after seeing 'Battle Angel Alita', 'Akira' and 'Ghost in the Shell'. Like, all Japanese animes. I was like, wow, this is something else, I have to create something like this. That was the first seed planted in the brain."
"And then the second stage of that was, what sort of story do I want to tell? The story of The Nawlz is based around a future scenario of design culture that I might be into if, say we were 50 years into the future. So me, personally, I'm a designer in art and multimedia, and into the different ways you can create multimedia and present art and design."
Was it always going to be interactive?
"I started writing it as a comic book, like a printed thing, and I spent a good deal of time on that, but the format didn't agree with me. I'd been making things in multimedia since 1999, and it just felt backwards [to do it in print]. So I kind of gave up on the idea of it happening for a while, and continued on with multimedia on the commercial side. Then a project came up called 'The Harvest of Endurance Scroll'."
"It's a painted, 50 meter scroll that visually explains the Chinese immigration to Australia. So I was involved in converting this physical scroll into an interactive, online project. We had to scan it all in, and compile it into Flash by stitching together multiple Flash files. And the lights started going off in my head, like wow, this is such a cool way to tell the story along a panoramic layout. And that was it. I was like, this is how I'm going to do The Nawlz."
How did you, and do you, tackle the story itself?
"Well, the script is obviously the first thing I look at. When I started I had a framework and as I progressed through the story I'd been fleshing out and connecting the dots and evolving each issue. And that process is never ending. It would be nice if it was all complete and precise, but I'm not that organized, and probably not experienced enough as a writer."
"But from the script I have, I move to a sketched up story board and try to figure out which parts of it would be interactive and not. All of this on paper, but deciding where things might roll over, if the frame is going to scroll horizontally or vertically, and so on. The storyboard explores all those options and ideas. I keep that intentionally loose because I like the creative process of laying it out. Then I move to drawing. I do all of that on brown paper, usually on a big scroll."
Is the scroll a replicate of how the final issue scrolls?
"No, it's not as ordered as it looks in the comic. Mostly I do it for production, so if I get bored or burn out on one image, I can quickly jump to the next image. So I might be working on ten images at a time, just so I can continue producing work very quickly. Having them all on the scroll just works well for jumping around."
"Then, as groups of the images are ready, I'll scan them in and render the colors and shades and all that, and do that until I'm bored of rendering, then I'll jump back to the scroll and draw more. Just constantly jumping between the two stages to accommodate my attention span. And then there's PhotoShop to Illustrator, and I plan everything out in there before doing the actual build in Flash."
(You may also be interested in watching Sutu's three-part overview tutorial video on the making of The Nawlz.)
Getting back to the story and writing, are there any conscious decisions around exposition, act structure ... did you look at the traditional models at all, and then throw them out, or did you just 'go'?
"When I started The Nawlz, I had this framework of where the story was going to go. The reality at that time though, was that I needed to start or it might never happen. So I started and I think in those first early issues, there's definitely a feeling of author's voice trying to finds its way kind of thing. And I'm sort of tapping through the environment, trying to figure out how to present it."
"But I didn't want to spoon feed them at the same time, you know, I hate American TV that's like, at the start of every episode, it's like you haven't been paying attention and they spoon feed you all the answers. I think people want to be challenged."
In science fiction in particular, you can really paint yourself into a corner, and what a lot of people end up doing is just grabbing for cliches. So is it a constant battle against that?
"One sort of piece of advice that I got, that I read, it wasn't given directly to me, was I think Aldous Huxley, who was talking about creating the universe when he was writing 'Brave New World', and his advice for creating that universe was something along the lines of, you see the world from that character, in the book, so you don't see the entire world from the view of every person, you just have to create a single focus on your character. And that sort of limits the peripheral vision."
"And that meant, for me, I don't have to figure out everything ... I just have to figure out everything within this guy's view. And for me, that was like creating a circle around my main character and then extending that circle as a new person came into it, and that's all I had to do."
"As for dealing with traditional science fiction conventions that have been explored, and exploited and abused in the past, I was aware that with sci-fi and cyberpunk fiction, about 90 per cent of the stories that I've ever read were based on some great hacker guy who's in touch with the latest technology, that if it fell into the wrong hands, the world could be doomed. And that guy us usually being chased down by some big corporation. It was always like some super-human character, and my first decision was that I didn't want to do that."
"If anything, as an influence, I wanted something like 'Clerks' to be my influence and just set it in the future, because I didn't want my characters to be in a situation that I couldn't see myself in."
One of challenges of experimental narrative is that people get conditioned from when they are very young, that you press play, you sit down, and you watch. Or you flip the page, and if you get lost, you go back to your page. Did you give any thought to the segment of your potential audience who is simply not going to consider your story because of the mechanism used to tell it?
"There was a point after I launched the first issue that a friend commented that I was sliding myself into a very niche audience by not using conventional methods to tell the story. And I was kind of offended because I thought, for myself, doesn't everyone want to explore and dick around? But the reality is, I take that sort of thing for granted I suppose."
Any planning, looking down the tunnel at where this thing can go as far as earning money, or is it just purely a passion project?
"I think everything, once you spend enough time on something, every idea under the sun comes into your head at some point. You know, 'this could be the future ... this could be the way that everyone experiences comics in the future, or when magazines become animated maybe this is what it will look like'. All of these things come into mind."
"And then there's like, I've got this Flash engine that's dynamic, so I can easily update it ... maybe we can make it so that everyone can use it, and have their own platform for the future of interactive comics or something. So that idea comes into it. But those things were definitely not the priority. The priority was to just get the damned project done. And then think about the future of it as a potential genre or medium or whatever."
But do you now see some kind of formula for how someone can step forward - or even how you can do it now - and make this type of thing commercially viable?
"I think one of the ideas that appealed to me the most, because I want to see some of my artwork in print, is doing a sort of hybrid print and media product where you can ... you know, the story's in the book format, and the CD or DVD with the whole website is available as a multimedia standalone. That's what I'd personally like to see."
"I've also been thinking a lot more about that sort of standalone existing on the Internet, as like a download. I like the idea of not having to wait, and being able to seamlessly jump back and forth between issues and check them out. And maybe at the end of season one [now], I've got this package that already exists that I can present to a bigger financial backer and say 'hey, this is what we've done so far, and this is our big, magic bag of ideas of what it could be."