Created approximately in January 2024, this book was printed at home and was intended as a first and very rough visualization of the initial idea.
I used the concert story as the main guideline – a child is lured into the burning world with the promise of happiness, grows up and arrives at a crossroad, chooses between love, power and comfort, achieves happiness then tries and apparently manages to stop time for her and her friends. They reach paradise, but eventually the burning world catches up with them and the wheels of time start turning again. This cycle keeps repeating, the child, now a grown woman, learns that life is made of both happiness and sadness and that the ultimate solution is to learn to grow happiness in your heart, in spite of the fire and regardless of the choices you make at the crossroads.
I wanted to structure the book around four defying moments, that were also going to be the pop-up spreads. The first one was The Burning World, consisting of three Turkish map type folds glued on top of each other. The second was The Crossroads, a folding map that would include the three main choices and their ramifications. The third, Broken Paradise, would be a floating-planes pop-up spread, emulating the torn paper from the concert, while the last would be another Turkish map fold, depicting Life/Old Age.
In between, I added extra comic book style pages, integrating images from the three flipbooks.
I used gray cardboard to back up the pop-up spreads spreads. The Burning World and Life were hand painted on parchment paper, while Broken Paradise was hand painted on 160g cardboard and cut/torn by hand. The rest of the pages were accordion folds printed on 80g A3 paper and then glued to the cardboard with double sided tape. The text was temporarily set in all caps, and the font was IM FELL English PRO by Igino Marini. I kept editing the text, printing on self adhesive paper and adding that on top of the old text. The closed format was 15 x 21 cm – as much as the A3 paper would allow.
