What is Medlay? Hybrid Media Form
Medlay1 is a hybrid media form concept for crafting a multimedia artefact2 to narrate a story and/or communicate an idea on the Web.
A screenshot of the prototype The Last Dispatch.
It is hybrid because it combines the strenght3 of two popular media forms, the cinema and comic ones. In particular, it fuses the one-image-at-a-time temporal narration peculiar to cinema with the multi-images spatial narration peculiar to comics.
One-image-at-a-time temporal narration.
Multi-images spatial narration.
Hirohiko Araki, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure
Two proof of concept prototypes have been created to demostrate the possibilities of use of Medlay: The Last Dispatch and Ubik Chap. 6. They both narrate a short story.
A screenshot of the prototype Ubik Chap. 6.
Viewers of a Medlay artefact can explore actively and freely4 the time and space of a multimedia narration.
The watching time of a Medlay artefact is not dictated by the roll of moving images as it happens for a movie, so viewers are completely free to interact with the narrative sequence at an order and pace of their own choosing.
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Medlay = medley + lay. ↩
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A media form is to a media artefact as comics is to a particular comic book or as cinema is to a particular movie: the latter is a specific application of the former. ↩
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Such as, for example, the moving image or the variably sized and shaped panel. ↩
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By means of desktop and mobile devices and an up-to-date browser. ↩