It was a great pleasure to have the opportunity to partner with Kendra Dobson in doing the illustrations for her new Afro Futuristic multi-platform narrative project. Kendra has a play coming out this weekend at Scottish Rite Theater. It's a speculative fiction play (Afrofuturist to be specific) where Dido (the main character) is torn between two worlds. She is human raised in a cyborg society. This cyborg society, called The Private District, was created by The Public District, a city right next door where humans reside in a picture perfect solar-punk utopia. The Private District, moreover, is a dystopian community of part human, part machine entertainers who must put on a show to earn TRUST (money) from The Public District for their survival. Dido is chosen to star as a headliner to a cyborg circus because she is human, and will therefore be more relatable to their human audience. Trouble is, Dido's peers don't see her as one of them. Trust Me, Love tells the story of a privileged minority who has to learn to balance her privilege with her status as a non-Public citizen.
The program Kendra is proposing is an augmented reality app that will be available at the Central Library location. Readers will be able to download the app and read the comic book through their smartphones in augmented reality. Here's an example of how that will look.
This was a exciting collaboration because I've been wanting to explore more Futuristic styles of character design, storyboarding, and environment design. In the augmented reality, as people are reading through their adventure, they will see some elements outside of the comic book pages, seemingly in their real world when peering through the looking glass, so to speak. They might see a flying saucer overhead, or crops below that yield a sub-plot told through another medium when the reader interacts with it.
Please visit Kendra's website at www.kendradobson.com. And if you're free this weekend, stop by Scottish Rite Theater where we will be selling comic books, showing off the app, and performing a play from this story, Trust Me, Love. Buy your tickets here https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3337457.
Stay Tuned for more to come from NaturalBorn Studios.