Spot

by David Wiesner

ebook

Published January 1, 2015

About the author

During David Wiesner's formative years, the last images he saw before closing his eyes at night were the books, rockets, elephant heads, clocks, and magnifying glasses that decorated the wallpaper of his room. Perhaps it was this decor which awakened his creativity and gave it the dreamlike, imaginative quality so often found in his work.

As a child growing up in suburban New Jersey, Wiesner re-created his world daily in his imagination. His home and his neighborhood became anything from a faraway planet to a prehistoric jungle. When the everyday play stopped, he would follow his imaginary playmates into the pages of books, wandering among dinosaurs in the World Book Encyclopedia. The images before him generated a love of detail, an admiration for the creative process, and a curiosity about the hand behind the drawings.

In time, the young Wiesner began exploring the history of art, delving into the Renaissance at first — Michelangelo, Dürer, and da Vinci — then moving on to such surrealists as Magritte, de Chirico, and Dalí. As he got older, he would sit, inspired by these masters, at the oak drafting table his father had found for him and would construct new worlds on paper and create wordless comic books, such as Slop the Wonder Pig, and silent movies, like his kung fu vampire film The Saga of Butchula.

Wiesner has always been intrigued by and curious about what comes before and after the captured image. His books somehow convey the sequence of thoughts leading up to and following each picture, and that quality explain why they are frequently described as cinematic.

At the Rhode Island School of Design, Wiesner was able to commit himself to the full-time study of art and to explore further his passion for wordless storytelling. There he met two people who would figure prominently in his life: Tom Sgouros, to whom Tuesday is dedicated, and David Macaulay, to whom The Three Pigs is dedicated. These two men not only taught Wiesner the fundamentals of drawing and painting but also fostered his imaginative spirit and helped him comprehend the world around him. Sgouros's and Macaulay's artistic influences were vital to Wiesner's development into the acclaimed picture-book author he is today.

David Wiesner has illustrated more than twenty award-winning books for young readers. Two of the picture books he both wrote and illustrated became instant classics when they won the prestigious Caldecott Medal: Tuesday in 1992 and The Three Pigs in 2002. Two of his other titles, Sector 7 and Free Fall, are Caldecott Honor Books. An exhibit of Wiesner's original artwork, "Seeing the Story," toured the United States in 2000 and 2001. Among his many honors, Wiesner holds the Japan Picture Book Award for Tuesday, the Prix Sorcières (the French equivalent of the Caldecott Medal) for The Three Pigs, and a 2004 IBBY Honour Book nomination for illustration, also for The Three Pigs. Flotsam, his most recent work, was a New York Times bestseller and was recently named winner of the 2007 Caldecott Medal, making Wiesner only the second person in the award’s long history to have won three times.

Wiesner lives with his wife and their son and daughter in the Philadelphia area, where he continues to create dreamlike and inventive images for books.

Reviews

[Lyric · Rating 2 out of 5]

SPOT is an app by David Wiesner that allows readers to move through a story by zooming in to certain parts of the illustrations. Wiesner uses the power of surrealism and the new age of technology to create an interactive reading experience. It starts with an eagle-eye view of a girl writing in a book with a cookie and a tablet with the name of the app, SPOT. The adventure begins by zooming into the cookie, looking deeper into its microscopic details, where you end up seeing a cityscape. Inside the cityscape, you peer under a door into a building and you see a chair and a lamp. Under the chair's fringe, there are aliens, robots, dust bunnies, and rats. They appear to be eating around a Newspaper clipping. Zooming into the Newspaper images, looking at the point details of the print style, there is a little world hidden still. Umbrellas cover little bugs in the rain, but further in, we see a little puddle. Deep inside this puddle, there is a dark underwater world, where fish and plant life thrive among some other strange creatures. On the underwater floor lies a message in a bottle, and when you zoom into the letters that are written inside, the image begins to shift back into the writing of the girl from the beginning. The app is wonderfully replayable given the continuous loop that has been made. There are also so many interesting references to other David Wiesener works, such as the robots from Robobaby, and the aliens that have been featured in works like Mr. Wuffles and Flotsam. I do wish that there was more of an ability to explore the illustrations and landscape before zooming into the experience, but I understand the image quality cannot remain the same without continuous redrawing, so it really is innovative technology. Very basic, and not much of a story to it, so I see this more as being an interesting visual game rather than a piece of thought-provoking literature.

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spot is a E-book with interactive zoom-able imagery. David Wiesner creates a world within worlds throughout the story, where each world has its own unique story and illustrations. The recurring theme of lady bugs pop up throughout the story, as well as the standard use of robots, and out of this world characters. I would recommend this story to early readers with vivid imaginations.
for a link to watch the story copy and paste the link below into a URL.
http://bitu.com/spot/

[Lissette Bustamante · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spot by David Wiesner, is a digital book. This digital book shows the evolution of books and how they have evolved over the centuries. David Wiesner is a very well-known author, and having him create a digital book only adds to his amazing writing career. The purpose of the book is for the reader to click on a spot in the book to zoom in and see a different story. This book has lots of stories in this book told through pictures. There are stories to things a person would not even think of like, dust particles that take shape of animals. This book is great for young children to interact with.

This book has lots of positive feedback for its creation and the author that created it. It is great for young kids to understand and value the illustrations of books, to give them knowledge and show them that books are more than just the text in them. The main audience of this digital book is mainly for younger kids ages 3-7. I highly recommend this book because I really enjoyed this book.