22/10/2021 - 3/12/2021 / Week 9-14
Graphic Novel
LECTURES
Week 8
In week eight we were introduced to the basics on how to make graphic novels (comics). Continuing from last week's lecture about writing stories (link here), we move on to where to get the ideas from! Something to avoid is looking it up on google aimlessly; instead try using a keyword to find what we want. Other than that, ideas can come up naturally through our thoughts or conversations with a friend.
To make sure our ideas work well in a form of a graphic novel or overall just make sure it stays in our memory, a good start is by scribbling the important parts and starting the concept sketches.
Week 9
For week nine we learned about how to make comic transitions. Transitions in comics can be drawn in many different forms, starting from the basics of lines and background fades. To specifically show a change of time, we can apply using a clock moving from one hour to another, or the sky from bright to dark to bright.
Some transitions can be more personal or creative to the story itself; one of the example given to us was the transition from a tied hair to untied, and from the bottom to the top of the stairs. Or of a person sinking into their own bad thoughts can be a transition from a normal sized to becoming smaller, the background following the "bad thoughts" being from light to dark.
INSTRUCTIONS
Task 3:
3 ACTS STORY
Before planning out the panels (30-50), we needed to think about the story in text form first. Here is my 3 Acts story.
Standing in front of Old Man Hayes’ grave was his granddaughter, Pippa. She was called there after many years by her grandma, who hasn’t contacted in a long time.
“Pippa.” Called Grandma. “I asked you to visit today because I found an
heirloom I’ve long wanted to give you.”
Grandma opened her palms and in it was a compact mirror. Pippa was shocked
and was only able to nod. She took the mirror off of her grandmother’s cold
hands and went home after a few more minutes of mourning. After a long
journey, Pippa arrived home and greeted her two cats. She felt tired and
decided to place the mirror on the windowsill next to her bed and quickly
fell asleep.
Time went by and it has become late night. Pippa woke up to a sensation of
immense hunger and walked towards her kitchen. The halls surrealistically
extended more and more as she could only walk slower. Strange noises filled
the rooms but she dismisses it as her stomach grumbling. Finally, she found
the kitchen door and hurriedly opened it. Instead of finding food, a
terrifying sight was upon her. A tall creature with no face and long claws
were busy picking at what seems to be Pippa’s lifeless dear cats, pulling
bits and pieces of flesh through it. Pippa was startled, and started running
back to her room, unknowingly catching the creature’s attention and starting
a nightmarish chase.
Fortunately, it was all in Pippa’s head. Pippa woke up to the feeling of
one of her cats licking her face. Relieved, Pippa turned her head to the
left and opened her eyes to avoid cat saliva. A strong chill ran through her
back as she realized both her cats were sleeping peacefully on the
windowsill. She looked at the mirror her grandmother gave her and saw the
refection of the creature standing on top of her. A loud painful screech filled the empty rooms of the house.
*The focus shifted back to the grave at night, leaves trampling as it reveals that Pippa’s grandmother had already passed away. She was tricked by the devil to accept the cursed mirror.
Once I figured out the story, I continued to work on the simplified character concepts.
The characters I have in this story were Pippa, Grandma, Old Man Hayes, and two cats names Bean and Romi, but the cats were just for self entertainment. After adjustments I decided to change Old Man Hayes and Grandma to just Peepaw and Meemaw, as it helped with lifting the mood while working on it. The rest stayed the same and the creature remains unnamed.
I wanted Pippa to have androgynous features; a more flat shaped body and a bit stiff, and Meemaw to have a friendly face and huggable figure. The cats are simply cats. I had struggles creating a creature that's scary enough, and went with a much simpler idea of a singular eye, deformed head, and a mouth where it shouldn't be. Moving on from that, I took my time to create the sketches of the final comic.
The sketches are simply taken off from the story, and the characters are more detailed to my normal concept-doodling style. Although, some references were needed as I didn't quite understand how some poses looked, and several of them are just me moving around in my room in front of a mirror. One reference for the sketch I had used was from this image
There was little references of front-side ish view running people, so I used this one and thought about how it would look just facing a little to the right.
Moving on to the digitizing, I planned out at first what vectors I want to re-use in separate panels, and most of them were the bedroom and kitchen backgrounds. So I focused first on the details on those until the final version.
The next finalized piece was the grandfather clock (because those are the scariest clocks around); I used a reference as seen in figure 1.8 and attempted a similar structure, while completely randomizing the clock needle details.
Once that was dealt with I finalized the panels from start to finish in order, using the knife on some of the backgrounds for different panels and copy pasting some of the earlier heads, but painfully, drawn each hand as I only reused one arm pose.
Another panel that I used an online reference for is lighting, specifically the "dramatic gasp" one; using a reference from Picolo (post linked below).
Finally, all the more difficult ones were out of the way and there was just room for the simpler parts. Though I just realized after the finalized animation that the shadows nearing the end of the graphic novel were not applied.
Moving on; I imported the files into After Effects for the animation process, later to be moved to Premier Pro.
Unfortunately did not take progress shots, but here are the layers.
Finalizing the animation process, I moved to Premier Pro and downloaded (in final) seven sound effects from the links below:
Music Box Sound Effect | Out of Breath Running Sound Effect | Stomach Growls Sound Effect
Cat Meowing Sound Effect | Creaking Door Sound Effect | Horror Suspense Sound Effect
Finally, all was done, and the only thing left was to upload the files.
Feedbacks
General Feedback
Generally, Ms. Jennifer and Ms. Noranis says to keep in mind of the layers and what we want the layout to look like in both Webtoon and youtube animation format. The central theme should not be dragged on for too long as well.
Specific Feedback
Ms. Noranis provided feedback that in the story I should replace the creature eating Old Man Hayes' with the creature eating pippa's cats to further the scare factor.
Reflection
My experience working on this comic was... very tiring. Moving countries in the midst of it had buffered the process, and getting a huge art block at the same time was not pleasant! Regardless, I had to do it, so whenever it was possible i added one to five panels to the sketch every night. Once I moved on to Illustrator I enjoyed the process greatly, and very slowly motivation returned, but so was the looming deadline coming. I ended up submitting much later than I had hoped for.
Since there was a progress check every week after the lectures were all finished, I saw the styles my classmates had. Some were fully black white and red, some only had lines and shadows, some were fully colored, some had circles for eyes and some were semi realistic. The variety of styles they produced inspired me along the process of making my graphic novel.
From doing this project I was able to memorize more shortcuts through this project and build up the effectivity in moving a mouse to draw on the application. Applying the animations and separating layers weren't as pleasant but I have learnt what different methods I could use with the frames and such, leaving me with more experience. Finding the right sound effects were just as difficult as I had to find ones that are royalty free and compatible with Premiere Pro. Overall, it was so much fun to do and I was glad I could do it. The facilitators were very nice as well in listening to the students and what they needed.
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