Final Comic

Police Station Assignment

Final Project - Synopsis

The comic that I am planning to create will be a cute and simple story about a high-school-aged boy and girl who are attracted to each other. For this project I will begin the comic as chapter one. I may continue the comic afterwards on my own free time, however, for the purpose of this assignment, I will be primarily focused on creating detailed images with effective camera angles. I want it to be short, but good quality. I want my approach to these panels to be similar to the Japanese manga style. I would like to pay attention to the details of the setting and establish a mood through my drawings.

Brief synopsis:

Diana walks home by herself every day. One day she is alone in the woods playing flute. She is startled to see that a young man (named Lee) was apparently listening.His gaze compels her and she runs away with embarrassment.

A few days later she is walking home alone and two punks are messing with her. The same young man from before shows up for the rescue. She is shy but thankful. They walk together and talk.

This marks the beginning of a beautiful friendship and the end of chapter one.

Rotoscope

Figures in a short video were traced frame by frame using Photoshop onion skinning.

Module 4 Part 2

Module 4 Part 1

Module 4 Part 3

Donkey and Lee- It Wasn’t Meant To Be

There once was an only child named Lee, age 10, who loved to visit his best and only friend, a donkey, whom he liked to call Donkey. Donkey was property of the town zoo and lived in a fenced area all by himself to be used as a form of entertainment for visitors to see and pet. Lee would visit him often and they had become quite good friends. Donkey would listen to Lee’s talks about his hopes and dreams. Lee loved Donkey for his attentiveness, never interrupting as Lee loved to talk a lot. The boy was saddened that his only friend was always trapped in this zoo and that the two of them could never truly spend quality time with each other. Lee himself felt as if he was trapped in his home. No friends to play with, only Donkey to listen to him talk. Lee decided that the only way for him and Donkey to be free would be to run away together.

One night, when the town was asleep, Lee sneaked out of his house, wandering through the streets until he reached the zoo. Hopping the fence, he saw Donkey sound asleep. Having a small body, he carefully squeezed into Donkey’s cage, woke him, and together they dug a hole into the ground under the fence of the zoo until they were both out. Lee brought Donkey home and together they snuck into a small fishing boat that Lee’s father enjoys on the weekends.

They embarked on a great adventure to find freedom. Little did Lee know, the sea is a very dangerous place. A few hours into their journey, dark clouds began to roll in. Thunder could be heard and lightning was soon visible. Rain was pouring and the waves were powerful. The little fishing boat was lifted and lowered and pushed and pulled and poor Lee was flung from the boat into the raging sea. Donkey on the other hand had all four of his legs pointing out in all directions of the boat hanging on for dear life.

The storm settled, and Donkey was exhausted. He stood on the boat looking down into the water as if his friend would come back. Donkey was sad, lonely and afraid. He decided to get some rest and fell asleep.

He woke up a few hours later to find himself on the shore of a public beach. Beach-goers gazed at him as he shyly stared back at them. A lifeguard called a local zoo to inform them of the find and to see if they would like to take the donkey with them. The zoo was happy to accept the donkey. They quickly picked him up and brought him to the zoo and placed him in a fenced area so that people could come and look at him and pet him if they’d like. Donkey was yet again stuck in a zoo, all alone, with no family or friends. It was then that he realized that his life was meant to be in captivity. Donkey will never be free.

Steranko's Narrative Theory

This article talks and compares different forms of graphic storytelling such as comics, animation, film, and compares them with each other. Steranko mentions the different types of shots/angles involved in storyboarding. An interesting part is when he is comparing different arrangements of the same three shots and how they tell different stories depending on how they are arranged.

The most interesting part about this reading, in my opinion, was when Steranko talks about how he plays certain music to match the art he is creating in order for him to get inspiration. I really like that idea and I'm going to try to do that to see if it will work for me.

He gives good advice on making graphic stories. The last thing he mentions is really interesting. He says that a technique he uses in his storytelling is to actually pretend that he is the character/in the situation himself and then tell the story from that perspective.

Bouncing Ball

This was my first project for Fundamentals of Animation. It's a bouncing ball!

Drawn frame-by-frame in Photoshop with onion skins enabled.

Shape to Shape

Another small project for my Fundamentals of Animation class. We were given two shapes and asked to make any kind of in betweens to transition from one shape to the next.

Drawn frame-by-frame in Photoshop with onion skins enabled.

The Apple Tree

Drawn frame-by-frame with tablet in Photoshop. Onion skins enabled.

Stop-Motion Wire Man

This is my 1st stop-motion animation which I made for my Fundamentals of Animation class which I am currently enrolled in at RPI.

Images were taken using a Kodak z650 still camera and tripod.

I used Photoshop to clean up particular frames in which either my hand or other objects accidentally entered the work area.

The movie itself was put together using Adobe Premiere Elements.

Music is OAM's Blues by Aaron Goldberg.

Module 3 Part 3

Storyboard based on the following script:

1.(ELS) What appears to be an oversized soup can with a dome lid hurtles through space, twisting and turning every which way down to Earth. 2.(LS)It skims across treetops, 3.(ELS)around bridges and buildings, 4.(FS)whipping into the air anything not anchored down. 5.(LS)The ship (soupcan) guides its way to an open field for an emergency landing. 6.(ELS)As the ship gets closer, a house and barn come into view. 7.(LS)The ship attempts to land in the field, showering ears of corn onto the landscape. The ship slows its destructive path, but not soon enough. 8.(MS)BOOM! The ship crashes through the upstairs window of the house and whizzes out the back door, 9.(LS)crashing through the barn, stopping in a haystack. 10.(LS)The animals in the barn turn to look at the smoldering haystack. 11.(FS)As the animals move cautiously toward the object,12.(MS) the haystack RUSTLES, and out pops EDDIE the warthog, wearing a bomber jacket, goggles, and helmet.

Module 3 Part 2

Hand-drawn, scanned. Photoshop --> Texturizer --> Chalk and Charcoal.

10 THE INCLINED PASSAGE 10

1.[LS]Indy shoots out of a cut-off hallway and

2.[MS]turns toward the exit. The rumbling is very loud and now we see why:

3.[FS]right behind Indy a huge boulder comes roaring around a corner of the passage, perfectly form-fitted to the passage way.

4.[CU]It obliterates everything before it,

5.[ECU]sending the stalactites shooting ahead like missles.

6.[FS]Indy dashes for the light of the exit. His hat flies off his head.

7.[ECU]Almost immediately it is crushed by the boulder.

8.[ELS]Indy dives out the end of the passage as

9.[LS]the boulder slams to a perfect fit at the entrance, sealing the Temple.

Module 3 Part 1

For this project I decided I wanted to test out Sketchbook Pro. I got this software for free with an Autodesk book I purchased a little while ago. It's kind of like MS Paint but a little fancier and you can have layers and whatnot. I like how I can shade and the lines are pretty smooth.

The movie is 300. I thought this was a good choice for a storyboard since it has a lot of rich detail, is very expressive, and the movie is beautifully filmed overall.

Reading 2

Blood in the Gutter

I really enjoyed this reading. I talked about the gutter- the dividing line between two panels in a comic, and how our mind is what fills those gaps.

There are moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, aspect-to-aspect, and non-sequitur types of gutters. The idea of non-sequitur reminded me of the mini assignment we had to make a story about of the comic which had random images: cigarette, man on couch, dog bighting leg, etc.. That comic may have been non-sequitur.

The most often used of these are action-to-action, subject-to-subject and scene-to scene. I thought it was rather interesting that the proportion of usage of these types of gutter/transitions are almost identical in pretty much all comics. It is further interesting that in Japanese comics, the aspect-to-aspect type is actually used rather often while in western comics it is pretty much not used at all. In Western culture, the goal is to get to the destination, while in Eastern culture, its about experiencing being there. Its really interesting how different cultures could cause comics to be portrayed differently.

Module 2 Part 3

I found this assignment to be a bit more difficult than I had expected. I spent quite some time looking through the entire painting trying to fins any possible combination of images that could create a story. Finally I came up with this one: a tragedy about two enslaved men who attempt at an escape for freedom, and end up being sentenced to death.

Poetry & Comics

For this assignment I had a really hard time thinking of things that went together, so I kind of just wrote statements as they came to my mind. The background is an image I created last year in Intermediate Digital Imaging for our relative size project.

Module 2 Part 2

For this second part of module 2, the elements of fence, wall, water, dog and family are to be used to tell a story in comic format. In my story, I have a family of dogs relaxing by a small pond outside of their dog house. The mother falls asleep and one of the pups falls into the pond. She then goes to rescue the pup and all is well once again.

Module 2 Part 1- completed

I don't think I can make it any shorter than this without taking away from the story I am trying to portray...

Module 2 Part 1

I am trying to finish the first part of module 2, but I am having trouble using only 9-12 screen shots. I currently have 20. Here is the work in progress. I will continue to work to make it shorter.. Anyway, I am using frames from the movie 9 by the producer Tim Burton (who also made The Nightmare Before Christmas). I love the style of his work so I had to pick this film. Since I have not yet seen this movie, I am not exactly sure what is going on.. all I know is that some machines are "out to get them"... and the 9 stuffed dolls are somehow involved in the prevention of the machines destroying all.

I start my sequence with doll number 9 watching some kind of hologram/video thing which tells him that the machines have turned against us! He becomes concerned, runs off to notify his allies of the threat, and then a machine shows up. This machine grabs and kills 9's allies causing him to scream "NOOO!!!!" (as shown in frame 9). He manages to escape and is now all alone looking off into the vast emptiness of a world being destroyed by machines. That's my story anyway. I'm pretty sure the movie is nothing like what I just said... Again, I neeeed to see that movie!!

Comic 1

9!!

So I decided for the first part of module 2 I am going to use screen shots from the movie 9. I really want to see this movie, it looks awesome! I'm glad I haven't seen it yet though because if I did see it, then I wouldn't be able to use it for this awesome assignment! Woot!

In Class Activity 9.9.09

"The company had seen better days."

"The salesman smiled nervously as he reported his sales from the previous month."

Reading 1

The Vocabulary of Comics

I found the beginning of this comic to be really amusing and the rest of the comic was very interesting. It gave me a new way of thinking about everything I see. It's really interesting how we interpret cartoons as representing real things in our world. I learned about icons and that the things we see in cartoons are not what the really are, but are icons: images that represent people, places, things or ideas.

I like the idea of breaking images down into their simplest form. It's cool that a face can get simpler than 2 dots and 2 lines by showing it with letters as "F A C E".

I look forward to discussing this comic in class so I can better understand all of the ideas the character was trying to convey to us.

Module 1 Part 3!

Wow I am sooooo impressed with myself! I didn't think it would come out this good, but I actually really like it! I took a drawing by Lynd Ward and altered it to make the characters messy pile of papers into a neat pile and he turns away from the table. I couldn't really decide whether to consider this a "before" or "after", but I guess an "after" would make the most sense. I was originally going to make it a "before", and say that he got frustrated and messed up the neat pile... but the way I depicted the new image doesn't really look like that, so I will stick with it being the "after" image. Woo! By the way, I did this entirely using Photoshop.

Here is the original image by Lynd Ward:

Module 1 Assignment 2

Tada!

I decided that for this assignment I would portray the simple steps for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I did this entirely in Adobe Illustrator.

Assignment 1!

I would like to call this piece "The Duck Cycle". I was trying to simply depict a cute family of ducklings yet at the same time show the cycle of a duck. Beginning with the egg, a duckling is hatched, and eventually grows up into a beautiful adult duck. I began this as a drawing in light pencil and then went over it in mostly sharpie and some pen. I scanned it into the computer and used photo shop to make the lines even darker and used the texturize tool to give it the "ink" effect. I cropped it in certain places as well to give it more of a continuous, off-the-page, more realistic feeling.

Here is the original scanned drawing:

Assignment 1 Decision!

I decided I will use the idea of ducklings but I will have it portrayed as a ducks life cycle. I'll have a nest with duck eggs, some duckling, and an adult duck all portrayed in an image. I will make this hand drawn first lightly in pencil, then go over with pen and/or sharpie to make it darker for scanning.

Assignment 1 Ideas

So my first assignment is to create an image that depicts a complete narrative. I have to think of something that runs in a logical direction to communicate an intention. It must be in one space... what can it be?

People brushing their teeth? One person putting paste on the toothbrush... and the one next to him/her already brushing their teeth, and another person rinseing?

Or maybe have a group of school kids walking to class together.

O! An idea! How about ducklings following their mother into a lake shore?.. Not a bad idea? I will let you know if I've decided on it.

Ken and I

I was bored one summer day and decided to play around with illustrator.