Illustration & Visual Narrative: Project #3 Graphic Novel

Week 10 - Week 14 (26.10.2020 - 27.11.2020)

Seerat Tayyab Mukhtar Qureshi - 0345576 (BDCM)

IVN

Project #3

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Instructions:

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1. Planning:

For this project we could write a visual novel based on the theme of Issekai or accidental adventure. I wanted to write a manga because that is the style of graphic novels I am most familiar with. I started by mapping out my ideas a little.

I received feedback from Miss Anis on my story and she said it felt a bit incomplete so I decided to change it a little.

During our practical lessons, Mr. Faizul showed us a way of turning pictures into "manga style" on Photoshop by adjusting the Threshold and Gradient Map.

Before starting my sketching I also decided to look at some character sheets of anime characters to see how they are drawn from different angles.

Fig 1.0: Character design

2. Compiling: 

I started working on my panels.

Fig 1.1: My first panel

Once I started doing them it got easier to do them. I drew them in Procreate and then opened them in Photoshop to add the speech bubbles and text. I downloaded a comic font to make it look like a real manga would. 

Fig 1.2: Adding more pages

Miss Anis said I was on the right track after showing her an example of some of my pages. I then went ahead and finished all the pages I needed to do.

Fig 1.3: Final PDF

Next step was to animate some of the panels to make it a motion comic. I used after effects to animate the layers separately.

Fig 1.4: In After Effects

This took me a little bit longer than expected because I am not so familiar with After Effects. Mr. Faizul said we did not have to animate all the panels depending on our story.

Fig 1.5: Final video

Feedback: Miss Anis gave me quite a bit of feedback which helped me a lot in doing this project. I was quite nervous about it since its our final project but she said I was on the right track so that was very helpful. Mr. Faizul also gave us general feedback on everyones work. He said the quality was good so far and that was reassuring.

Reflection: I was quite anxious for this project and I didn't think I would be able to create a work that I would like or a work that would even look like a manga but through the help of my lectures I am happy with what I have produced. It was definitely a bit difficult because I have never done any visual storytelling like this so it was a first for me. I definitely learnt a lot about visual narratives and how pictures themselves tell stories without the need of dialogues or text.