Final time

Monday the 9th

3pm-5pm

COURSE EVALUATION LINK

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/lanier-10217-201610

ASSIGNMENT: STICK FIGURE ADAPTATION

For Monday's class, I want you to adapt a very short science fiction story by Frederic Brown, titled ANSWER:

Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing. 

He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe -- ninety-six billion planets -- into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies. 

Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev." 

Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel. 

Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn." 

"Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer." 

He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?" 

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay. 

"Yes, now there is a God." 

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch. 

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut. 

***

You can use as few or as many pages as you would like. Use a combination of captions and word balloons to get the essence of the story across. Part of the assignment is that the characters have to be stick figures – today we're looking at a short film by Don Herzfeldt which uses stick figures – it's amazing what he can get across with a few simple lines.

ALSO FOR MONDAY:

Write down, and print out, your ideas for your final comic or short video for the class. We'll be working on it for a solid three weeks. If it's a comic, it should be at least 4 pages; if a video, at least two minutes. It can be a work of adaptation, or an original work. It can be in any of the modes we've used so far – abstract, collage, or figurative. Think of the different approaches we've used – utilizing gesture, slowing down or speeding up time, building up to a powerful image. It just needs to be something personal enough that it's worth spending three solid weeks on. 

Assignment: Expanding Time

For the beginning of class, your assignment is to slow down time. If you're doing this as a comic, you need to take an event that lasts 2-4 seconds, and take two pages to show the duration of that event. If you're using video, you have to expand a 2-4 second event into something that lasts at least 20-30 seconds.


Here's the download for the open source Ghibli animation software:

https://opentoonz.github.io/e/index.html

Assignment: Collapsing Time

Assignment for Monday – take a whole movie (or en episode of a TV show), and compress it into a one-page comic (or alternatively, edit it down into something no longer than two minutes). Figure out how much of it you can leave out, and still have it make some sort of "sense." You get to pick the size of the paper and the number of panels (or edits) you use.

Activity for Today (Monday, 3/21)

Hello all. My apologies – I won't be in class today. I will be here on Wednesday.

I originally had a movie in mind to show you as a class while I was out – but it seemed, last week, that everyone was still working on their two-page "Image with a capital-I" project. Madison might actually have this one done by now, but it seemed everyone else was still in the "inking" stage, so I thought it would be good to have one more in-class period where people could work on scanning their inked pages and digitally coloring them.

Piera has access to the cabinets, and can break out tablets for people to use. There is also a lightbox in there, and you can temporarily bring in the lightbox from the table just outside the door for today's class (just make sure to put it back by the end of class).

Madison, Max and Anthony should all have an idea of how to scan and color the inked pages. If there's a scanning bottleneck today, you can also use the two scanners that are attached to the Macs in the open studio space, outside the video recording studio.

Scans should be done at 300dpi, as TIFF files (this can be done through Image Capture, or the Epson Scn utility). Once the inked images are scanned, you can open them in  Photoshop, and create a new empty layer above the layer of scanned artwork. Change the blending mode of this layer to "multiply," and the colors you can add there with the brush tool will "fill in" the white of the scanned page underneath. The black lines will remain black.

The basic principle is shown here:

https://youtu.be/ZZSM-ZWv0uU

This tutorial goes more in depth:

http://designinstruct.com/drawing-illustration/how-to-color-inked-line-art-in-photoshop/

I'd recommend someone gets Pandora going on a machine that's hooked up to the speakers, and you all have a chill day coloring. I do want to see your two colored pages done by the start of next class – we're going review your "Image" project on Wednesday, and start a project that looks at how you can compress or expand time with comics or videography.There are also open lab hours this evening - check out the schedule for the open lab, posted next to the door, to the left as you're entering.

Hope you all had a good break, and see you soon.

Assignment for Wednesday (3/2)

The assignment for Wednesday, as a reminder from the class, is to sketch out two pages that are tuned to showing a capital-I "Image." Something that's really stuck with you, something that you've carried in your head for a while. You'll use the pages as thumbnails for a finished comic, or as storyboards for a short video.

The image has to have a strong personal dimension – something that comes from your life, or something you saw in a dream. Something that has put itself squarely in your mental library.

Like the beginning of the film was saw in class, I want you to construct this in a way where we see details of the Image without fully understanding how they might piece together on the first page, and then on the second page, we see the Image in full. In the film was saw the details of the aftermath of the accident with the horse – but couldn't piece together the relationship between the yelling people, the rope, the train and the horse until the final shot of the sequence.

So the first page will be made of multiple panels, showing details of your scene - and the second page will be taken over by one panel revealing the full image. The "details" on page one could be different physical details in space (the way, in the film, we saw the person emerging from the water, the feather floating, the guy grabbing the rope, etc), or you could make them details that extend the sense of time – a detail that changes over time, and it's not clear, till the second page, what those changes have been leading towards.

Homework for Wednesday (2/24)

In your new sketchbook, write down an idea for your "gesture-based" comic/video, which we'll be working on next class. The comic or video will be a story without any dialogue or narration – you will need to show a relationship between two characters (broadly defined – the characters could be two people, or a kid and a monster, or a girl and a dog, or a robot and a pack of cigarettes). It can be an antagonistic relationship or a supportive one.

All you need for the start of Wednesday's class is a brief description of who the characters are, and what their relationship is. And make a sketch of one gesture each character will make during the course of your story, which reveals something about their emotional state or character.

Homework for Monday (2/22)

Due for Monday - your "Diary Comic." Between today and Monday, keep track of your thoughts and experiences, and pick one day to bill down into a diary comic. As I said in class, this doesn't have to be "dramatic" at all - the everyday, the quotidian, the ephemeral are all open as subject matter for you. You can be playful, serious, or, like Keith, you can use reality as a starting point to make some stuff up. No restrictions on format - size or style - you can paint, draw, collage, what have you. For those of you working in video, you can make a mini-video, catching some moments of your life on the fly – for video, I'll put a restriction that it has to be short – 45 seconds, tops.

Here are the examples we looked at/talked about in class – James Kochalka, Gabrielle Bell, Keith Knight (click to see larger):

Quick note on homework

For Monday – Feb 1 – is to make the "page two" of the comic you were handed.

Plewds and Others

We'll be looking at this today – comics "eminata" taxonomized 9tongue in cheek) by Mart Walker:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1673017/quimps-plewds-and-grawlixes-the-secret-language-of-comic-strips

Homework for Monday

Just a reminder - at the start of class bring the one (or two) page comic based on our in-class exercise. Again, the exercise is to take the three images you linked together, and make a story of some kind out of those connections. It can be a sensical story or a non-sensical one – it's can have a straightforward "this happened, then this happened, then this happened" narrative structure, or it can have a more open-ended sense of structure. But you need to create panels that create the "narrative glue" that connects the three images you chose to group together, in a way where that connection is self-explanatory (meaning, you can't assume you're standing there to explain to the viewer what the connections are – it has to be evident in the comic itself).

I don't have any constraints on the ultimate number of panels per page, or the extent to which you are transforming the images as you draw them (like Payton mentioning he was going to add rocket packs to the horned toads). If you'd like more of a guideline, a 9-panel grid is a very often-used format for comic page layouts, so you could resort to that.

Here are a couple examples (and you can click on them to see them larger) –

A straightforward narrative sequence by Japanese cartoonist Osamu Tezuka, which almost works like a storyboard (it's meant to be read, like Japanese script, from left two right, reading down each column):





And here is a psychedelic narrative by American Underground cartoonist and poster artist Victor Moscoso:

Welcome

Welcome to SNC Tahoe's GRAPHIC NOVEL AND STORYBOARDING class blog.


Here are a couple things we will look at:

 



http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/10/menace.html

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/07/dog.html

https://vimeo.com/97259197

And the syllabus is here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cgu0b5epqhndh3n/16SpringDART480-1Lanier.doc?dl=0