Illustration & Visual Narrative // Project 3

08/06/20 - 24/07/20 / Week 8 - Week 15
Ibrahim Fazal Ahmad / 0337423

Illustration & Visual Narrative / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / Taylors University / Project 3


Motion Comic - Create a web comic of maximum 30 panels and also animate it into a short video.

For our final project, we have to make a web comic based on the pandemic. However, I did jump the gun a little bit and worked on this a little earlier to try and get a head start. This lead me to working on a comic that wasn't following the theme at first and I adapted it into the theme afterwards but I will explain it starting from my original idea. 

Figure 1: Mood board of my ideas.

So my original idea before being told the theme was Romance/Supernatural. I wanted to do a romance comic because it is what I enjoy reading the most personally and I thought it would be fun to make one with a more diverse cast and enjoyable story. I explained this more in my pitch which I will put below:

Figure 1.1: Pitch 1

FEEDBACK: I was told this idea is actually pretty good, and having a romance comic that would resolve in the two of them realising true companionship is all you need would be pretty original since in most romance comics, they'd fall in love. Hence the name romance obviously. But! That isn't the theme we're supposed to be following, so I need to rebrand the idea a little bit, I can keep the characters and aesthetic but I need to change my story. Which I did into a more adventure/fantasy heavy concept.

Figure 1.2: Pitch 2

FEEDBACK: I was told the idea was definitely not as strong as the first one which is explained because I spent around 3 weeks coming up with an idea for the first one. But we don't have the luxury of spending another 3 weeks to solidify my idea because of time. I was cleared to work on this idea, but I was that completing this might be difficult because I am aiming for 30 panels which is already a lot and my illustration style is pretty realistic in terms of proportions. I was warned, and I understand that but I would like to take the risk because I genuinely don't think I can fit this comic into less than 30 panels.

After getting my idea approved, I worked on thumbnail sketches for the entire story just fitting it into roughly 30 panels and did some concept art sketches for the general environment and atmosphere for them.


Panel Sketches: 
    
Figure 1.3: Thumbnail sketches

FEEDBACK: I did the thumbnail sketches for each page and also a rough idea of how I would want the camera movement to be for the animated version. They said the sketches looked fine and I didn't have to change anything about them. Mr Kannan however did suggest me to try and break past the panels in a few panels and to make the background/frame behind the actual panels match to the current location they were in.

After this sketch I also did another slightly more detailed sketch after which I did the line art. I also did a few simple concept sketches for "inside the mind" because I wanted to know just a rough idea of what I would be working with for the backgrounds. I was heavily inspired by these images: 

Figure 1.4: Inspiration

Figure 1.5: Inspiration

Figure 1.6: Inspiration


I wanted the inside of his mind to look relatively real, but just a personalised version of your "happy place" almost. Min (the character whos mind we go into) is from Busan so I wanted to make the area very much based on a beach and vast ocean. I wanted it to also have a high perch and mountain in the middle of nowhere to give a very isolated feel. I also made the sky losing based off of how neurons look and are illustrated. I did some simple black and white sketches of his mind using the following images: 

Figure 1.7: Concept idea of inside the characters mind.

After figuring out the background, and finishing all the line art I coloured the comic in. I tried to make a bright and vibrant colour scheme that could change along with the mood of the story. Here are the colour schemes of the characters: 
Figure 1.8: (Left to right) Min, Zayna & Jinn.

In Figure 1.8, I roughly sketched out the general look and colour scheme of my main characters. Min is the only human that appears in the story, I wanted to make him look suspicious and trying to hide his face from being seen. Zayna is much more outgoing and friendly and I wanted her concept work to represent that. Jinn is much more reserved and would prefer not to engage in such dangerous activities on his own will and I drew him more calm and quiet looking. I also gave both Jinn and Zayna coloured hair to give them a more clear association with their demon forms.

Figure 1.9: (Left to right) Zayna, Azazel and Jinn.

These are the demon versions of the character. Zayna and Jinn retain their general look because I wanted them to still be relatively the same and more of a partial transformation than a full one. The demon is a proper demon form, with non human legs and hands and a devils tail. All of their colours are quite bright and vibrant because it is my own personal visual style. I also made Jinn and Azazel of the same "colour" which will add more significance to what happens later in the comic. Here is the fully illustrated version of the comic as a PDF: 

Figure 2: Motion Comic

After illustrating the comic, we had to animate each panel into a short video. I ended using Adobe Animate because I already have a years worth of personal experience on the program so I am more comfortable using it compared to other Adobe programs. For the animation, I had already done everything on separate layers so all I did was increase the PPI from 300 - 500 for better image quality. After which I opened Adobe Animate and imported the Photoshop files themselves into the stage. 

Here is the link to the animation, I uploaded it on YouTube because the quality on blogger is really bad: 

Figure 2.1: Motion Comic Animated

 REFLECTION:

Experience: My experience with this project was very fun, it was one of the most difficult assignments I've had yet in Taylors. I had such a big idea, even Ms Yvonne and Mr Kannan were unsure whether I would be able to complete this assignment within the time given. Honestly even I was a little unsure but I didn't let that stop me, I worked and worked and worked over the last few weeks and finished it, earlier than expected too! I have learnt a lot more about character design, expressions and gestures. I have also learnt some things about character design and staging a shot to make it interesting. 

Observation: An observation I made was that the simplest of things can make such huge and impactful differences in your artwork. Whether it's just a specific colour for the background or a different staging. One huge difference in my work was in the line variation I had done. Originally the first page I drew had no real line variation, it was just slight pen pressure difference. I had sent the page to one of my friends and she said to try and add more line variation within the artwork and gave me a tip on how to do that. With that alone it made the whole comic so much better.

Findings: One thing I found was that there isn't one specific style of comic when it comes to webtoon. What makes the webtoon comics so interesting is that there are so many different storylines and art styles all suited to different audiences and people. I really enjoy it because from what I've seen in a typical western comics there is a lot less style variation among the popular comics. While on webtoon it really allows an artists individuality to shine through their work and I hope that the same applies with mine. 

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