Knowledge for my third year: Weeks Seven to Ten research to create intent for next week

With these it was basically discovering what I would want to do as my final major assignment.

Thoughts process towards final major project.

Over the past few weeks we given the task of looking for something that could gives us an idea of what our intent could be for our final project. At first I knew that I wanted to create a Graphic novel, but this not an intent it more a technique I wanted to use. So with this I started to break down the idea of a comic, so for an example I used Stjepan Sejic comic Death Vigil and broke that into different sections. So when I broke it into different categories, the first was text boxes I found out that he would express emotions through the text boxes such as dread was expressed by a skull text box which is a good way to get across the idea of emotion without seeing the facial expression. I also found out that he would use different coloured text boxes with a different font to express the archetypes such as villains were red and the heroes were blue. The next sub category was the layout of the page for example when every it was an action scene the panels were layered tightly together and sometimes overlaid but when it was casual conversation the panels had a gap between them to give the sense of time passing by. The final category of the comic that has started my idea for my intent was the characters body language and facial expression. I found it amazing that it could send across an emotion by just using a facial express and body movement. This started me on my path on what I wanted to do for my intent.

So with the next week I had looked up more comics which focused on this idea of using body movement such as Gasoline Alley, Krazy Cat and Chris Ware work which focused the movement of time. With these ideas it was good to gain an idea of movement between panels. I also looked at artists that were basically sections. The artists were Leonardo Da Vinci who scientifically studied the human body and muscle movement and visual recorded them down, the next artist was Marc Davis who was an animator that worked at Disney animation studio and did a whole series of natural movement of animals and humans, one I thought would be interesting and relating to what I want to do would be Alfred Hitchcock storyboard which are created him that express get emotional and fantastic gestural movement and the final artist which focus on interior design is Michelle Morelan. But overall I needed to look at something that expressed more movement and I need to board my idea of movement, So with that idea I looked at silent films like Metropolis and Nosferatu a symphony of horror which express mostly movement and the talking is all down through screen text. This helped me look at what creates a scene for example in the film Metropolis the female lead Maria (Brigitte Helm) who played two different characters with same appearance. She express this by making the characters move differently such as Maria the human moves timid while her counterpart moves more snake like movement. Then with Nosferatu he moves slowly and stiff which gives the idea of being a moving undead through his body movement. With this idea I gained my intent of understand how body movement, gestures and facial expression express emotion. I will also need to task myself to look at other things besides films such as dancing, ballets, sports and etc.

Intent: to displaying emotions and movement in graphic novel outcome with own creative story.
Theme: Supernatural/horror or everyday story illustrated.

Artists for reference:

Marc Davis ( Disney animator)
James Jean (fine art)
Chris Ware( Comic artists that presents time in his comics)
Michelle Morelan (interior design)
Leonardo De Vinci (Renascence artist)
Alfred Hitchcock (Storyboard artist)
Sjtepan Sejic (Comic artist)
Claire Hummel (concept artist)
Shaun Tan (children book illustartor)

Writers for reference:

Neil Gaiman
Terry Patchet
Bill Willingham
Stjepan Sejic
H.P.Lovecraft
Brother Grimm
Hans Christian Anderson

Shakespeare
Vladimir propp

Types of comic layouts:

Japanese comics (manga)
American comics (eg superman)
Online comics
Children comics
Children book layout
For action scenes the layout is tight and compact
For relax scenes there are large gaps between the panels
Some of the panels have a black box around them so they stick out
Some of the pages have panels blending with the background
One comic called Gasoline alley had a layout in which only the main character moved.
Sometimes with the panel layout the pages is overlaid with panels to fill in more story.
The manga layout of pages relies more on shading and speech bubbles to express most of the emotion
Some comics relies on no speech bubbles to tell the story Aka non narrative (eg)

Text box layout:

Stjepan Sejic text display emotion besides the characters face expressions
In most comics they display the archetypes of characters through colour of text box (eg Villains: red, Hero: Blue and etc)

Photography