Behind the Scenes of My Comic Strip

Skills Development:

During this project, I will be using a variety of skills such as Graphic Design Skills, Traditional Art Skills, an Understanding of Animation, an Understanding of Typography, an Understanding of Colour Theory, Creative Thinking, Technical Skills, Interpersonal Communication and Originality.

To do this project, I will be drawing out all my shots and then scanning it onto my computer, this will show my graphic design skills, my understanding of animation and creative thinking, from there I will use Premiere to combine all my shots and then I will also collect sounds with friends out of college to show my ability to organise a time to meet up with them and also my team working skills.

Week 1:

Today we chose what we were going to do for this project, the options were: photo series (2-3 triptychs), a 5-10 minute podcast (Audio), and comic strip (For print & video with audio). I decided to do comic strips as everyone chose to do photo series, I wanted to challenge myself and test what I have learned this past three months or so. To actually know what I was getting myself into, I researched different comic strips and techniques that were used in the process of making them. 

After finding out what I was doing, I then started to plan what my storyline will be, for the comic strip I have to create camera shots and then animate it, by putting all shots in together and adding music and sounds to it.

Week 2: 

Next, I went onto YouTube and to get inspiration of types of stories I can portray in my comic strip, and then I had the idea of recreating the scene of the ‘birth’ of The Flash. I chose to portray this scene because it was quite simple as the movements are easier to mimic. I decided to use tracing paper as then I can see the transition from movement to movement. To make the shots look interesting and eye-catching, I used bright colours to show the supernatural side of the scene. This way the audience will be drawn to how that is affecting the change that is going to occur.

Week 3: 

This week I spent finishing off my camera shots. I also rented out a boom kit to allow me to record and capture sound for my scenes. The sounds I needed to capture were background noise, also in the scene I have chosen, there is a storm and an explosion. I was able to mimic the sound of the storm in my shower hitting a shower cap. For the explosion, I used my heater to create the build up, then I rustled plastic in a bowl to be the after sound of the explosion, for the explosion itself, I popped a crisp packet. In one shot, Barry is seen pulling on chains, to create the sound effect of this I got my friend Harry to start moving metal screws around in his hands, starting off slowly and then slightly increasing the speed. In the scene from the flash, Barry doesn't necessarily say anything in it but I've included reaction noises, here I got Harry to speak into the mic to say 'huhhh'.

Week 4 (Final Week):

This week I am putting combining both the camera shots I've drawn and the sounds I have recorded. I will be creating the animation on Photoshop, one here I layered all my pictures to create an animation illusion. After layering the drawings, I put set times for each of the frames, allowing movements such as pulling on the chains, more fluent. Next, I exported the layered frames as an mp4 file, and then placed it into Premiere Pro, this allowed me to add my background sounds and reaction sounds. Finally, after much work, layering each of my sound recordings, I exported the file and uploaded it onto YouTube.

Conclusion:

To conclude this project, I would say that overall, I completed it well. I have definitely improved my skills in Photoshop, Premiere Pro and Drawing. Ways that I could improve on is to create more frames of individual movements, to make the shot look cleaner and fluent. If I had more time, I would have also spent more time with the sound recordings, by recording more and to also edit them better to the camera frames.