#dsdn112

Emotions

The story I choose allowed me to explore a range of emotions as since it is set in a dream world I could put my character in literally any situation to create any emotion I wanted. The main character starts off very surprised at waking up in this world, but then is overwhelmed by joy at the sight of this dream world. The character is later slightly surprised when they see the female character riding a dragon, however this changes to very surprised when they see themselves inside the door. As the main character first meets the female character he is quite self-conscious and insecure, this this soon changes to extreme happiness when she asks if he wants to sit down. In the sixth page their relationship starts off good but it slowly starts to fall apart. During this stage I show happiness, worry, surprise, annoyance, anger and disgust. In the car the anger is suddenly replaced by fear and surprise when he sees the car coming towards them and he fears for their safety, this was important as it showed that he still cared for the other character. When he wakes up he initially shows surprise but joy and a bit of sadness appear in both his and the other characters faces.

  Project description

I wanted to take advantage of web possibilities when creating my web comic, I wanted to do things that that I wasn’t able to do before. I also really liked Dan Goldman’s navigation system in his comic Red Light Properties. His system let you bring up one panel at a time instead of the whole page all at once. I wanted to incorporate this into my design and It works well with my story as there are specific scenes that I want to keep a surprise to the reader. Instead of instantly seeing where the main character has woken up, the reader is left in suspense before the whole story is revealed to them. Unlike Goldman’s comic I only let the user travel one panel at a time instead of giving them the opportunity to skip whole pages. I didn’t want the user to read my comic any other way, though I would have to change this if my comic was longer. I took inspiration Aencre’s comic which used gifs to create a moving dynamic story. This movement is unique to web comics and create an intriguing story for the read to experience. This effect worked very well as I used it to create moving wavy corners on my panels to show that they are in a dream world. It is an effective visual clue to let the audience distinguish what is dream and what is reality. At the end of the comic there is a small moving wave on the last panel to make the reader wonder if he is still in a dream. On the whole I was happy with my initial story, I was interested in dream worlds as they leaded me limitless possibilities, but in the end I went with a more down to earth story of a man realising what was really important to him through a dream.

  I took code from this website.

http://www.w3schools.com/jquery/tryit.asp?filename=tryjquery_hide_show

And I took inspiration from these comics

http://aencre.org/blog/2010/bol-directors-cut/

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Creating both a physical and web zine for our final assignment, was not only a lot of fun, but a challenge looking to be accomplished. Even from the start of the project, I was already excited to create characters and draw comics like I usually do in my spare time as a hobby. Instead of creating something completely new, I wanted to develop a project that I had started. For my final NCEA Level 3 folio I designed a game concept, it’s characters, packaging and promotional design. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to give this original project a definite storyline and there was just so much that I could explore with the resources and works that I had created. [However, edited and developed the design of the characters a bit more to make to make it current and fit my liking].

It was difficult having to draw an eight paged comic in just over a week as I’m usually a perfectionist and love to put hard work and detail into each and every panel. I think that because of this, my work suffered slightly as the style wasn’t consistent with me not being able to complete a lot of my screentoning and shading. However, even due to this difficulty I was really pleased to how my comic turned out as if this was through normal circumstance, I would have given up through the middle or eventually leave it as a work in progress to be never completed. It was interesting to go back to working with jquery again as it had been a while since I had used it. It was also fun learning new jquery codes since my prior knowledge on jquery is only pretty minimal. I ended up trying a bunch of codes, however I decided to not use most of them as even though they were really cool to function, develop and execute, they didn’t really work well with the concept of my comic. I wanted to make the story face paced and straight to the point.

Through my love and prior knowledge of manga, I looked upon several manga to give me ideas such as Corpse Party, Naruto, Pokemon Special/Adventures, Bakuman, Case Closed amongst others. They gave me ideas on panel structure and using screentones and most importantly speedlines for the chase scenes. With this I also chose to use a black border instead of a white to enhance the feelings of fear, aloneness and the dark atmosphere created by the story. Due to this, I decided to place my comic on a black background so that the panels themselves stood out in the middle. I had several ideas to place for the interaction of my comic, but simplified it down to just a simple down scroll. That way the whole page isn’t revealed and the reader won’t be spoiled of the climax as fast. I based this off the scary Korean comic Bongcheon-Dong Ghost which was shown in the lecture. Although the story is completely different, it influenced me to produce my concept in a similar way.