[PROJECT 3] Final Summary
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.
Overall this website was not only a fun experience, but one that would help me to improve the skills I had prior to this assignment as a designer for the web and for general.
