Graphic Novel and Animatic

The progression of my graphic novel started out slower than I would have liked. I had to work and re-work my page layouts a few times in order to make the story flow in the way I wanted. After some edits and overall approval from my director, I began art production. I started with my character designs. I took the simple characters I had developed for my animation and made them more complex. Then I took about two and a half weeks to draw out all the pages of the graphic novel. There are 17 pages of art with the cover re-using one of the images. I then started a rough cut of where I wanted the images to be in the animatic, and I started planning how I wanted them to move.

At the Capstone Faculty Review, I had my line art for the pages, but not the shading or the cover yet. I also somehow managed to forget to unplug my USB from where I was working at home (oh Mondays...), so I unfortunately could not show my professors the progress on the animatic. The faculty did give me some good advice on how to improve my graphic novel, and the next three weeks I spent making the changes suggested, finishing up my animatic, and putting together my poster-board for the presentations.

For my graphic novel, I made the borders of the pages black and developed the cover. I added in shading to make the images a bit more dynamic and give them some depth. Everything is in black, white, and gray because I didn't want colors to take the center stage in my project. I wanted the story to be powerful and I didn't want colors to detract from the message I tried to convey.

For my animatic, I was surprised at how difficult it was to find creative commons audio that would work with my setting. Audio recording and editing are things I am still not very good at, but I ended up recording the sounds of walking, the newspaper rustling, and a few others. The walking was so difficult because my microphone didn't want to pick up the sound very well, so it sounds more like tapping than footsteps. The people I shared it with agreed with me that the steps didn't sound quite right, but I ran out of time to try and fix it. I need to make friends with an audio person or two I guess.

Overall, production was fairly straightforward once I had a feasible project instead of attempting the impossible. The biggest challenge I had other than audio was really managing working on this project at the same time as numerous other projects for other classes.