After our last class discussion, I thought a lot about what projects I was considering for thesis. Now, these may seem like a complete shot in the dark, but I believe them to be fully within my skill range. So why not give them a try or at least gather some info about the.
Project 1: Interactive Comic Story
The idea behind this comic is to create an interactive page-turning experience that provides an enriched story with impressive visuals that change and move with each turn of the page. There will be multiple paths to the endings that depend on the viewer’s decision on where they would want to go in the story. The book will consist of being roughly 15 to 20 pages long, some with additional slides for the endings.
Project 2: Animated Visual Story
The idea behind this is to introduce a new way of telling a story through well-placed imagery and conceptual art pieces all synchronized in an animated fashion using visual elements to present a well-written narrative. This idea of storytelling has been shown in numerous fashions but to the ideas I have with it will differ in many different ways. Using programs such as Unity, Photoshop, and After Effects, The goal is to create this visual style never seen before in this medium in storytelling
Project 3: 3D Rendered Character Designs
There are a number of character designs created by numerous artists in and out of the industry. This idea will be centered around creating 4 different 3d modded original characters with their own animation sets. It has always been a thought of mine to learn more about 3D modeling programs and create more human-based characters with the tools provided and create original designs with their own personalities and delve into the world of character design.
Tools For Each project
Project 1- Unity, Adobe Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint Pro
Project 2 – After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, Unity
Project 3 – Blender, Unity, Unreal Engine 4
If anyone has any thoughts or ideas on smome resources that may be of help. please feel free to let me know. Thank you for reading this. best of luck to everyone 🙂
INTERACTIVE COMIC
I like this direction, Chris, and I think you should find it personally inspiring and motivating given your interests. Any type of interactive/branching story can get overwhelmingly big really quick. I’d encourage you to keep the paths through the story few and simple, and focus instead on innovating the form of a digital comic. I mentioned you should read up on Scott McCloud:
– Understanding Comics: http://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/index.html
– Reinventing Comics: http://scottmccloud.com/2-print/2-rc/index.html
He makes some really interesting observations about the level of realism in comics and how much we read into a panel, also how we read *between* the panels of a comic whether a second passed between them or a week or a year. I’d encourage you to come up with some novel ways to progress through and between the panels of a digital comic, then focus on demo-ing those effectively rather than coming up with a ton of illustrations to fill out an expansive story tree. BTW I could easily imagine you adding After Effects to the mix for this project.
ANIMATED VISUAL STORY
These words *sound* good but as I read them and then re-read them I had trouble understanding what they actually mean 🙂 And the fact that you’re having a hard time describing the idea in clear terms means you might have a hard time making your idea real and tangible. It’s likely to stay too big and too vague for too long into the development process.
3D CHARACTER DESIGNS
Good that you want to challenge yourself with something new, but there have been hundreds of thousands of 3D character designs and I’m not sure how much opportunity there is to do something truly innovative, something that would help your product and your skills stand out from the crowd.
Chris, your interactive comic has so much room for exploration and your own personal style that I’m sure you could ace it if you wanted to do it for senior thesis. I don’t know much about the software required to get this done, but I have actually read a few interactive comics before. There’s one I’ve read before that’s pretty short but may help you with your own design and working out how to make a divergent storyline. It’s called Saving Maggie and you can check it out here:
https://www.studiomik.nl/hype/maggie/home.html
Having seen your work before, I have complete faith and excitement towards you bringing your first idea to life! The interactive comic story is a great way to demonstrate your creative storytelling abilities (writing/developing the story), expand your digital illustration skills (designing the characters/setting), as well as give the audience something fun to do (direct the fate of the story).
I took a look at the comic Rachel suggested you look at and I think it would be a great template for you to follow.
I also think the novel’s Ault suggested will help you get a firm understanding of making a comic as opposed to just a normal type of video.
I’m assuming Photoshop and After Effects will be your best friends for this project but I’ve heard of a few types of software designed specifically for digital comics that you can probably find on Google as well.
Looking forward to seeing your final product in a few months!