WOW long time no blog! Since the last time I blogged, Katie and I met TWICE and our comic has had a MAJOR glo-up. I'm going to use the blog post to showcase our process and some of our struggles when creating the final first draft!
So our first step was creating the storyboard, which I outlined in the last blog post. Here's an example of our of our storyboard draft ideas.
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| We were going to use the picture under the bridge when we wrote this lol |
Next, we finalized our photo choices and added the speech bubbles and borders to the pictures using drawings on Google docs.
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| It was a beautiful day when we decided to take these pictures, and my iPhone camera did quite well! |
Katie and I both traced different Gompeis in different poses and outlined them in marker so they could be easily traced in Illustrator. Katie worked her Illustrator and Photoshop wizardry (she totally mastered the lasso tool which was giving us extreme stress during the infographic unit!) and then we put our traced/lassoed Gompei into the frame.
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| Gompei striking a ~fabulous~ pose |
Then we put the frames into Google slides and arranged them on the slide so they looked decent and the flow made sense to read.
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| YEAH! |
While we struggled a whole lot less with Adobe suite, we hit a whole lot of bumps in the road. We did a lot of our design in Drawings in Google docs, without knowing that you couldn't copy and paste those into Google slides. Thankfully, the snipping tool ROCKS, and we snipped the heck out of this project. Then we had to layer the borders over the photos by drawing rectangles over the images. There was a lot of struggling with the sending to front/sending to back in the Google format (kinda wish they had layers like in photoshop).
But, despite a LOT of time being spent on transferring photos from one media to another, we got a lot of positive feedback today in class! Some of the constructive feedback included making the fonts bigger and making the frames more even in our layout. We also need to revise some of our Gompeis to make them look less weird (and flip the lettering we forgot to flip on one of Gompei's shirts). We have a lot of work left to do, but we are on a good path so far!
I really enjoy hearing about all the behind the scene struggles! It looks so professional I would have had no idea that you had so many struggles in transferring and layering. It really looks awesome and very unified. I feel like that's why I feel so surprised that you had to use such a vast array of programs and hacks. I hope the changes you mention making won't be too much of a struggle!
ReplyDeleteOne of the reasons why I really like these blog posts is reading about the different routes you took to get to your completed comic. It looks really nice and I could definitely see it being used during NSO, especially with how WPI it is. I'm excited to see your final!
ReplyDeleteI am thoroughly surprised that your comic was created using Google Docs, Google Slides, and Snipping Tool. It looks so professional--something I don't associate with any of those tools. That shows I need to be more creative with how I do projects, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting how the combination of multiple styles in the comic itself parallels the range of programs and mediums you used in creating it.
ReplyDeleteWas the Gompei design you used based off of an existing one, or of your own creation? Either way, it works very well for the purpose as it is immediately recognizable and manages to avoid straying into the uncanny valley or other weird design territory despite the human-like pose and features.