Final dossier - http://enhancingwebcomics.tumblr.com/abstract

I would've liked to spend more time on the visuals but I ran out of time. I also couldn't get the font I wanted to use uploaded properly....
 I also wanted to have slideshows rather than 3 images in a row, and embed the video better than just youtube.

I looked at embedding an instagram post at one point, but the frame is too chunky and I didn't have time to clean it up to fit my aesthetic.

Have tested it on mobile and a mac and it should work on those too.

toby morris.

Just realised I've never done a post on Toby Morris, despite looking at a lot of his work. I went over some of his work briefly on my Illustration Studio blog

He's a NZ Illustrator who does comics - a lot of them political/social commentary, but still relevant - and uses simple animation. A lot for The Spinoff and The Wireless.

The animation tends to be either 'squiggle text' style or simple movements like eyes/hands/etc. It's used to draw attention to particular things

Take A Deep Breath and Dive In:








On A Plate:






From This is Not A Table:

illustration studio practice

In illustration studio practice we did posters with a continuous sequential narrative + animating some small elements, which is somewhat relevant to this project! I did the animation in after effects.

Started experimenting a little with scrollmagic/GSAP things, making them scroll activated.

Slides for Pecha Kucha

My page of notes of what I talked about, more or less:

I left some things out because it was going very long and I was almost last. But I got some good feedback, Mark and Karl seemed to think it was good! I just need to figure out the way to present this information in my dossier since everything's a bit out of order.

webcomic examples: animation

I recently joined a webcomic creators discord server and someone brought up animation in webcomics and a few people discussed it - some people said if there's too much, it can make a page too busy and lose the flow, or just be too gimmicky, but also that if it's done subtley or every now and then, to add extra emphasis or punch. especially in horror comics, with creepy eyes moving a little for example, or glitches


Colorless
A comic about a boy who wakes up in a strange supernatual city inhabitated by Animations who kill all humans. It's in single frames, no panels - though if you read it on tapastic they operate like panels.

It has a few animated pages every now and then, in order to emphasise various elements - mostly to do with the Animated (demon creature things), emphasizing their creepy nonhumanness

Here's a video I took of a part near the beginning:

The one part with the fish demon behind him emphasises the intensity of that sudden realisation there's something behind you..

One sequence near the beginning is an animated (motion graphic mostly) video

Here's a few of the other animated pages...






Ctrl+Z

A short comic about someone's experiences in uni, animation is used to emphasise a few moments. It's especially thematically relevant as the narrative is about how they couldn't study animation like they wanted to.

No Borders, No Limits:
The Infinite Canvas as a Storytelling Tool in Online Comics
and
Hyper/Comics/Con/Text:  Institutional Contexts and Interface Design in Online Educational Hypercomics


highlighted notes under cut

8 different articles about queer fairytales, queer comics, feminist fairytale retellings etc - highlighted notes under cut

Norman, Don. "Affordances and Design". Don Norman: Designing For People, 2004, https://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and.html,.


highlighted under cut

Talking with Kerry Ann one on ones

Some dream-ish related things she suggested looking into

sleep science/ dreams/ dream interpretation / paralysis/ near death experience


As well as some things to think about in terms of narrative/visual things

familiar/unfamiliar
screenbased
navigating through dream
control/chaos

chance/surreal artists

relooking at things
perception/ things are not as they seem


A couple things that deal with dreams she suggested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Life
http://www.realmeaningofdreams.com/slow-wave.html

I'm not sure if I want to make it so explicitly about dreams, but some good things to think about!

Lev Manovich - The Language of New Media



Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c, 2000. Leonardo.

notes under cut

Little Nemo + Mistlands comic reactions

A selection of people's thoughts-

Little Nemo;

I didn't get too much attention/feedback about this - but about as much as much as I do for any art I do that doesn't have a big fandom. Sam's comment about Maurice Sendak made me look it up and apparently he was very inspired by Little Nemo in Slumberland (which makes sense!)


Mistlands Parallax;
On tapastic, a comic hosting site where I post it

It's nice when people ask how it's done! I explained it briefly, linked to where I got the code, etc. The last comment is pretty sweet too - and I think it speaks to the fact that this is a one time thing, specifically for this part of the story in order to enhance this bit and make something cool and interesting rather than what the entire comic is made of? I suspect if the entire thing was like this people might get bored of it, especially in the posting format it's in (a page or two a week). 

Tumblr (where I host the comic as well):

ari (walkingnorth) has two very popular webcomics (I think I talked about Always Human on here a while ago?) and her reblogging this got me quite a few notes! the 'immersive fantasy webcomic experience" is a very nice comment too!! Having friendships with other webcomic creators is a really great to get things out there (and learn from them!)

Twitter:

 Instagram:

I find in general people are more likely to comment on instagram? I'm also not 100% sure if some of these people didn't go to the site itself, as the post is a screenrecord of me scrolling through it - maybe some of them just watched the video?

Patreon:

I also gained a handful of followers/subscribers on tumblr and tapastic. Overall, I got way more comments on all these sites than I ever do with normal Mistlands pages or any other art most of the time! I'm very happy with that (and grateful to all my friends and followers!)

These didn't end up being so relevant, but I grabbed a few quotes from the intros, mainly.

Nakevska, M., et al. "Interactive Storytelling in a Mixed Reality Environment: The Effects of Interactivity on User Experiences." Entertainment Computing, vol. 21, 01 June 2017, p. 97-104.

Vakulenko, Svitlana, et al. "Conversational Exploratory Search via Interactive Storytelling." 2017.

Jardim Nunes, Nuno, et al. Interactive Storytelling: 10th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2017 Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, November 14-17, 2017, Proceedings. Cham, Switzerland : Springer, 2017. Lecture notes in computer science: 10690.

Tristam mentioned picking a topic i'm interested - for example 'dreams' like Little Nemo and it got me thinking, I do really like stories that are someone going into a fantasy dream world, portal fantasies, etc, and that a lot of the examples I've been looking at do have that theme.

• Little Nemo in Slumberland obviously
• The Land of the Magic flute has the protagonist crash his car and go into the lake, entering a magic land, and at the end swimming up to the surface and being rescued by ambulances etc and thinking it must've been a dream (but then seeing a tentacle slip back into the lake...)
• Thunderpaw has characters also in a car crash, then find themselves in a weird creepy forest)

Having the contrast of reality/fantasy world is something that could really be played with style & layout & medium wise (as it is in the above comics)

Like Alice in Wonderland,


In terms of representation (lgbtia+ -wise, mostly), the majority of the comics I read have it as a normal, given thing, rather than something the comic is about - e.g. the main characters are lesbians and that's treated as normal and not any source of conflict, it's about normalizing them. So in whatever I do, I'll definitely have diverse characters, but it won't greatly affect what the story itself is about.



I also downloaded a whole lot of fairytale books (Andrew Lang's coloured fairy books mostly) to look for lesser-known fairytales I could possibly adapt, and have found a few that interest me, though I'm

Second Showing (week 7)

My presentation - it's basically the same as last week, I just added some more details. And I finished my Mistlands parallax

I chose the inform group because that's basically what comics and storytelling is, a device used to inform people, about whatever the story happens to be about. I suppose it's mostly about interaction and direct exchange, as well as being subjective (depending on the narrative?). In our group we didn't discuss very much how it informs or what kind of informing it is in specifics - because on the surface level it's fairly straightforward.
I didn't get that much feedback from talking to other classmates to be honest; most people seem to think I've got my direction and know where and going, and that it's all clear - which it is to an extent, I just need to figure out what my story is going to be about which will open up more need for research into different areas. I also need to do more detailed research into the things I'm already looking into - what I put up in my presentation is fairly simplified (so I don't have too much text up there.

When talking to people, they mostly brought up how it's very cool and interesting, and they like interacting with it (possibly because they haven't seen my project before), as well as suggesting other cool examples and different areas of webcomics, asking about the overlap of print and web comics - questions about the broad topic rather than specifics. This probably indicates I need to present more succinct detailed information.
I had a few people suggest that my narrative could somehow involve, conceptually, the idea of digital forms of storytelling. Someone also got me thinking that I could create a story in which part of the narrative is a webcomic and part of it is print - like a dual narrative, or from different POVs, and show how the different mediums can be used? I think that's a little off topic and would require a bit of rethinking of my project. My main goal now is to figure out what my story is about, and at least have a more specified and solid direction for that.

notes

what you need & will have to go forward
inform - imperitaves, education, instruct

design issues in research to date

essential/interaction - direct exchange
formative/subjective
informing - storytelling is an informative device


precedents of types of comics like what i'm interested in

The Language of New Media Lev Mavovich

pull back up- interaction design and media design
& narrative

block out points

be conscious about practice


exploring interactivity to enrich storytelling

Thunderpaw

Finn showed me this cool comic called Thunderpaw which has simple animation on every page, and some pages break out of the frame.

Best friends Bruno and Ollie are lost. As they try to survive and search for home together, the world around them continues to crumble.

The simple looped gifs and squiggly animation gives it a real sense of anxiety, (or calm, in some places) which really suits the energy of dogs, I think? (the main characters are dogs)

The way it's only used in certain panels, not all of them, is nicely done, creating more focus there, or a contrast between dream and reality, etc. The animation is on every page, but is fairly simple and not overdone - the simple, monochromatic art style means it's not too busy and annoying.

Another nice detail is that the background colour of the web page is the same colour as the background of the page - so the panels don't look like they're on a page at all, and it's also a very simple but effective way of changing the mood. Some 'pages' are long, and some are short - effecting the pacing of the overall story.

this page is more of an infinite canvas type / as is this one

Ruben and Lullaby

Here's something I found mentioned in Digital Storytelling - an app/short story called Ruben and Lullaby I don't think it's available anymore, but here's a video:

it's very short, and is just about a couple having an argument - you tilt the screen to go between characters, and shake it to make them angrier/rub it to calm them down. It's a bit choose your own adventure in the sense that it has multiple endings depending on if you make them angrier or not.

Parallax

I finished the mistlands parallax page! It's here. I may look at making the images a bit smaller - though I think I've made them as small as I can without losing quality (there are white pixels showing on the edges) I may yet add some more fae peeking out from behind corners, but it needs to go up on patreon on Thursday and public on Monday, and I need to work on other things. I can add them at any time if I want.


I also just got a new phone, and tested it on mobile too: 

It's obviously not quite right dimension wise, but it works!

The video Fiona wanted to show me was this - which is interesting, it's not really a comic or anything, but she thought in terms of narrative (how it follows a coin) could be relevant to my work somehow, considering I'm not sure on my story yet.