About the Project's Development
At the beginning of the semester, I had no idea what I would be doing for this huge project. I’ve had this idea for a story for a couple years now that’s about a crew’s adventures in space, where the only way I can think of getting it out realistically is in some comic form. About a quarter of the way through this semester I decided to use a rough idea of that story as a sort of test run. I tried to come up with something as unrelated to the actual plot of story as possible so I decided to make a generic space battle. What I have for that story is nowhere near sharing, so I couldn’t adapt anything for this project, and I would rather save it for when I’m actually ready to make it. I know I wanted to make a comic but I thought the requirement was that it needed some sort of extra element, like combining two story telling media. I chose to make an interactive comic for a battle in orbit, one where you get to decide the outcome. I found out the next class that it wasn’t required, but I decided to keep the interactive element anyway. Because of this a full read through is pretty short, about 4 or 5 pages, but in the end I made 10 pages in total. If I had canned the interactive element, I would have had a much longer story that probably would have been much better in quality than my current final product.
My goal was to see how I could put my thoughts onto a comic page and make it look good. So I made some story boards and made a few drawings of the ships I wanted to use. The overall shape of the ships are the same as the final project, but there are a few design differences. The initial story board was a lot different than the last one. It started with no dialog, the battle just started in silence. Up until the midterm, I had very little to show. I had played around with a lot of ideas and designs, but I was doubting myself a little and thought that I couldn’t finish it in time. After the midterm, I realized I had to start working much harder, so I got to work.
Over time I realized that I made more work for myself than I needed. I had other classes I needed to dedicate time to. To fix this, I used Illustrator to “draw” everything for the comic. I would make a page, then save a ship outline to an “assets” file. I have at least 3 or 4 different angles for each ship saved as an asset. This helped save time, but it made the comic as a whole look too clean and same-y. I do think that it looks okay, but I think if I had more time and wasn’t as busy it would have looked better. There are a few inconsistencies here and there on the ships. Some lines being deleted on accident and me not noticing and some perspective issues. Nothing too noticeable, but I don’t have enough time to go fix them at the moment, I will do so on my own time after the semester is over. For color, I used Photoshop. I used a grayscale color palate for everything except the thruster trails of the ships and their weapon discharges. I wanted to make it easy on myself by not having to pick a color scheme, but I still had to color each panel. The reason I used color for thrusters and weapons was to actually tell the reader what’s happening. How would the reader know a ship is moving if there’s no other indication? I thought that more gray would just get lost, so I used bright red and blue. I really liked how it looked once I finished up the first page with movement. I think the minimal use of color looks great for something like this. A battle out in space where the only light source could be obscured by the shadow of the planet they’re orbiting. The thrusters and weapons charges would give off some light.
As story, I know that it’s somewhat lacking. I wanted it to be a test comic, so I wasn’t thinking too hard about the background. Eventually I came up with a back ground and reason for the fighting. But it still felt lacking as I couldn’t fully express that when I start the comic right at the beginning of the battle. I made a short dialog by the commander of the protagonist’s allies, and it sort of worked but it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. I thought that the interactivity would count more towards story than anything, but I realized that I need that background information. Without it I’d only have what happens during the fight and the outcome for the pilot. I realize that using this to vaguely help myself out in a future project might not have been the best idea, but it did help me realize how much work story telling is and what kind of emphasis I need to put on certain story elements.