After reading part of the book “Understanding Comics,” there are several different ways that I could approach this next assignment. For one, I could use unique ways of sequencing text in order to get across my story. In the recent story that we read in class about the rock and role pauses (the name escapes me), the author used many different ways to relay information.
One example that comes to mind is when she used a graph of a cycle going in circles to explain the flow of a conversation that she was having with her mom. Using this style showed off how a conversation in their family typically flows and the fact that it is shown to be a cycle shows that these kinds of conversations happen a lot.
Time frames are a great way to communicate to readers about the order of events that are happening in the story. For my own assignment, I could have text flash on screen to say things such as, “1 Hour Earlier” to show off something important in the story. This might work well in something where there is a lot of drama happening. Maybe there’s a murder mystery that needs to be solved, and the author wants to cut to a flashback of a scene where two characters are arguing with one another in order to further the suspension and get readers more invested in the plot.
I doubt that I will write a murder mystery for my assignment, but it does still give me some ideas for things that I could do. I am probably going to be writing a sci-fi war story of some kind, and maybe within this story there could be cuts backwards in time to events that started the war and influenced the characters in the story. I will have to give it some thought.
– Gibson