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2/7- Ideas from McCloud (Late)

kpodelco23One Comment

I’m excited to try and play with spacing and the sequencing of frames when working on my visual narrative. I’ve been actively tinkering with things such as spacing gaps and turning words into visuals into writing that I have done in my own time, though I never put much thought into why I was structuring things the way that I did other than ‘I want to play with space’. The idea that a detail such as frame sizing or the size of a gap between frames can act as such a powerful silent director to readers is so interesting to me; especially as someone who has only ever really worked with words and being limited to what letters on a page are capable of in terms of formatting. Working with telling stories through images is not something I have done a lot, so I think that I’m going to end up experimenting with all of the tricks that we’ve read about in McCloud’s book at some point or another– if not in this class, in my own time for sure. 

There are two things in particular from McCloud’s book that I really wanted to try messing around with in my own visual assignment, despite the fact that they aren’t very common in comic storytelling. I did read ahead in the book, so these ideas may come from farther in the reading than this prompt is meant to focus on. This said though, the first is the idea of having panels in later moments in comics affect those in earlier moments; for example, a bullet from a gun fired in the 6th panel hits a character in the 4th panel, or something of that sort. I feel that it offers a lot of opportunity for playing with time or visual loops, like a drawn version of the looping videos we made in class.

The second idea is one of making a visual story into a sort of ‘choose your own adventure’. I love the idea of personalizing stories more for readers/players/etc., and I also enjoy the idea of exploring multiple endings and being able to incorporate different paths that will not only let me further expand on my story and its world, but to embrace all the different paths that the characters could fall down.