Category: Visual

Final Project

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CalebOne Comment

Hey everyone,

Here is the link to my Final Project. I unfortunately didn’t account for server delays when playing videos, so the edits are very choppy and not the intended outcome. Playing the game through the file loads much better. I have uploaded the file into Slack as well. Despite this drawback, I have my artist’s statement:

This project was extremely fun to make. I combined hypermedia with video to create a narrative through Twine. The story follows roughly the same premise I had for the video anecdote project we did a few weeks back. I enjoyed learning twine while also working on my film making skills. I was inspired by many works throughout our time in this course, notable mentions include the Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in terms of cinematography and lack of dialogue. I was also heavily inspired by the various Twine stories we looked at and their creative use of the software. I intend to tweak this work over the summer and into the future to correct the issues that arose during its upload. Overall, I am happy with the end result and hope the narrative comes across well.

Thank you,

Caleb

Week 10 Blog Post

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Caleb

Hello everyone,

The three works we looked at during break and into this week brought me all the way back to elementary school where I would constantly read Choose Your Own Adventure books. Indeed, each work should be considered stories.

For example, With Those We Love Alive is a story that requires the reader, or for better terms the person interacting with the story, to put the pieces of the narrative together. Much like how a choose your own adventure book would have you turn to the page of your desired decision, the webpage would “turn” to the consequential page of your chosen highlighted word. Similarly, in My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, the pattern of click destination is used to progress the story, once again requiring the reader to take each piece of information they are given and put together the story on their own. The narrative exists, but it isn’t quite as linear as How to Rob a Bank. That being said, How to Rob a Bank utilizes a more linear presentation of key presses to progress the story forward, much like a slideshow. The story still requires pieces to be assembled but aids the reader by handing out the pieces as the story progresses instead of having them seek out the information solo.

I found each work to have a certain level of engagement that partners with the linearity of the narrative. I’m going with this thought as a personal preference, as others may feel differently. Having the ability to progress, change, and choose the path a story follows gives another level of meaning to each work, with the reader becoming a part of the story itself.

Lastly, I want to quote Scott McCloud:

“Generally speaking, the more is said with words, the more the pictures can be freed to go exploring and vice versa”. (pg. 155)

All three of these works utilize pictures and words, some using one more than the other, to present a world for their story that the reader creates through each page, slide, and frame. A fantastic experience and quite the nostalgia trip.

-Caleb

Visual Narrative #2

snarith20

Ellis is a dog. A dog with a lot of desires, all he wants in life is just to snack on his favorite treat his tasty bones. But his Mom never gives him enough bones. He tries and tries to tell her but she always only put those nasty kibbles in his bowl. Will Ellis ever get enough bones to fill his desires?





Week 6 Blog Post: 5 Photo Story

Caleb

Hello class,

In theme with Valentine’s Day, I created a story about attempting to rekindle a lost relationship between two individuals. The story follows the creation and eventual send off of a handwritten letter. I chose to order these photos in this direction to mimic the flow of the letter’s creation. A shift to the left indicates a setback, like the crumpled up letters. A shift to the right signals progression, like the mailing of the letter in the mailbox photo. In reference to McCloud’s panel-to-panel transitions, I made use of subject and scene. The first three photos reflect a subject-subject transition shown by the photos depicting different objects within the same environment. The last two photos show the scene-scene swap with the letter next to the mailbox in the fourth photo then reappearing in a bedroom in the fifth, signifying the two separate environments.

Visual Narrative II

Sammy

In this mini-story of someone going to the bar for a drink, I used subject-to-subject and aspect-to-aspect transitions. I recruited my coworker for help and together we came up with these shots (and many more actually.)

Week 5 Blog Post: Understanding Comics

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Caleb

Hello class,

Never did I imagine that there was so much creative ingenuity and artistic expression composed in comics. Nor did I think to incorporate those elements into other forms of literature. However, after reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, I believe I’ll be equipped with some useful tools that’ll help tailor my stories in unique ways.

“…I’m using the world ‘icon’ to represent a person, place, thing or idea” (Comics, pg. 27).

One of the biggest takeaways I gathered from this book was McCloud’s definition of “icon”. This one word defines an endless amount of content that creators and authors convey their messages through. These icons can be manipulated to the creators will in a way that could either directly show their meaning, such as a picture with a thought bubble, or an abstract image that must sit in the readers mind for a moment before the meaning becomes clear. In my own work, I can use McCloud’s idea of the Pictorial Vocabulary in my designs to determine the style of my digital storytelling.

“The phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole has a name. It’s called closure.” (Comics, pg. 63)

I found this piece of information regarding closure very interesting as McCloud explains how we experience closure through so many forms of media. The concept that our mind takes two or more separate images and connects them based upon their context. Furthermore, McCloud takes closure and explains 6 different types of transitions that allow for closure to flourish. He explains the differences between eastern and western comic culture and their usage of specific transition types. With this information, I can utilize one or more of these transitions in my own work to create an opportunity for the reader to create closure. Especially based on what type of story I want to tell, these transition types could be further simplified, especially for our upcoming slides story, to depict mere shapes and words.

“The durations of that time and the dimensions of that space are defined more by the contents of the panel than by the panel itself.” (Comics, pg. 99).

McCloud follows up his work on closure and gutters with a deep dive in time perception in comics. The perfect example appeared on page 95 of the book where McCloud takes a long, still frame and breaks it up into sections to depict time passing. Yet, the image itself was one whole, how could time be passing through a single image? McCloud explains how other aspects of the story aid in the readers mind to perceive time, such as the use of sounds and the order of words being spoken by the characters. Something that I noted, it’s as if McCloud is providing a correlation between the reader’s time spent on the specific frame with the time allegedly passing in that specific frame. That might be putting too many words on a simple thought, but I did my best to create my own understandings of McCloud’s work so that I may utilize his thoughts in my work more efficiently. Regardless, this section of the book gave me ideas on how I can use imagery to depict time, such as specific spacing, blank space, and words.

I love this book so far, I’m eager to read and discuss the thoughts you’ve all come up with.

Thanks!

-Caleb

Week 4 Blog Post: Diagrammatic Storytelling

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Caleb

Hello everyone,

This week’s story titled Great Rock n’Roll Pauses utilized a digital slideshow to tell a touching story. This slideshow wasn’t simply text in boxes formatted like a regular book. Instead, each slide conveyed emotion and ideas through design elements and positioning of text and shapes. This story is one I’ll be recommending to those I know would appreciate it’s creation.

We are introduced to a table of contents if you will depicting 4 distinct acts of the story. Next, we are introduced to the characters of the story including our main, Alison Blake. The story contains a handful of conflicts that are at first hard to distinguish which one is the main conflict of the plot. Alison being annoyed with her mother, Sasha, at just about everything she does, indicated by the “annoying habit #number” she puts in the slides, is indicative of one conflict. Drew Blake, or Dad, and his drinking problem that’s attributed to past trauma and his current work life is yet another conflict. Even Sasha refusing to talk about her previous life experiences with Alison is another smaller conflict. However, it appears that the main conflict comes from Drew and Lincoln’s (Alison’s older brother) communication barrier.

We see in the story that Drew has a hard time understanding the way Lincoln communicates his thoughts and feelings, in this case Lincoln is fascinated by the pauses in popular rock and roll music. In slide 16, we see that Alison has created a flow of text to describe the thought that Lincoln intends to communicate and what actually comes out in words. To further the idea that this is the main conflict of the story, it’s the only conflict that gets resolved at the end of the story. If we follow the classical pyramid structure of plot, the outburst that Drew has over Lincoln’s response represents the climax of the story, or where the conflict becomes clearly identified. Then, following the pyramid structure, the scene back at home where Drew asks Lincoln if he “hears” the pause of the outside world, we see that Drew finally understands how Lincoln’s mind works.

“Okay. I know.”

Considering the explanations of Diagrammatic Writing by Johanna Drucker, we can see where Alison Blake incorporated the use of special awareness to draw the attention of the reader. For my own story, I have a much better understanding of how to use a pages space for my benefit. I can really get creative when it comes to conveying my ideas, but not too much so that the reader is left confused or unsure of where to go next.

“The space of a page is finite” (Diagrammatic, pg. 11)

Through the proper utilization of the space of a page, I can experiment with size, shape, direction, color, order, and text style to generate pace, rhythm, and flow for the reader to grasp. I’m eager to see where these creative thoughts will take me in cultivating my story.

Thank you.

-Caleb