graphic narrative evaluation

This is an evaluation that will re-assess what I did for my graphic narrative and what I took away from my production essay. It will highlight things such as my;

Narrative structure

Frame anchoring

Character representation

Use of color

and how the piece is affected by the lives we live today. Also I will be featuring some aspects of budget and health & safety. This is due to the fact that I failed to mention them in my production essay.

The narrative in my manga is mainly linear and follows the chronological order of the story line. Though there are some instances of flash backs or fantasy scenes that are occasionally unnecessary to the plot. Since it is a start up piece that is only the beginning of a larger idea the story does not tend to follow the life styles of characters other than the main protagonist. Along with this there are no real opposing characters just a single strand narrative that always or almost always involves the main protagonist. The theme and structure that it follows is fairy basic. There is a simple introduction, the main character is presented with a task, he conjures up some idea on how to deal with the matter and the story ends with him having either fail or succeed. My over all goal was to have him succeed, however I decided to add a slight plot twist to the end.

At the start I assumed frame anchoring would be the simples of tasks to achieve. By this I mean both the creation if the text as well as the placement of the text on the work piece. This later proved to be a very difficult task to accomplish, not in terms of script writing, but in terms of where to place the text. In order to do this I had to create rough drafts of the scenes to predetermine where all the text and speech bubbles went.

I took the examples of most school based manga pieces and structured my characters the way most manga writers decided to do this. This made the character, both male and female, seem rather girly in terms of body and facial structure. Of course personality portrayed through the narrative highlighted there gender along with the length of their hair and the size of their eyes. In terms of religion there was really on one character who has an obvious religion. This is represented through her clothing i.e. the head scarf. Other than this there are no other intentional religious representations. Race was difficult since the entire manga was in black and white. The only way I could portray the race of a character was through their hairy style.

I decided to use shading instead of coloring the actual manga firstly, because it was simply easier. Secondly, I personally believe the lack of color and representation of bright and dark spaces provides a better perception of depth without having to go into much detail. Thirdly and this is the most important point, I cannot color.

The piece itself is based on the daily lives of students at a college. This was a simple direction to take the manga, because I am a student who attends a college. Of course just a manga about people at college is fairly boring so I decided to use the things I would personally like to do and made it a little more eccentric than the original idea. i.e. I want to be able to eat in class, the main character will go on a round about quest to make it mandatory to eat in class.

The budget was fairly low, of course the prices for utilities differed depending on where they were bought. A number of supplies were bought at pound land on special offers i.e. 26 pencils for a pound or two erasers plus two sharpeners for a pound etc. However the quality was fairly poor. Some supplies that were bought from WHSmith were far more expensive, however the quality was far better and the products lasted far longer. At most I would say I spent 13 pounds on all these products. The only real health and safety issue to worry about was a lack of exercise and sleep due to the amount of drawing that was necessary. Seeing as how no toxic markers were used so there was no danger of inhaling toxic fumes and that is truly the only danger in drawing manga.

I believe this unit has taught me a few new skills such as teaching me how to draw along with a more creative view on potential creations. One thing it did re-teach me is the importance of pre-planning, which is essential when creating a graphic narrative. The use of hand drawn images have taught me some tricks that I could use during filming i.e. the creation of depth through lighting. Over all I believe this unit has been a great learning experience for me.