W2-Reading and P2 Storyboard
Reading reflection
Since I was a kid, I have never been a big comic fan, and I blame those low-quality comics I was exposed to for that. After finishing this book by Scott McCloud, I might have found hints of reasons that threw me off when I read comics.
I'm deeply impressed by comics artists who can interpret all the physical world's senses with flat, mostly black and white ink and paper. I found it interesting to see comic artists use line and space to express time, emotion, and sound. In graphic design, designers find sounds in fonts and rhythms in spacings. Even though we are dealing with two different media, we share a lot of similar logic. White spaces can tell a more exciting story than piles of words. Carefully arranged graphics and texts with clear hierarchy lead the reader to follow the story or message with ease. I think the comics I read before were lacking those fundamental principles that made my reading less enjoyable.
Never would have thought a book explaining how comics work will deliver thoughtful life meanings and guide the path to be an artist in general. I especially loved this quote from his interpretation of comic and cartoon, "The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identities and awareness are pulled an empty shell that we inhabit, which enables us to travel in another realm. " This explained why kids love cartoons so much, but also why people usually resonate with trends that are simple icons, like a smiley face :). Under all the shells and makeups, adults are still kids, finding ways to escape a little. The six steps of being an artist can apply to any professional area. Scott helped us categorize different people in different segmentations of an industry. By laying out six steps, he showed me how to advance from my current stage to the next and what is yet to come.
Project 2 Storyboard
A thought came in when I was brushing teeth one day. I found the Chinese story, Where's Mama, which tells a group of tadpoles searching for their mother, shares many similarities to The Ugly Duckling story. Both stories depicted the adventures of cubs on their ways of finding their mothers. On the other hand, one was animated in traditional Chinese painting, and the other is in a refined Disney cartoon. It will be interesting to combine two drastically different styles into one piece.
I expressed the idea with my partner Bowei, and he was interested. Due to the length of the animation, we decided to combine two stories with a twist.
The story starts at a pond. A tadpole saw a group of fishes with their mom and wondered where his mom was. Above the water, a duckling saw birds in the sky with their mom and wondered the same. The tadpole asked the fish if they've seen his mom, while the duckling asked the birds. Unfortunately, no one seemed to know their mothers. But fishes asked tadpole to check above the water, and birds suggested duckling search in the water. When the tadpole and duckling met each other, they learned both of them were looking for their moms. They decided to go on the adventure together. While they were swimming away and departed to find their mothers, a swan is eating a frog in the distance. Story End.
