Bibliography

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The finish line

After a long time, I finally had the choose-your-own-adventure style graphic novel and IPhone versions of my comic.

The final stage was to complete the cover as I had left that until last to get a true feel of the comic before I started it.

Eventually I came up with a simple design for the cover which I did in pencil roughs first...

and then finished with inks and colors...

and the iPhone version...

Overall this project took a lot of work and things that I thought would be simple turned out to be a lot more complex than I thought such as the very creation of the comic. Although I appreciated comics beforehand I now had a lot more appreciation and respect for the artists and writers who create them. It's no where near as easy as it looks.

However I am very pleased with my finished results for both the versions and the lessons I had learned regarding their composition and structure I am sure will be used in my future projects.

Advertising

To go along with my iPhone and iPad version, I came up with some simple advertising posters and banners which could go on other websites. I tried to make them as 'Apple' like and professional looking as I could.

I created two poster versions as well as the benner...

Poster one...

Poster two...

The banner...

Animatics for iPhone version

As well as the normal frames, I intended to animate a few of the frames in the iPhone version. They would play on touch and link straight to the next panel once finished.

These were complicated as everything that moved, needed to be on separate layers in order to animate them. So with many of the animated frames I had to create and edit multiple layers for parts like limbs moving otherwise they would look far too static and would not move organically. The more layers there were, the better the animation would look, but of course the more layers there were, the more complicated the animation was to do in After Effects.

I created four of these for the graphic novel and I think they compliment it very well and are not just animation for animation sake which is always a risk so I had to choose the frames I was going to animate carefully.

iPhone comics

Since very early after the iPhone's release there has been various types of comics and graphic novels available for the iPhone. Comixology was one of the first to offer these and was able to offer a comic book reading platform which worked for several titles instead of being a company specific reader.

In the same way that companies release tie-in comics when a big film/game is being released, the same was being done with iPhone comics. Titles were being made sporadically but usually only when there was a movie to tie in with such as 'Watchmen' or 'Scott Pilgrim'.

Smaller companies started to bring out comics for the iPhone which were created for that purpose or for characters who's rights were in the public domain such as Sherlock Holmes..

Over the last two years the larger companies such as Marvel, DC and IDW have seen the possibilities and have released their own comics for the iPhone and iPad, normally with their own comic reader.

I intended to adapt my own graphic novel for the iPhone and this meant that I needed to think about the scale and how the interface would be.

I decided that the screen would normally show one frame at a time to allow for clearer views as the art and lettering would be lost if I left them at normal page size.

The reader would scroll through until they reached the choice screen and at that point would tap the screen on the animal form which would take them to the appropriate route/ending.

Interactivity

Early on I knew that I wanted two versions of my graphic novel. I wanted a regular comic page sized version and I wanted an iPhone version.

The iPhone version would be interactive, it would go frame by frame until the protagonist is cornered and there is a choice screen where the 'reader' would be given a choice of animal form, either bear, hawk, spider or panther...

Then the story would span off in one of those directions which with path being different. This choice screen would give the reader a chance to interact with the story, a chance to affect the outcome.

There are many interactive novels, such as the 'Choose-your-own-adventure' young adult books of the 90's, where the reader would be given a couple of options at the end of a chapter about how they could proceed and then the reader would have to 'Turn to page 64' or whatever their choice was. Though these types of novels have ebbed away in recent years and they seem to be few and far between, there are even fewer interactive comics. Certainly this was something that was not exploited in any great way by the major companies.

On the internet, there are a few examples of interactive digital comics such as 'Hotel' http://www.hoteloscartangoecholima.com/splash.html. But I don't think these are exploited as well as they could be.

The only trouble with my graphic novel would be that if I had four completely different paths, then that would be a lot of work and I had to bear in mind that I was already taking on a lot by producing two different types of graphic novels (comic/iPhone).

After speaking with my year tutor, I learned about culminative explosions. This technique would be very useful as it meant that although some of the paths would be very different, they could end the same way and therefore I could use the same frames.

Interviews

As soon as we received the brief, I contacted as many people in the sequential art and motion comic industry as I could. As expected I didn't get many replies at first, but I kept trying and resent emails until people got sick of me. Eventually I managed to get a few people to agree to a short email interview. I was very happy with the people who replied as one of them is the manager of a company that is at the leading edge if motion comics and the others are big names in the comic business.

My interviews will be in my misc folder.