Illustration & Visual Narrative - Final Project: Animated Visual Novel / Comic
30.06.23 - 14.07.23 / Week 13 - Week 15
Ilhan Rayan bin Khairul Anwar / 0361205
Illustration & Visual Narrative / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media
Final Project - Animated Visual Novel
LECTURES
We had no lectures during this time period as our lecturer cancelled the classes for both Week 13 and Week 14, additionally by Week 15 we already finished our classes for the semester and this week was to submit anything we had left along with our portfolios.
INSTRUCTIONS
PRACTICAL
Part 1: Visual Novel
Our final project for this class was to create a one page visual comic / novel based off of one area from our story as well as include one animated panel inside of the comic. The main challenge for this project was to use the same art style that we used for our digital triptych. For my class, there was some confusion on this project as our two classes meant to work on it were cancelled so we were left to figure everything out on our own. Luckily we were able to get clarification on what we were supposed to do for this project and got an extension for it by two days so that we had more time to work on it since we had to start from scratch.
Once we had this clarification, I began working on the final project; I decided to go with Act 3 since I was most familiar with that area and had elements that I felt I could portray. I began working on the layout for my comic first before coming up with what I wanted to have appear in the panels.
Figure 1.1: Comic Panel Layout Draft
This was my first attempt at creating a layout for my comic, I knew I wanted to have the Red Death face the reader as he spoke ominous statements about his role in the world and how his appearance is inescapable so I already got to work on that panel. However I never ended up disliking how this felt as I wanted to show the prince on the floor which was an important part in the area I was presenting, so I ultimately scratched this layout and started working on another one; though I did keep the panel of the Red Death as I really liked how it looked. I also chose to use the 300x600 px canvas size since they never stated what canvas size we were supposed to use, but since we used it for the digital triptych, it felt like the most reasonable option to use.
Figure 1.2: Updated Comic Layout
This was my second layout that I made that I decided to stick with as I knew I could work with this to portray the area I wanted to portray to the extent that I wanted to. Once I was satisfied with this, I started working on creating the outlines for the characters.
Figure 1.3: Red Death, Knife & Text Added in
As I was working on creating the elements, I was having trouble finding references for the prince as I depicted him wearing a suit in my triptych and I wanted to keep that outfit for this one. However none of the reference photos that I found online suited what I needed; so instead I decided to use myself as the reference by taking photos of me wearing a suit which I would then trace over for the comic.
Figure 1.4: Reference Photos of Me
Using these three photos that I took of myself, I was able to create the poses that I wanted in my comic as seen below.
Figure 1.5: Main Outline Done
I was originally going to keep the drawn on faces in the comic but after looking at it for some time, I decided to ultimately remove them as they didn't look great. After adding in additional elements and changing some stuff in the comic, I started working on adding in colour to the comic.
Figure 1.6: Colours Added
Once I added in colours to the figures in the foreground, I moved onto working on the background. While working on the backgrounds I got an idea from one of the phrases that the Red Death says for how I could create the background for certain areas. In the actual story, there is no direct dialogue between two characters and is instead written through a narration in the third person of the events that took place in the story. One of the pieces of dialogue that I gave the Red Death was "With every breath I take, the world fades into shades of crimson, and all that remains is my timeless dominion." Using this quote, I decided to have the floor and walls around the Red Death turn to a dark crimson as it infected the pale blue and white walls of the abbey that the Prince was in. While on the topic of the world fading to crimson, I decided to add in a gradient for the background that would go from white to a dark red to add onto the effect.
Figure 1.7: Background Colour Added In
It was during this point that I realised I made a big mistake that could cost me part of my grade as one of the challenges was to use the first paragraph from the story for the animated comic, but due to miscommunication from our lecturer, our classes being cancelled and instructions that weren't clear or explained in detail, I thought that we were allowed to use a paragraph from any section from our story instead of the intro. I was far too deep into this project and I knew I didn't have enough time to start all over again so I decided to stick with what I had and just finish it, though I could be wrong about all this and be worrying over nothing, I still felt I should explain it.
As for the windows, I knew I wanted to have each of them represent the seven different coloured rooms that were present in the abbey but I didn't want to create each individual room, so having them be presented as windows was an easier solution for me. I was considering just making them plain windows that had each of the colours before coming up with the idea to have each window contain an illustration of a God of Death from different religions around the world since the whole message of the story is that you can't escape death no matter what. So to have the different iterations and depictions of death be present through the windows was something I started working on.
Figure 1.8: Death Window Art Outlines
I hid the art work for the red death and the prince so that I had an easier time working on the seven panels. There was some deliberation and rearranging from my part on which gods I wanted to present but after half an hour, I came up with the roster of gods that I wanted to have present using reference images I found online. From left to right, the gods of death presented are Hel (Norse), Mictlantecuhtli (Aztec), Osiris (Egyptian), Thanatos (Greek), Azrael (Abrahamic), The Morrigan (Celtic), and Ah Puch (Mayan). Some other depictions that I considered adding were Shinigami (Shinto/Japanese), Anubis (Egyptian), the Grim Reaper (General), and the Horsemen of Death (Bible). Once I had their outlines done, I moved onto adding in colours for each of them and based them on the order of the rooms that the Red Death walked through, which was blue, purple, green, orange, white, lavender, and black.
After a few hours, I finally finished adding in the colour for each of the panels and with this done I finished the full art work for my visual novel. What's interesting about this panel is that in the final composition, the second and sixth windows aren't fully visible since the prince and the Red Death block them with their body so most of this work wouldn't be noticed. But I decided to commit to it as I wanted to feel satisfied with having finished each window.
Figure 1.10: Attempted Blur Effect
Before I started working on the animation part I tried experimenting with different ideas that I could integrate into comic, one of which was to blur certain backgrounds so that specific elements and text would stand out more visually. But after looking at it for a while I decided to not follow through with it as it didn't fit the stained glass effect that I had in my triptych.
Part 2: Animation
A lot of us were confused about how we were supposed to animate our final project as they never specified which application we were allowed to use or how long the animation had to be. The only rule they gave us for the animation was that it had to have at least one panel be animated instead of the entire comic being animated. But after some time they said that we could use any of the skills we learned to animate the project.
For my animation, I decided to have all the windows be hidden in the dark but have a light shine through the windows to illuminate and light them all up and reveal their design before going back into the dark. I had a very simple plan for how I was going to animate it, I would create a long black rectangle with a hole in the middle and and lowered opacity so that it would shadow the art.
Figure 2.1: Black Box Contraption
I chose to use this so that I wouldn't have to alter each panel one-by-one. From there, I would animate the rectangle be dragged across the screen from left to right so that it reveals the window art before eventually going back into the dark. Below is a visual representation of how it worked. They never stated how animated our animation needed to be so this felt fine as it was still technically an animation.
Figure 2.2: Black Box In Action
I knew I wasn't going to do the illustrator and photoshop method of creating a gif as that would take too long to create all of the frames for the animation. I tried using After Effects to animate the movement but there were too many issues, such as none of the panels being lined up correctly and were also out of order. After trying to solve the issues I gave up as trying to rescale and resize everything was too annoying and difficult, so I decided to download Adobe Animate and teach myself how to use the application through YouTube. I believe weeks thirteen and fourteen were designed to teach us how to use Adobe Animate and also provide us with in class time to work on our assignment but since they were cancelled for unknown reasons, we didn't learn how to use animate.
Figure 2.3: Adobe Animate Application Screenshot
Having never used this application before, it was an interesting experience learning how to use it as it's fairly similar to After Effects, but with more of a focus on animating rather than adding in visual effects. After watching a YouTube video on how to create the desired effect that I wanted, I began working on animating it, the process to do it is simple as well as all you need to do is convert the layer into a Motion Tween and drag the effect to where the animation ends. Once that is done, you then move the elements from the layer to where you want it to go, for my case all I needed to do was drag the shadow box across the screen so that when it becomes animated, the box moves across the screen on it's own.
Figure 2.4: Adobe Animate Timeline Screenshot
What I found interesting with Adobe Animate is that when you create the time frame for how long you want the animation to be, you have to manually drag out each layer as well to where the time frame ends otherwise they won't appear in the animation. But since I only needed one thing animated, I decided to just repeat the process I did for my shadow box but make no changes to the other layers whatsoever. Once I repeated everything for each of the layers I began exporting the animation as a gif before finding out that there was an issue with my export. Because I used the 300x600 pixel canvas for my triptych panels and the visual novel, I used it again on Animate thinking it would export fine but when I exported it, the file came out with incredibly low quality and visible pixels which ruined the whole animation.
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Figure 2.5: Failed Visual Novel Gif Export
Because of this issue I had to redo the animation all over again but this time, I made sure to use the HD Canvas provided by the application, though I did change the dimensions from 1080x1920 to 1080x2160 since we had a 1:2 Ratio for our canvases. After redoing the animation which didn't take long since I only needed to animate one thing, I was able to successfully export it with a good quality.
FINAL SUBMISSIONS
Figure 3.1: One Page Visual Novel featuring Act 3 of "The Masque of Red Death" (JPG)
Figure 3.2: Outline View of One Page Visual Novel
Figure 3.3: One Page Visual Novel featuring Act 3 of "The Masque of Red Death" (PDF)
Figure 3.4: Animated One Page Visual Novel featuring Act 3 of "The Masque of Red Death" (GIF)
REFLECTION
I have mixed feelings about our final project as a whole, mainly due to the time constraints we had and the amount of work we had to do.
On one hand, I really enjoyed creating the artwork for the comic, it was a lot of fun being able to create a visual novel for the first time as this is the sort of work that I would like to specialise in for my career as combining narrative writing, visual storytelling and art is something I'm really interested in. I had a lot of fun coming up with all of my ideas and figuring out how I would go about with expressing them in this form. It was also fun learning how to use a new application despite not being taught how to use it, I find the layout of the Animate to be easier to navigate than After Effects as its a lot simpler and more up to date in terms of its visual design.
On the other hand however, the amount of stress this project caused me and my classmates was what made me dislike this project quite a lot and in my opinion, the cons outweigh the pros. For starters, our two classes that were supposed to be used by our lecturer to review our work and provide us with feedback and critiques were cancelled and online replacements never happened. Secondly, the instructions and guidelines we were given for this assignment were confusing and weren't explained in full detail either. Many of my classmates, myself included, thought that we had to animate one of the panels from our triptych for our final project instead of creating a comic from scratch. I was fortunate enough to had already started working on the comic before asking my classmates about what we were supposed to do for the assignment as many of us were confused. I'm extremely grateful to Ms. Anis for providing our class with an additional two days to work on our project so that we wouldn't have to cram everything before Friday.
But overall I am satisfied with what I have created for this project, I definitely feel that there are certain areas I could improve in, such as adding in more furniture to the composition but because of time constraints and my skills being fairly mediocre I'm fine with submitting what I have so far. I hope to use Adobe Illustrate more next semester so that I may become more familiar with the application and become more skilled with it as well.
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