EXERCISES
Character Swap
The two movies I picked were Ready Player One and Romeo & Juliet.
In-Class Style Exploration
RESEARCH
WRITING
I used to write a lot of short stories when I was younger, but I became super self-critical to the point where I didn’t like anything I wrote because I thought it was too cliché or childish or unoriginal, so I haven’t written in a long time. I decided to write a simple story about something relatively mundane and realistic. After I finished, I felt more confident so I wrote another, more adventurous story. I then broke the story down into the main events and described what would happen in different genres.
Story 1:
Story 2:
STYLE
I explored three main styles: impressionism, cubism, and Strange Planet (comic by Nathan W Pyle). I examined work and did some research to break the styles down into their major elements and principles, then used those to create the opening scene in my story.
The story itself doesn’t have an overwhelming mood because I wanted to use the visual style to create it; although some of the events could be very stressful, I wanted the story to be more whimsical and storybook-like. Strange Planet was by far my favorite. Kayla suggested that my character was too much like the “beings” from Strange Planet and I was doing more copying than mimicking style. I decided to create different, more alien-like characters and focus on the basic ideas of the style instead of copying the actual characters, and it became much more successful. Strange Planet uses primarily blues and purples, as well as pink and green. I decided to use red (danger) for the climax, where the leading alien is chased by a monster, and yellow (happiness) for the resolution. When creating my characters, I focused on using imperfect, hand-drawn lines to create simplified shapes which I filled with solid colors and shaded around the edges.
Here’s how I created them:
STORYBOARD
I quickly sketched out my plan for each frame of the storyboard:
After creating this plan, I decided to remove scenes 4 and 5, but ended up combining them into one instead of removing them both altogether. I also removed scene 7 because it seemed unnecessary; it would be clear in scene 8 that they had fled to a new planet.
For each scene, I used the original forms of each character and traced over to change their pose/stance. Here are some examples:
Feedback from swap critique:
Some people had trouble identifying the climax scene, where the lead alien is chased by a monster. I had distinguished it by using red, but it is rather early in the story, so I added a canted angle to make it more extreme. I also added a scene of them landing on the new planet with the lead alien exploring before the climax. Finally, I went back and made some of the black lines heavier because they seemed too thin when at the actual 11×17 scale. Finally, I added hand-drawn, thick lines around each frame in the storyboard to mimic the borders from Nathan W. Pyle’s comic.
I chose to title the story A Strange Opportunity as a play on the inspiration style and a hint that the robot they find at the end is the NASA rover Opportunity.
Here are some of the highlights of my process of creating my characters & scenes:
Style reference:
Pyle, Nathan W. Strange Planet. Morrow Gift, an Imprint of William Morrow, 2019.