1

Graphic Narrative

Evidence Template

Jonah Adshead

2

Digital Photography

3

Evaluation

Taking your own photographs can be very helpful in post production when using comic book effects as you can direct the photographs and have them depict exactly what you want instead of having to find a image from the internet. This can make your images clearer and allow the story to be told easier and more effectively.

Using just the photographs, un-edited, to illustrate your graphic novel can also produce interesting results. This method is popular in children’s books as lots of expression can be portrayed through the images and the familiarity of the real life photos can be enjoyable to a child. The position and expressions of characters in the photographs can do a lot to tell the story allowing minimal narration through words to be used.

4

Illustration

5

Evaluation

Illustration is a very flexible way of graphic narration as the only real limitation is the imagination of the artist. Very detailed, complicated images can be created as well as simplistic more juvenile images. This means that this method can be used very effectively for both children’s story books and graphic novels.

Expression can be portrayed very well in drawings and so can other things such as movement and speed using trail lines etc. All these things allow the images to tell the story to also tell themselves if drawn skilfully.

Depending on the complexity of the illustrations and the skill of the artist, the speed of production can vary with illustrations. Some simple drawings can be produced very quickly and still be very effective. Others can take longer but the amount of detail that can be included is often worth this time.

6

Comic book effects

7

Evaluation

I believe that this method of creating comic book style images is effective and looks very good. You can change the threshold and “cutout” settings to change the severity of the change in the image. Threshold is particularly effective at changes the darkness of the image allowing you to change the mood of an image.

The speed at witch these images can be created is very quick and so would be well suited to someone looking to produce a larger story as it wouldn’t take too long to make all of the images. The look created by this technique can be made quite detailed and also quite moody and sophisticated looking and so I believe is better suited for graphic novels rather than children’s books. However when the edge fidelity, edge simplicity and number of layers are changed in the “cutout” settings is changed a more childlike, simpler image can be created.

8

Rotoscope work

9

Evaluation

Rotoscoping can create very attractive images that look very stylish. They are popular in graphic novels because of the detailed, lifelike images this technique can produce in contrast to the simple images more commonly desired in children's story books.

As a method it is relatively easy to do and images can be produced quite quickly, this makes it well suited to illustrating longer stories or graphic novels. It does however, require a certain level of skill and a short demonstration will have to be given as it would be hard to learn yourself this method without prior knowledge.