Watching animated cartoons, movies, and television shows through to comic books, ignited my passion as a visual storyteller and inspired me to combine these skills as an artist. I looked back at cartoons and shows from my childhood as they bring back memories. Even though at times these movies and shows did not age well, they still hold a special place that allows me to connect with friends and family, fun times.
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My work is within sequential arts, including comic strips and expanded stories. I use this mode of communication to get a reaction from people when I create different pieces of work and see how they interpret the story. My early style was more traditional such as using character designs, crossing mind-maps and storyboards. I am now expanding my skills by using different forms of digital media, which allows me to constantly change and develop my characters.
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Transmedia is a unique way of storytelling across multiple platforms and formats using various digital technology. I have carried out research on 3 different media franchises that have large transmedia bases, such as Harry Potter, Sam and Max and Super Mario. I compared the three franchises together to help me to identify the Transmedia principles. I decided to focus on ‘worldbuilding’ as I could alternate stories and seriality. This will allow me to create a franchise across multiple media, which could potentially lead to a comic or an animated series. This I feel is an opportunity to experiment and develop new skills such as animating Gifs and writing a fictional blog, which connects to the story.
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I want my target audience to be in the age range 11-14, as this would allow me to have some control when developing suitable content. This age range could be increased if further content was developed at a later stage.
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Henry Jenkins, explaining Participatory Culture (2013), is an inspiration and I liked how he described people sharing their experiences together online via different outlets, i.e., Blogs, Twitter, and Wikipedia and how they discussed a range of different issues. I relate to his comments as I want to visualise my ideas when I am writing a synopsis, which gives a basic background story to my plot. This helps me to create mood boards to develop locations and characters.
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When creating a blog, I researched ideas by watching videos on how to set up and run a blog via the Wix website. I found the university workshops instrumental in building my website. The Google Trends website helped with my initial ideas for the story and if they were currently trending. This led me to link my storyline of a doctor becoming disillusioned with his work developing human enhancements on injured soldiers. I found using this medium allowed me to visually see how this story was progressing and how I could continue to develop the characters. Next, I created 6 weekly blogs documenting Dr Mind’s Journey and I added digital drawings of each scene.
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The next medium was the Gif comic, which I had some knowledge of as I had seen some previous examples. This made me think I could use this medium to experiment with my animation skills to help develop my own Gif skills on Photoshop. At first it was only the cover illustrating the characters rotating, however after feedback I expanded the Gif comic cover to a Gif comic. For example, I needed to draw panels with characters detailing some animation.
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The final medium was developing posters to advertise the story of each character and their world. I was inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic and how it brought people together during a challenging time. For example, it made different people work together to protect their countries such as scientists coming together to produce vaccines. I then completed 8 rough sketches trying different title positions, layouts, and character poses, this gave me a clearer idea of what would work. I then chose a suitable poster to develop into a professional advertisement to promote my story and characters.
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Ultimately, bringing this final project together using old and new skills alongside discovering new methods has allowed me to expand my world building to introduce new characters and discover the lore of my franchise.