Final Assignment: Hype, Crook and Lyric

The final project at last! It’s different from the others in that it’s a group project. We were given a choice between writing a storybook for young children, or a comic strip for teenagers. We brainstormed a few ideas, and decided that a comic strip would be the most suitable for what we wanted to do.

The following were some of the ideas I offered during the discussion:

Story Idea 1:

A man wakes up and finds himself in the middle of a devastated city. Everyone around him is dead, and everything has been destroyed... But he can’t remember why. Then he spies a movement nearby and rushes over, only to realize that it’s his fiancé... dying. Frantic and sick with horror and anguish, he asks her what happened. But amazingly all she does is smile, and whisper:

“You did this.”

Story Idea 2:

A man is standing on a cliff overlooking the sea, listening to the sound of waves crashing. He has a thoughtful expression – thinking of his childhood, his family, the woman he loves and his friends. One by one, the memories fade away, until there’s nothing left but silence, even the waves cannot be heard. And suddenly, the wind picks up, and the man smiles, putting on a pair of goggles.

“I don’t doubt what I am about do.”

The man then turns around and walks away, leaving no trace of his passing.

“I am a Kamikaze pilot.”

Story Idea 3:

A community is having dinner by a fire, and everyone is happy – there’s fun, laughter, good-natured teasing, good food and camaraderie all around. The protagonist, leader of the community, is conversing with his friend when the topic switches to that of his son, who went exploring and hasn’t been seen for a while. Just as the protagonist is about to go look for his son, the little boy comes running back to the community, carrying a strange object in his hands. Passing it to his father, he curiously asks what it is. The protagonist looks at the object in his hands, and is taken aback for a moment.

It’s a DVD. The protagonist then smiles ruefully, ruffling the boy’s head and dropping the DVD to the ground.

“It’s nothing, son.”

He then turns to stare beyond the edge of the community, gazing upon a ruined city.

“Just a memory of what we’re better off without.”

 

Ultimately, story idea 3 was chosen as the plot for our comic strip, and we set about to refining the concept and fleshing out the characters. The story was changed and reworked and the final storyline that we decided on was:

The year is 2819 A.D., and technology has advanced so much that humans are now able to live on other planets. Earth has been drained completely dry of natural resources, and most of humankind has already left. Those that still remain are those who were too poor to buy a ticket for a one-way trip off the planet, and have resigned themselves to dying on Earth. Jaded and despairing, their only wish now is to live out the remainder of their lives peacefully.

However, a duo consisting of a father and son fervently believe that nature still exists somewhere in the world, and they’re constantly trying to convince their community to move out of their comfort zone and find nature. Nobody else is keen on the idea, however, and the duo become reviled and ridiculed. It escalates into a minor scuffle, ending in the father and son leaving the community behind in search for nature.

 

We also came up with character bios for the 4 main characters of our story:

Biggs Barnum Wolfe

A man who lived a simple, honest life prior to the Exodus. Unable to buy tickets for his family of three, he resigned himself to being abandoned on Earth. Shortly after, his wife vanished mysteriously, leaving behind only a letter stating that she had gone searching for signs of nature. Firmly believes that nature still exists on Earth, and that when he does find it, he will find his wife as well.

 

Toivo Biggs Wolfe

 

A young boy who was born a few years before the Exodus, he doesn’t have a clear memory of who his mother is, or what she even looks or sounds like. His favourite childhood tales are of nature, trees, the deep blue sea, the brilliant sun in a clear sky and animals. His name means “Hope” in Finnish.

 

Eric Wesley Manfred

 

A man who grew up in the slums, living a harsh life comparable to the one he’s living now, post-Exodus. Extremely jaded and wanting nothing to do with the world beyond his comfort zone, he detests the notion of searching for nature, and as a result has come to hate Biggs and Toivo.

 

Melchior

 

Nobody knows his full name. However, his incredible shrewdness and wisdom has enabled the community to thrive like none other in such desperate times. As a result, he’s looked upon as the leader of the community, and his authority goes unquestioned. His wish is for everyone to live out the rest of their lives as peacefully as possible.

 

The moral of our story is: Don’t take what you have for granted, and treasure our planet. We target this comic at teenagers who are growing increasingly materialistic due to the influences of society.

All our hard work finally cumulated in our comic, titled Halcyon Days:

One major lesson learned from this undertaking was that creating a comic strip is much, much harder than it looks. The line-art alone took 9 days to complete, and the coloring and adding of dialogue took 2 days. Many things had to be taken into consideration – the panelling of the comic, how to pace the story over the limited number of pages, which angle is most suited for a particular panel, the choice of colors, typography were just some of it. Thankfully we had already accounted for a margin in our comic pages, because we had heard horror stories from other groups about how they wanted to print a solid background but ended up with white margins because they forgot to do bleeding for their documents. Little details that never seemed to matter before suddenly surfaced and became huge chasms between us and our final goal.

Working on this project, and NM2208 as a whole, has been extremely draining, but extremely rewarding as well.

Assignment 5: Your Notion of Colorful Asia...

This was one assignment that I had a great deal of trouble doing, and caused me no small amount of anguish as well. When I first saw the theme “Colorful Asia”, I was pretty much all “Haha, this should be fairly easy, I have so many nice photos of Asia.” And then I read the fine print: “Avoid touristy landscapes”, and I cried a little.

Following that, I tried to think of other things people commonly associate Asia with, and one thing that immediately came to mind was food. I quickly browsed through my laptop in hopes that I had some super secret food photographs stashed somewhere, but alas, it was not to be. All I could find was a photo of an empty bamboo steamer, and scratch my head wondering why I had a photo of that in the first place.

The next thing that came to mind was our many diverse races. Once again, I looked through my photo folders, but came up dry. And the thought of gathering 100 strangers of various races just to take a single photograph seemed like a pretty good way to shave some years off my lifespan, so I decided that I couldn’t do this for the postcard design.

I started to get desperate, and decided to try and throw something together using images off the internet (which was quite obviously a stupid move on my part). “Colorful” invoked the imagery of a rainbow in my mind, and so I looked for Asian objects and food of varying colors to create a rainbow.

At the end of everything, this was the design that I came up with:

But of course, using images from the internet is a big no-no, so I had to redo the postcard assignment. I racked my brains again, trying to think of what I could do for the assignment, and I finally decided on temples. A representation of the incredible richness of our culture, the amount of temples in Asia is nothing short of staggering. And some of them are so rich in history that if history could be converted to cash, a single brick alone would probably be able to buy me a brand new Ferrari.

I looked up pictures of Chinese, Hindu, Muslim and Japanese temples, and started working on a design for the postcard. Initially, I wanted to simply draw a single building, but with clear influences from all 4 kinds of temples, but I soon realized that there was a reason why I’m not an Architecture major. With that idea down the drain, I decided that the simplest way to do the postcard was to segregate it into 4 equal segments, and draw a portion of each temple in each segment.

This is what the postcard looked like when the line-art was done:

I then selected a whole range of bright and vibrant colors to really bring out the theme of Colorful Asia:

And the finished product:

The major lesson learned from this assignment was the importance of colors, how they work and how they complement one another. Postcards are not easy to design, especially since the canvas is so small.

Class Exercise #2

The second class exercise was about using basic shapes to create abstract or semi-abstract images to represent a word. For this exercise, we were made to pair up and create a pair of images, and I teamed up with Xin Le. We came up with the following:

Order:

Our rationale is that order is best represented by having a fixed pattern.

Distress:

We decided that isolation and creating the image of a gaping chasm was one way of depicting distress.

Assignment 4: Save, Prevent, Kill...

Save, prevent, kill... I’ll freely admit, I got hooked on the word “kill” for a while, wondering just what sort of poster I could come up with. That probably wouldn’t have gotten me very far in terms of this assignment and my portfolio though, so I started trying to put together another idea. In the end, I came up with a poster that tackles a very real problem in Singapore that anyone who takes public transportation has probably experienced at least once at some point in his or her life.

Impatient MRT commuters.

Honestly, it wouldn’t kill people to just wait 10 seconds so people inside the MRT can alight. But no, as soon as the doors slide open, a veritable wave of humans comes surging into the train, and on occasion, if you’re unlucky, you get swept right back into the train with them, and you end up missing your stop.

And sometimes, missing that stop means being late for school or work.

“I couldn’t get out of the MRT!” doesn’t sound like an eligible reason, does it?

And so, I decided that perhaps a poster might help in tackling this issue. Taking into account the fact that this poster would be put up at bus stops or in notice boards along busy streets, and that people would only be able to glance at the poster for a scant few seconds, I decided to go with big visuals and as little text as possible, so as to drive the message home in the shortest time possible.

I started with this sketch:

And ultimately converted it into this:

Initially, it looked more like the blue guy (victim) was standing at the MRT doorway trying to stop people from getting in (“You shall not pass!” – Gandalf) Friends from my tutorial and my tutor said it was because the initial design only had people swarming into the MRT from the outside, and there was nobody behind him. I then added some people standing behind him to create the look that he was surrounded, and it quite effectively dispelled the image that the victim was a gatekeeper of sorts.

Doing this assignment made me realize a few things. The first is the margin. It is always advised that visual elements be kept a distance away from the edges of the canvas, to prevent the audience from getting the feeling that the visual elements are falling off the page. However, there are occasions in which having certain visual elements stretch all the way to the edge can be advantageous. By having an uniform colour stretch across the entire canvas and then having an odd colour splashed across the middle, it draws more attention to the odd colour, which is the ultimate objective of posters – getting the audience’s attention fixed on the message.

Not only that, by having an equal spread to the edge of both sides of the canvas, it can generate a “large” effect – audiences will draw the conclusion that this picture is something that stretches beyond the boundaries of what the poster can physically capture, and that can be turned to a designer’s advantage as well.

Something else that I came to notice while doing this assignment was how the little details often make something illogical miraculously make a great deal of sense. Take the poster above for example – the initial design did not have the East-West Line green bar above the door. Instead, it was simply a man standing between 2 white rectangles holding off a horde of people. Most of my friends could not draw the link between the poster’s design and the message I wanted to bring across, and it confused me for a moment. But I realized that this was because I being the designer, know perfectly well what I’m trying to say with my poster. However, the audience does not know what a designer wants to say exactly. The designer must always take this into account – “will the audience know what is it that I want to say? Do I need to add anything else for this to make sense?

Assignment 3: U C What I C

This assignment sounded simple enough – use 8 photos to tell a story without the use of any words. The story can contain a twist, or not, and photo manipulation is allowed. It all sounded incredibly easy – after all, how much time would one need to just take 8 photographs?

More ignorant words have never been spoken.

But more on that later. The very moment I read the assignment outline, I knew, I just knew, that I had to do a ghost-related story. In the spirit of classic Asian horror movies, the (often foolhardy) protagonist would be minding his or her own business, thinking that they were all alone in the room, but of course, it wouldn’t be a horror movie if there wasn’t a ghost standing behind you watching your every move.

Even if you’re answering nature’s call.

Man, that’s some dedication.

So I quickly developed a storyboard, starting with a shot of what would appear to be a deserted and dark corridor (and it makes one wonder just what it is about such corridors that draws movie characters to it like moths to a flame)

And then came the difficult part of this assignment – actually getting the photos taken. Much easier said than done, really. My friend and I spent close to 3 hours in this single room just taking photos over and over again, trying to get the camera angle to look right, and also because I’m a horrible actor, as can be seen in the photos below of me trying to look startled/disturbed and failing spectacularly.

We finally managed to get 8 shots taken, and I set about to editing them to set the mood. I immediately changed all the photos to black and white, and adjusted the colour balance to create a very dark, crisp sort of atmosphere. As for the photos themselves, we tried as much as possible to follow the Rule of Thirds so as to create a more visually pleasing photo, but on occasion we decided to forego the rule for the sake of dramatic impact.

No, that hand in the last photograph isn’t photoshopped, it really is that long, partially also due to the camera angle.

Once again, a very enjoyable assignment to do. This assignment taught me how to analyze photographs taken in sequence, and how to put them together to form a coherent story. A picture speaks a thousand words, and these thousand words can differ for each member of the audience. It’s the onus of us, the creators, to ensure that everyone reads the same story.

Assignment 2: Abstraction

The second assignment, Abstraction, was primarily centred on the abstraction process and the creation of a pictogram to be put up around NUS. Pictograms are simple images that convey a singular message – for example, no smoking, no playing of ball games. I started to think about the kinds of pictograms that could be put up around school, and was quite abruptly reminded of a couple incidents in the past. In those incidents, we were going about doing our own things as was normal, but upon reaching a flight of staircases, we would find it blocked by people who were sitting on the stairs, talking to one another.

In NUS, not all staircases are wide and are able to accommodate more than 2 people trying to use it side-by-side. And here these people were taking up most of the space of a staircase, and not because they desperately needed the space in any shape or form. They were simply sitting there, on the stairs, blocking the way and being a huge pain in the rear.

I’m sure pretty much everyone has seen that scene from “300”, the one where Leonidas yells “This is Sparta!” and kicks the other guy down a pit. I was so immensely tickled by the idea of merging this idea along with the ice cream idea that I immediately based my pictogram on the combined version.

And yes, that photograph actually contains 2 of me, it was edited using Photoshop.

This was the initial degree of abstraction that I did for this assignment.

However, my fellow students and tutor said that the final pictogram was a tad confusing because it was trying to convey 2 messages at the same time – do not sit on stairs, and be warned: someone may kick you off the stairs. They advised me to simplify it even further such that the pictogram would ultimately be conveying a singular, clear message. And this is the result – a slightly retouched degree of abstraction.

And here we have the final version of the pictogram.

A fun assignment to do, on the overall, although I’m a little disgruntled that I didn’t quite get to use the pictogram of one guy kicking the other down the stairs. This assignment taught me that regardless of how simple a pictogram may seem, so long as it conveys more than a singular message, it is not in its simplest form yet. The assignment also taught me how to better identify critical elements of a picture so that even after simplifying the picture, audiences are still able to identify key elements.

Assignment 1: My, Myself and I

Me, Myself and I. The first ever assignment of NM2208, requiring us to manipulate objects to change the typography of our names so as to represent a particular personality, habit, quirk or trait. The assignment sounds deceptively simple, but when it came down to actually doing it, it turned out to be much harder than expected. The first thing that needed to be done was to jot down a list of words and short phrases that people tended to associate me with.

The results came in: Sleepy and videogame lover.

I’m not sure if that’s a good sign.

In any case, I drew 2 quick sketches based on the word ‘Sleepy’.

The first is simply a sketch of my bed, which is practically my own little kingdom. I love my bed as much as a man can love an inanimate object without being sent to seek psychological help. However, I quickly realized that this probably wasn’t a sketch I could utilize, as there really wasn’t much in terms of objects for me to manipulate.

The second one is a sketch of the letters of my first name (A, L, V, I, N) sleeping in class, something that I’m (shamefully) famous for. And yes, the letter N is missing, because I didn’t plan this sketch properly and ran out of space. A perfect example of a poor design layout – good thing this is just a preliminary sketch and good thing this is the first assignment, eh? I quite liked this sketch, but decided to play around with other sketches to see what I could come up with.

And so the third sketch came into existence:

This sketch was done based on the fact that I was (and still am) an avid gamer. The letters in my name for this sketch are made using Tetris blocks, a sword, a torch, a boomerang and a snake – various objects that can be found in games. I was quite attached to this idea, but friends claimed that it wasn’t obvious that this sketch was meant to reflect my enjoyment for videogames, so this sketch was ultimately abandoned.

The 4^th and final sketch came from a personal observation that I was a person who often got lost in his own thoughts and tended to analyze certain things too deeply (“think too much”, as some of my friends would say). Hence the sketch – a literal representation of “reflection”.

We were then to choose one out of the 4 sketches to further develop into 2 roughs – I ended up choosing the reflections idea as I felt like it was the closest in representation of my true character. I refined the idea behind the design a bit, and finally came up with the 2 roughs as shown below, one in white and the other in black.

The black version of the design ended up appealing to me far more than the white version (no form of racism intended here), and that was ultimately the design that I chose to develop into the final prototype. I began playing around with the opacity of the reflected “Alvin”, trying to get it to most closely emulate an actual reflection as possible. However, here was where I stumbled into what would become the most trying question for this assignment.

Basically, I had 2 choices:

1.       I could keep the opacity of the reflection really low, such that it looked realistic, but at the expense of visibility for viewers looking at the design for the first time.

2.     

  Or I could increase the opacity of the reflection, such that it looked far more artificial, but greatly improving visibility.

This was a dilemma that I found intimidating – in either situation, it seemed that I would be undermining the very principles of visual communication. It was clear that I needed to find a balance between the 2, but as people always say, talk is cheap.

Finally, after versions upon versions of the same design, I ended up with this:

It seemed like a fairly reasonable balance between realism and visibility for audiences.

The refined story behind this design – I am a person who tends to put up false fronts and masks in front of other people, so as to hide my true feelings . As a result, the actual name itself is flipped, indicating the Alvin persona I display to the world isn’t an accurate depiction of my true character, and its scratchiness/sketchiness is indicative of how incomplete and inadequate this false persona actually is. My true persona in this case is the reflection in the surface. However, its fading opacity shows that the more I hide behind this false persona, the closer I come to losing my true self.

Some final thoughts on this assignment - I chose to go with black and white so as to keep things elegantly simple. Also, some may say that this design may not fulfill the requirements of the assignment, namely, object manipulation. However, in this case, the object in question is the name itself, representative of the side that is being shown to the world around me. 

This assignment got me used to making full use of my Wacom tablet to draw. Initially, using the tablet felt strange and unwieldy, but repeated usage and an undying determination finally allowed me to reach a level of competency such that it almost felt like the tablet had become a part of my body.