A brief interlude away from the Nepal trafficking project to share my latest interactive piece done for Stanford University’s CISAC. Wondering what the difference is between a worm, a backdoor and a trojan? Or why you should break that habit of naked skype conference calls? Then read the comic here. Roll over the red dots when you hover over the pages to call up interactive markers housing audio, video and hyperlinks.
At least it is for my current assignment for the Stanford Medical School on the minutiae of cholesterol and heart-attack-related chicanery.
2012 is already looking to be a busy year for me, I’m pleased to say. From May 24-28 I’ll be in Phoenix, Arizona for the International Communication Association’s Conference, talking about comics journalism, followed a month later by the Woodstock Digital Media Festival, where I’ll be discussing visual storytelling on digital platforms. Straight after that I’ll be reprising my comics course at EPGY, Stanford’s Summer program in late June, followed immediately by my second stint at Idyllwild Arts College, near Palm Springs, California (that’s about 1.5 hours east of LA, non-yanks). Click here to find out more about the 1 week adult class I’m giving at Idyllwild, and here for 2-week youth (14-18) class.
I know it’s a long way off, but I’m also delighted to say that this December there will be an Archcomix exhbition at Studio Unfiltered in Pleasanton, where I’ll be displaying select pages from my latest comics journalism projects. The reason I chose to work with SU was because of their “art for social change” ethos, realized in the fact that one third of all sales will be donated to an anti-trafficking NGO. But of course if you can’t wait for the festive season, you could always head over to the Archcomix online comic art repository and order a page directly through this site.
As promised, see below for a brief sampler of the anthology produced by students in my recent graphic novel course at EPGY. This preview features work from Beiatrix Pedrasa and Heywood Ye – all the more impressive considering they only had 12 days to put their stories together. More previews will be posted shortly, so support this new generation of visual storytellers and come back/share the link/tweet/shout it from the rooftops etc.
After a week or two off (imagine that!), allow me to showcase some of the incredible talents from the two classes I taught directly after my knight fellowship ended. For more on the classes, click here to read my previous post. The first featured creators aged 14-17 from Stanford’s EPGY program, which ran for 3 weeks, during which time I crammed as much graphic novel know-how into their porous brains as I could. Like any of the workshops I teach, we covered the creative process (writing, thumbnailing, pencilling, inking, scanning, photoshop, indesign) with the invaluable addition of also critically analysing some stand-out examples of the form. This being me I put a heavy slant on non-fiction visual storytelling, meaning we covered Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Maus by Art Spiegelman, The Photographer by Guibert/Lefevre, Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco, Wordless woodcuts from Franz Masereel, Lynd Ward and Giacomo Patri, as well as Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Douglas Wolk’s How to Read Graphic Novels.
For more samples of the students’ final artwork, scroll down.
Where has he disappeared off to? I hear you ask, dear reader. Well, since the Knight journalism fellowship finished I’ve been teaching back to back graphic novel writing classes, first at Stanford’s EPGY Summer program, and now currently to a group of mature students in the heart of the rural hinterland that is Idyllwild College. It’s 6000 feet up a mountain, about 2 hours east of LA, and I’ve reverted back to a dial-up modem to send this missive from my little cabin in the wilderness.
Both the courses have gone extremely well, and it’s always a pleasure to spread the good word (and image, wah wah) of visual storytelling to a larger audience across a broad age group. The current Idyllwild class is focusing on non-fiction comics, which I thought would be easier to structure a tentative first effort around, given the skeletal outline of facts/evidence etc. Topics range from: shootings in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; escaping from North Korea; the burgeoning Lion fish population in the Atlantic and the Armenian genocide. I’ll post some sample panels forthwith. For those of you that missed it, the tier above is taken from my latest interactive piece on the Nisoor Square shootings, published on Cartoon movement last month. Click here to try it out.
Be sure to check out the news below the fold: I stumbled across a great comic on the Canadian mining corporation Goldcorp and their struggle to uproot indigenous communities to access gold mines in Guatemala. Not to mention the toxic effects of their mining process on the unfortunate families who are unable to move away from the site of the cyanide-oozing mines. In the interests of impartiality (ahem) it should be duly noted that “over 50 percent of the 1,900 people working at the mine were local residents at their time of hiring, and 98 percent were Guatemalan residents. In 2008, the Marlin operation spent more than $90 million in Guatemala on supplies and services, and paid over $20 million in taxes”. See for yourself here. Though the integral inclusion of cyanide in the gold extraction process has to raise a few eyebrows given the outbreak of skin diseases amongst the local population: [thanks to Chris Van den Ven for the summary below]
Cyanide leaching…uses a cyanide solution to dissolve gold from host rocks for later precipitation. Rock is removed from the ground with explosives. After the ore has been excavated, it is brought to a grinding mill, where the ore is crushed into sand or smaller sized grains. Next, it is transported to the leaching plant where the ore is mixed with the cyanide solution. The cyanide solution dissolves the gold from the crushed ore. Next, the gold-bearing solution is collected. Finally, the gold is precipitated out of solution.
That’s right, click here for the full 1.5 hr audio of “The World in Frames” panel organized at Stanford last week. Featuring Andrea Lunsford (Professor of English), Adam Johnson (Assoc Professor in English and Creative Writing), Adam Rosenblatt (Ph.D. Candidate, Modern Thought and Literature, representing the Program in Human Rights) and, of course, myself (Comics Journalist, John S. Knight Journalism Fellow).
Joe goes into detail on his process, what tools he uses (nibs and paper types, the whole shebang), his influences, and why he chose comics as the medium for his journalism.
There’s nothing quite like the race to the end of term to catalyse a depth-charge of creativity. The past few weeks have been busier than normal as I’ve spent hours hunched over final cut and flash (as opposed to the drawing board and scanner), busily hashing out my first mini-interactive documentary site (produced with fellow Knight Madhu Acharya), on Bhutanese refugees and their integration into the Oakland community. The screenshot above gives you an idea of the homepage layout, which in the final published version allows you to choose different chapters of the story to explore. I’m currently tying up loading/streaming issues with the FLV files, but aside from that I think it’s good to go.
Now that I’ve got to grips with Final Cut and Flash, I can move to phase 2 of my project, namely combining video and audio within comics pages to give online readers an interactive multimedia comics experience as they explore news events. Looking back at the “to do” list I put up at the end of January, I’m pleased to say that I’ve hit all the goals:
I’ll next week with news of some future projects, as well as some previews of the above – including my first experiment with text animation in After Effects.
I have finally succumbed to the lure of After Effects, Final Cut and Flash for my visual storytelling needs of late. Not that I’ve turned my back on my drawing board (or the more accommodating sketchbook – additions to which are up on flickr). More like I’m finally able to start experimenting with different ways of presenting the visual stories that up until now have been pencilled, inked, scanned and printed (or published online). Turns out After Effects is more intuitive than I thought, though the avalanche of sub-field arrows reminds me of the first time I got plonked in front of Photoshop CS2 at Penguin many moons ago. So I’m finally on track to combining video, audio slideshows and interactive comics from one story into an online rich-media maelstrom. The question is, what is the best way to hack them altogether? Is it Flash, or will that be the online publishing equivalent of Quark in a few year’s time? By now, loyal reader, you’ll have no doubt closely watched the Pulse and Seda videos that I’ve posted (scroll down in the News section below if not), and will be anxiously awaiting the latest offering, which should be wrapped up by Weds. It centres on two Bhutanese refugees who have been resettled in Oakland, and their contrasting experiences at different ends of the age spectrum.
With the help of the indomitable Christopher Lin, I’ve also managed to put out a new version of my interactive comics reader prototype, now featuring a vertical as well as horizontal scroll, and pop-up windows from linked panels. It went down very well at our Knightly outing to Google last week, where I presented it to teams from Google News and Youtube. Fellow fellows Hugo Soskin and Di Pinheiro are putting together a video of the talks (also given by Cafe Babel founder-now OWNI partner Adriano Farano and Investigative Journalist Evelyn Larrubia), so I’ll post a link when it’s up. The excellent comics journalism resource Cartoon Movement have also expressed an interest in an interactive narrative visualization (like a data viz, but with visual stories as opposed to infographics, though I suppose the panels technically constitute information graphics) I’m putting together of the Nisour Square shooting of 2007, so expect that down the pipeline soon. To keep you sated until then, check out this video from a talk I gave to the MA journalism students at Stanford last month on comics journalism, my path into it, process, and all that good stuff.
The Winter term kicked off this week, and already it feels like I’ve been back ages. In true Stanfordian fashion, yesterday’s highlights included: an introduction to multimedia reporting (hello Final Cut Express), catching up with the globe-trotting antics of the rest of the Knights, planning a group ski trip to Tahoe, reading Jeremy Scahill‘s scathing expose of Blackwater and the role of private security firms in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then sitting down with ex-National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss her take on them. While thinking about how all this fits into my project, and working out which courses to shop. Just your average day back at school really.
Geri Migielicz’s class on Multimedia Storytelling is the definite course highlight of my year, as I’ve been wanting to tinker with video, audio and animation to complement my comics work for a while now. Naturally, a lot of the same compositional/framing devices for comics apply to (and are directly borrowed from) film, so that helps. I’ve been addicted to storytelling shows like this American Life and The Moth podcasts for years (ever since depending on them at White River for accompaniment during the hours spent inking at my drawing board in fact), so it was great to see Jessica Abel and Ira Glass’s Radio: An Illustrated Guide in the syllabus. In fact, just this afternoon a bunch of us are getting together to learn how to make a podcast, courtesy of KBOO Portland Radio Director Jenka Sondenberg – so be sure to come back next week to listen to that. Some of the examples we checked out were the NYTimes Year in Pictures and the media-rich 5 Years Later from USA Today, focusing on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I snapped up my copy of Final Cut Express from the bookstore that afternoon, and have just installed it, though I hear it’s a beast on a par with Photoshop in the menubar/features stakes. We’ll see.
The chat with Condi Rice was another year-long highlight, though the mood in the lounge was a lot lighter than expected when I walked in – probably a strategic decision on Jim and Dawn’s part to mix up the holiday catch-up festivities with an indisputably controversial speaker. Predictably, Condi came across as furiously intelligent, quoting in-depth resolution numbers and bilateral treaties in many of her answers (though arguably few of us could confirm or deny their veracity), and the possessor of a honed rhetoric that was nimbler and more acrobatic than the psuedo-kung-fu hand gestures that accompanied them.