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Hit ‘preview’ above to read previous panels in my ongoing preview of my graphic novel, Hardhats. Rollover the tabs above to browse other comics, and leave your comments!
Just finishing up the last page of part 1 of my graphic novel, featuring the White Horse tavern in NYC. Click here for more of an intro to the project. The above panels continue on from the last post and feature a conversation between Harry and Kwame, two idealistic NYU students, about the effectiveness of art as a tool for political change.
Smarter than the average bear (or not): screen grab from my cartoon explaining the $ crisis
If last term was all about creating content, then next term will be about how to best display and navigate that content. In a way that builds on the visual storytelling framework of comics to create a long, interactive narrative, as opposed to a free-standing, autonomous infographic. Here’s the closest I’ve come to what I’m talking about – a hyperlinked version of the AIPAC comic that ran on Religion Dispatches last year.
Predominantly through Flash, despite it being the unwanted guest around Apple’s table(t). After teaching animation in flash for a few years, getting back into the rigmarole of key frames, movie clips and tweens wasn’t too hard (see pic to the left), but didn’t prepare me for the move to actionscript and incorporating interactive elements, like scrubbers (not those sorts of scrubbers, UK folks), buttons and inset animations. To give you an idea of the sort of things I’m looking for, here are just a few examples that have caught my eye:
USA today piece on mortgage comparisons between 2000 and 2007 (subtle nod to the importance of data viz in sexing up dry data)
Medecins sans frontieres piece on War in the DR Congo
In fact, I’ve just had a very productive chat with Katy about the future of interactive visual media, the challenges it faces on being accepted into the newsroom, as well as a guide for best practices in user interface design. Once again, the goal is to amalgamate the page composition of comics with a multi-layered, dynamic online experience. Katy mentioned the importance of learning HTML5 over Flash…but one thing at a time. Methinks I need to find a code-minded collaborator.
Harry and Kwame debate the motivational discrepancies that student filmmakers face when making art with a message – a sample from my graphic novel in progress, Hardhats. More to follow. More info on the true story behind the project here for those new to the site.
Now that spring break is here, I’m hunkering down (yes, old worlders, I’ve been in the US too long) to get the first part of my graphic novel, Hardhats, done once and for all. Problem is, the more me and Nikil revise it and check for edits/inconsistencies, the longer it seems to become. So now I’m on the last page – just wrapped up the penultimate page this afternoon (I’ll scan in a few pages for your viewing pleasure now), but I still have a redraw to do before I tackle minor edits. One of the stranger things about embarking on a project of this length is the fact that I have to rein in my drawing style to how it was when I originally started this, way back in 2009. I’ve come a long way since then, preferring my 0.3 micron to my once favourite Pentel brush pen, so I find myself straddling the older style so as not to disconcert the reader.
NB the meticulously clean work area
To mix things up, I’ve also finally got around to working on my mashup of Goya’s The Shooting of May 3 1808, which you can see to the right of the pic (experimenting with how well bristol board takes watercolour washes. Results thus far: not so well). My take, if you can make it out, swaps out the spanish and napaloenic troops for iraqis and private contractors – a precursor to my nisour square interactive piece (also in the works), which I’ve mentioned in previous posts.
For more on the project, which is an interactive mini-site, scroll down to read today’s news. For those new to the site, welcome! You can browse and read my comics by hovering over the links at the top and clicking on titles from the drop-down menus.
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.
A daily comic from the Archcomix archives (circa 2006) featuring that day's new stories, a la Steve Bell
Last night was my backstory chez Jim Bettinger, our program director, a now time-honoured tradition amongst the Knights when we each take center-stage for an evening to explain how we got into journalism. My talk went well, and led to some good questions about collaboration, multimedia and legal issues around comics journalism. It was also surprisingly satisfying to wade through the murky depths of my early cartooning career to pull out single panel op-ed pieces and chart how I got from there to the longer form work I do today. See attached for some examples from back in the day.
As I tap I’m putting together the final edits on the Bhutanese Refugee story I mentioned last post, which I’m hoping to then import into a flash template ahead of tomorrow’s multimedia class. That’s the plan, anyway. Aside from learning a ton about editing and Final Cut file (mis)management, doing this project has also schooled me in the pain of subtitles, or rather, overdubs. Something that will no doubt become essential training for my future work, which often does feature english as the primary language of interviewees.
Above is a graphic I put together for a project started by Fellow Knight Jigar Mehta on the Egyptian protests, #18daysinegypt, so-called because it’s all about encouraging citizen journalists to come forward with their footage of the recent developments in Cairo. The key lies in the footage being geo-tagged to create an explorable archive for viewers to find their own way through the dates and places that led to Mubarak’s resignation. More news and updates below.
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.
