Tonald Dump

For the past several months the junior freestyle students have been working on the Narrative Unit. It’s focus is on telling stories in different ways and through different mediums. This project covered all of the skills that we had learned this year. By creating our own products we, not only practiced and mastered those skills, but learned even more about the creative potential in each of our classes.

The narrative project started in English as a ‘Flash Fiction’ assignment. We were told to write a story that completed the entire narrative arc in less than 500 words. As a students we are normally told the minimum length for an assignment, so when we were told that all we needed to do was keep the story short the task seemed too easy. As it turns out the, writing a story that is less than 500 words that both, develops a character and, takes the reader on a journey with the character, was difficult to say the least. By producing something so short I learned how to edit my writing in a concise yet understandable way.

In design class we took the flash fiction that we wrote in English and created a rough comic telling the story. That rough comic became a full, single page, color comic about the rising action in our stories. We then took that hand drawn comic and scanned it into Illustrator where we began to recreate each panel piece by piece. After weeks of work, we eventually we ended up with a single computer file that contained evidence of the months learning and practice that we had spent all semester learning.

With a rough comic drawn in design class, Web/Audio students began the animation process by creating an animatic from the rough drawings. Using the animatic as a guide we began work on our animations. These animations are the product of a semester of learning and practicing skills as well as a month of work by each student. On top of all the animating the website is also a large part of the class. It shows all of the finished work from this unit as well as glimpses into the creative process. There will also be images of the application used to create our projects to give the viewer some idea of what we spend all of our time working on.

 

paper prototype

dreamweaver screenshot

Above is a screen shot of the application Dreamweaver which is what we use to create our websites. On the left is a view of the code, in this case the code is creating a fancy box, and on the left is a view of what the website looks like based on the code on the left.

illustrator screenshot

Above is a screen shot of the application Illustrator which is what we use to create our illustrations. The main image is what will be seen in the final and the images off to the side are extras used to create the final images.