Graphic Narrative Evaluation

Use this template to help you evaluate your project.

You should give specific details about your work.

You should provide both written and visual examples to explain your project.

You should find areas to praise in your work. Be specific about why you think they are good or why you are proud of them.

You should also find areas that could be improved. Look for areas that you could make better if you went back to them. Be specific about what you would improve.

Add additional slides as you need to. Don’t be restricted by what is here.

Any blank slides should be deleted before submission.

Does your final product reflect your original intentions?

My flat plan and final product are identical as I changed the layout of some of my pages when I got on to doing the flat plans. Below is one of the pages I decided to change because I added three other pages to include the Merchant that sold each Martian the Hay, Sticks and Bricks. This page combined two pages into one were the Big bad Alien climbed onto the roof and then fell down the chimney and into the pot of boiling goo. If I had, had more time I would have liked to have extended my story so I could have included a page for the alien climbing onto the roof, a page for the Martians positioning to pot and another page of the Big Bad Alien falling into the pot of goo. The main reason for me not doing this was because in the time frame I had I feared the quality of the image may have dropped.

Another thing that changed throughout my book was the idea of the Martians living in little igloo type buildings. The images below best show the styles of house I originally intended on making and the style of house I end up doing. In my storyboard plan I thought it best to make the houses into igloo shapes and make them out of materials that you would find on the surface of Mars, which meant making them out of such things as Dirt, Sand and Rocks. Then while making my flat plan I decided that as it is a children's book it doesn’t really matter if the houses are made out of realistic materials and so I decided that the houses should be made from the same materials as the original story. This was because I want to keep close to the original story so that people would know it was an adaptation of the Three Little Pigs and because it makes the story easier for children to read a grasp if there is sense normality to it.

How well have you constructed your images?

The pages in my book are well structured to make each page nice to look at. I have tried to make each page have different shots and angles although it did turn out that the pages were either a long shot or a medium/close up shot. If I were to do this again I would try to use some other shots to create some diversity and change between the pages. This would help the reader as it would make the illustrations more interesting to look at. Pages 8 and 11 are good examples of the two shot lengths that I used and shows that there was not much variation which is something I would focus on when doing this project again. The texture I used in this book are also show off on page 11 (the page with the brick wall) as I used a different technique to create this one.

Unlike all the other pages where I use Rotoscoping to create the scenery, characters and props in this one I use the Filter Cutout. This creates a slightly more detailed look on the rotoscope effect but doesn’t look to different this effect.

How well have you used text to anchor your images

I believe that the text on most of my pages accompanies and explains what is happening in the illustration very well. However, on one of my pages I think that I have put a bit to much text on the page and that this page could have been split into two or maybe even three pages. The page below (page 11) is the page in question. As you can see the text explains how the bad alien climbs onto the roof, the little martians put a pot of goo out, and the bad alien falls into the pot. This page is good but I do think that if I had made a page for the bad alien climbing onto the roof and then

and a page for the martians putting a pot of goo on the fire then this would have allowed me to put the text an illustration that it would accompany better.

Is your product suitable for your audience?

In my proposal I said “I am targeting my book at children from age 5years+” and I feel as if that is what I have done. As my book is very easy to read and each page doesn’t have too many words on them it means that the child will be able to read it generally easily but could struggle with some pages, for example on page 11 I have put quite a lot of text which could have, given more time, been split up onto another page. However I still think that 5years and up is a suitable age for the book. Also I mentioned that I didn’t want to make it so simple because adults may also be reading this book to their children and so it needs to appeal to them so they would buy it for and read it to their child.In my proposal I mentioned that “The book will be mostly aimed at male children” I feel that this demographic hasn’t changed after making the book as many of he characters in the book are male, in fact the only woman in the book is the mother martian and she is only in one frame of the book. Although, I also said “this doesn’t mean that females can’t read it” and I still stand by that claim as the book is based on the classic Three Little Pigs which was read by both genders, so this has lead me to make my book appealing for females to read.

What do you like/dislike about the techniques you have used?

Throughout my book I have pencil drawings and rotoscoping to create the characters, scenes and any other props. I found that the pencil drawings where the part that I disliked the most as they where the hardest part of the whole process and made the process of making the book longer. This was because when drawing the sketch I needed to make it detailed so it would be easier to rotoscope when it was scanned in and imported into Photoshop. The image to the right is an example of on of the images I drew for my book. This is an image of the “Big Bad Alien” that terrorizes the little martians throughout the book. As you can see this image is slightly different to the one in my book as I had to make some tweaks to make him fit in with the art style of the rest of the book.After drawing my characters I used the scanner to scan these into my PC and import them into Photoshop so I could use the Polygon Lasso Tool to select the different parts of his body and rotoscope them. I then used the Colour Overlay Tool to make the body parts and clothing on my characters the colour that I needed. I then used the Polygon Lasso Tool to select a little bit of each body part on the left and right side to create the highlights and shadows.

What do you like/dislike about how your final product looks?

I believe that the best feature of my book is the use of rotoscoping to create my house assets because they are the cleanest looking assets in my book. Compared to my characters which are my least favourite asset in this book. This is because I have used the same character model for the Mother, Merchant and Three Little Martians with a few little tweaks. This combined with a little amount of poses that each character has makes the book look repetitive and get a bit dull.On the other had I do like the page layout as it is very clean and laid out in such a way that it makes easy to read. I like this layout but I would have liked to use a double page spread layout as this would have give me more room to create each scene, but I decided against this as I thought I wouldn’t have enough text to put on its own page. I also did not like that my scenery did not change that much throughout my book and the only difference was the change when the shot change from close, medium or far. I believe that this could have been done better.

Why did you include the content you used?

In my book I used a font called “Sanchez”, I used this font as it is a serif font which makes it easier to read as the little flicks that you get on a serif letter make the letters more distinctive which can make the brain identify each letter quicker whereas with a Sans-Serif font the brain has to spend more time trying to identify the letters. This makes reading this book a lot easier for a child or adult.

The colours I used throughout my book where mostly greens, reds, and browns with a few exceptions. The image to the left best shows off the different colours used when making my book. This also shows off one of the effects I used to create the gust of wind the Bad Alien blew which was a simple effect of using the eraser tool on 0% hardness to softer the edges of the gust so it didn’t look like to much like a blob of grey on the screen.

The images I used to create my characters where my own which I drew up with pencil and paper and then scanned into the PC to be rotoscoped and made to fit in my book. The martian sketch that I drew up ended up being the template for all of the Martians throughout my book, in hindsight I do wish I had create a few more drawings of thesemartians to give the book some variation in character so theywould all look exactly the same just with different clothes, eyes, hair, mouths etc. The other drawing is of the bad alienwhich I also think I should have made more of but instead oflooking different he should have been stood in different positions.All my other images where either created by my in Photoshop or rotoscoped by me using images of things I found online. An example of an image I made my self would be the piles of hay and sticks that replaced the houses on the pages where the bad alien blew the houses down. These where quite simple to make as they where just made up of shapes like the leaf shape.

An example of an image I got online is this cottage which I used as a base for the houses in my story. Each house in my story was changed in colour but not shape. However, looking back now I feel I should have changed something about each house or even used a completely different house picture per little martians house to give the book some variation.

What signs, symbols or codes have your used in your work?

In my book I used bright colours as I thought this would make it look more happy and make parents want to buy it for there child as the book looks light and happy and not dark and scary. I used a simple jagged edge style as this again helps the book have a cartoony and lighter feel to it. Also if the characters had been super realistic the book may have looked as if it was for an older audience. The locations in my book are the inside of the third little martians house and the surface of mars. The locations I used where very limited but as the whole story took place outside I did not need to change much about them until the story moved inside the third little martians house. My characters where I feel designed well but could have been done better, for example if I had more time to draw a few different martians instead of using the same martian model for them all then I may have had a little bit of variation and the martians would look exactly the same, with small tweaks.

What representations can be found in your work?

As my book is set on Mars and has only martians and an evil alien in it, it does not contain that much diversity in the sense of gender. The only female in the book is the martian mother and she only shows up in one frame. However I have included a way of telling that a person is a certain age, I have done this be increasing and/or decreasing the height of certain characters. In my book there is a slight show of race as the Martians are green and the Evil Alien is red, I feel like this happened by coincidence and not on purpose as I only coloured the Martians green as that is the classic martian colour and I coloured the evil alien red to show that he was the bad guy. Also my book doesn’t contain any religious differences because I haven’t mentioned religion thought-out my book. I thought this would be best as the child reading it wouldn’t really need to know the religion of the characters in the book. Also if each character had a religion then it could cause issues with people from those religions being offended.

What style have you employed in your products?

In my book I have used my own style as I drew most of my characters in my book however I did get some inspiration from the martian picture below which gave my characters the look that they have. While creating them in Photoshop though I edited them to make the look different and not be an exact copy of them for copy right reasons.While making my Evil Alien I decided to create a character from my mind and so this doesn’t really have any original image that it was inspired from, instead it was made up from a mixture of pictures and my imagination. The assets throughout the book where made by using images I found on google as a template and changing them in Photoshop to be my own instead of copy’s.

What were the strengths and weaknesses of the pre-production and planning

A strength of my planning documentation and pre-production is that it gave me a time scale and a idea of what I was going to create and the time scale that I set myself so I knew what I needed to do and when to create my booklet. I did find the pre-production particularly helpful as it gave me an idea of the kinds of character models I was going to use and it gave me time to practice the techniques and tools that I would use to make the illustrations. A weakness I had in my work was that I didn’t stick to my plan. Even though I thought my plan was good and was well set out, I still found it difficult to stick to it and found my self running certain parts of the project over the time I had allotted to it. This made it very difficult to create my booklet and made it so that most of the pages where made in the last two sessions.

Historical and cultural context

My work is quite similar to the original version of The Three Little Pigs as I have kept the original houses, huffing and puffing and most of the Characters are similar with slight tweaks, for example the Big Bad Alien as all the same traits as the Big Bad Wolf and even has a very similar name. One of the traits the Wolf and Alien share is the Huff & Puff. Originally I was going to change this to something more to do with space like, Zap or Blast but in the end I decided that it was best to stick with the original script so that the reader would know that they where reading a variation of The Three Little Pigs.My book however resembles the newer adapted version of this tale rather than the old original version as my version has the Three Martians run from the Alien to the next martians house were as if I had gone with the original the Alien would have eaten two of the three martians and the third martian would have cooked and eaten the alien.

Peer Feedback

• Summarise peer feedback and discuss– Responses you agree with– Responses you disagree with