Tuesday, March 13, 2007

I guess I should write about my process...

Ok. Well, here's the thing. I originally thought that I was going to use three different media, and that they would all be about equally weighted in the project and the presentation. Three different perspectives on the same succint, funny little story. But after having done the whole project, it turns out that the main focus is really the graphic novel. I like having Troy's voice track, I think it definitely adds to the story being able to hear it in his voice. But I won't even have time to play that part in the presentation, and it's pretty much the same perspective as the graphic novel, although I did try to present the comic from my perspective with the back and forth between myself and Troy in the morning at Notre Dame. As for the text messages...I am pretty sure dlog is trying to kill me. They just don't work, no matter what I try. For one thing, I don't want to type everything out, because that's just not how text messages are sent or recieved. When one sends a text message, one has to press buttons multiple times to get the letters he or she wants. That would be impossible to present in dlog. When one receives a text, the text just appears, you don't see it being written out on your phone. I wanted to use dlog to copy and paste in each text message, with the time and date it was sent according to the receiver's phone, and then have each one appear as if somebody was actually receiving these text messages. This works gloriously until the text messages reach the bottom of the page, at which point dlog refuses to scroll down as the messages appear, but rather allows the messages to appear below the point of visibility. That does not help me. Furthermore, no matter how I save it, dlog refuses to make my entry loadable. I can't find it except in my own window. I see Rebecca's project and Allan's project. But not mine. I also can't load their projects as it is taking a year and Rebecca's still hasn't loaded. This situation, as you may imagine, is extremely frustrating. If anybody is more familiar with dlog and wants to enlighten me, please please do so.

The other main problem with the text messages is that they only provide the skeleton of a story. In order to make them as realistic as possible, I really only present texts that could have or actually did go back and forth between people in the story, and therefore no really explicit story line is sent out. That's ok though--I think that after reading the graphic novel, there is no need to spell out the story again. The texts just serve as a sort of evidence almost, a set of data that tells a story spine. Well, they would serve that purpose...if they were visible to the public.

As it turned out, creating a graphic novel was simply too time consuming to finish in conjuction with two other outstanding works. For that reason, I am pretty satisfied with what came out of my ComicLife endeavor and not too impressed with the rest. It's fine, but the comic is really the heart of the project. It was exciting to see it in hard copy, it looks really different. I'm bringing three hard copies tonight to float around during my presentation.

That is all.

No comments: