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Illustration & Visual Narrative - Task 4 Final - Webcomic "The Monkey's Paw"

2/12/24 - 5/12/24 (Week 10 - Week 14 ) due on 6/12/2025
Anggia Tsani Rachmadiyanti, (0368487)
Illustration & Visual Narrative / Bachelor in Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Task 4 Final : Final Assignment Animated Webcomic Cover and One-Page Comic for "The Monkey's Paw" (40%)


 CONTENT LIST 

 MODULE BRIEF : 

 Instructions: 

Assignment Brief: 

- Students will create an animated, web-ready comic cover and a minimum 3 panel comic page based on the short story "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs. 
- Need to pick a part of the text and analyse it and picture it into visual: https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/monkeys_paw.htm 

- use Photoshop to manipulate images, adding textures, effects inspired by Dave McKean’s Sandman covers to achieve a surreal, atmospheric style. This will be key for creating suspenseful, eerie mood. Search for “surrealistic adobe illustrator artwork” 

- Webcomic Animation: Using Google Slides, students will create a portrait-oriented comic cover and a one-page comic with animated GIFs. 

Week 11: Introduction, story analysis, and animation basics in Google Slides 
Week 12 - 13: Focused tutorials, animation techniques, panel composition, feedback sessions, and work time. 
Week 14: Final critique, presentation, and submission. 

Assignment Requirements 
  1. Comic Cover: Design a cover that represents your interpretation of The Monkey’s Paw, including a title in Illustrator. You may use Photoshop to manipulate textures and images for a surreal effect inspired by Sandman covers or refer to “surrealistic adobe illustrator artwork”. Include subtle animations if desired to create a haunting atmosphere. 
  2. One-Page Comic: Translate a selected part of the story into a single-page, animated webcomic with at least 3 panels animated using GIFs in Google Slides. Focus on panel-to-panel transitions (e.g., moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject) to maintain suspense and continuity.
  3. Format: Portrait orientation for phone or tablet display. Assemble all elements in Google Slides for presentation. 
References and Inspiration: 

- Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud for narrative transition techniques. 
- Framed Ink by Marcos Mateu-Mestre for composition and depth principles. 
- Dave McKean’s Sandman covers for visual style and mood inspiration or vector based surrealistic artwork.


Lecture 6 Notes: Storytelling Acts Structure 

1.) Central Theme:
  • The theme is what the story is really about. It’s the main idea or underlying meaning. Often, it’s the storyteller’s personal opinion on the subject matter. A story may have both a major theme and minor themes. 
    • Major Theme: An idea that is intertwined and repeated throughout the whole narrative. 
    • Minor Theme: An idea that appears more subtly, and doesn’t necessarily repeat.
2.) Conflict:
  • The conflict is what drives the story. It’s what creates tension and builds suspense, which are the elements that make a story interesting.
3.) Character:
  • Central Characters: These characters are vital to the development of the story. The plot revolves around them. 
  • Protagonist: The protagonist is the main character of a story. He or she has a clear goal to accomplish or a conflict to overcome. Although protagonists don’t always need to be admirable, they must command an emotional involvement from the audience. 
  • Antagonist: Antagonists oppose protagonists, standing between them and their ultimate goals. They can be presented in the form of any person, place, thing, or situation that represents a tremendous obstacle to the protagonist.
4.) 3-Acts structure:

1.) Setup: The world in which the protagonist exists prior to the journey. The setup usually ends with the conflict being revealed. 

2.) Rising Tension: The series of obstacles the protagonist must overcome. Each obstacle is usually more difficult and with higher stakes than the previous one. 

3.) Conflict: The point of highest tension, and the major decisive turning point for the protagonist. 

4.) Resolution: The conflict’s conclusion. This is where the protagonist finally overcomes the conflict, learns to accept it, or is ultimately defeated by it. Regardless, this is where the journey ends.




 Inspirations & References: 

Scott McClouds Transitions

Dave McKean's Cover



References from 'Framed Ink Book'



Digital Sketches and Drafts:


(REVISED NEW) After Feedback from sir:
  1. I had to cut down the parts as sir said there are too many panels. I decided to pick the part where Mr. White lights on a match and went downstairs and suddenly the matches went off as my new panels.
  2. I sketched out again and made a rough draft:


New Chosen Text:


----- Book Cover Progress -----


I wanted to make a surrealistic feeling by placing the scary paws emerging out of a book and creepy tree branches on both sides of the page. I made the colour theme dark blue to give an eerie night feeling and placed a moon on top of the composition.

I used Illustrator & used the Pen tool, Shapebuilder, Gradient tool to make the elements such as the background, branches, text, moon, hand and the book. I added the OUTER GLOW effect to the moon and hand as well. I also used the BRUSH tool to add the furs on the hand and more details such as the shadows on the book and more.

After finishing on Illustrator, I exported the files into photoshop and added several adjustment filters such as the hue and saturation, noise filter, wind and more..


Used a reference picture of my hands. I used brush tool to make the details and furs and used pen tool for all the other elements



Added shadows using brush tool


 In Photoshop I added grains, wind effect texture and adjusted the hue and saturation


----- Comic Page Progress -----


I started by making the panels outlines using the rectangle tool


I did the whole page and elements all fully using pen tool (vector) using illustrator




I used gradients alot for the backgrounds..


I downloaded a Horror font from dafont.com for the words..


Then I exported the Ai file to Photoshop and added the Grain, noise texture as well as the Oil Paint filter to give texture. I also adjusted the hue and saturation more.


For the fire and smoke, I made 12 artboards on illustrator to make the sprite movements which later on will be animated for the GIF..



Finally, on the making of the GIF comic for both cover and panels pages, I imported the Ai file to Photoshop and add layers to the timeline to create the movement..



 Final Work (PNG): 



 Final Animated GIF:


 Tools used in Illustrator & Photoshop: 

Illustrator:
  • Brush tool
  • Gradients
  • Shapebuilder tool
  • Text
  • Warping and Envelope distort
  • Pen Tool
  • Shape Tool
  • Gradient and Shadows
Photoshop:
  • Colour adjustments (Hue, saturation, gradient swatch)
  • Noise texture
  • Oil Paint canvas style filter texture
  • Timeline mode to make the GIF from the illustrators layers


OVERALL  REFLECTION

Experience - This project was one of the hardest one in this semester. However, i'm happy with the final outcome. It was really time consuming as everything has to fully be done by vectors on Illustrator. I am happy that sir helped all of us in giving feedbacks everyweek on how to improve our work more. Because of this task, I got to explore using more tools i didn't know before as well as I learnt on animating and making a GIF. This final task has allowed me to fully use all the techniques and tools which has been taught to us previously since week 1 of IVN. There were several errors while I was doing my work such as forgetting to go on a new layer and so on. I found animating the hardest as I had to create each frame one by one using many art boards, but I managed to do it in the end.

Observations and Findings - Composition is really important and that continuity is important as well. I found out that the first important thing about making a comic is that we have to make sure that the viewer can read the page in a way that there is a good flow of scene. Make sure each panel directs the viewer's eye from one to another correctly. At first I made too many panels for a part of the text so I had to cut it down as making too many panels in one page can be hard for readers to go with the flow. 


SEM:

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