Week 11 - Meeting with Simone and Alex Graham

My meeting with Simone has been cancelled due to her unavailability. However I have managed to send her my essay and I will hopefully receive feedback from her on Tuesday evening.

On the friday, Alex Graham came into Abertay to discuss what it is like to create realistic 3D work. Based on what she showed us, she specialized in 3D environments for AAA games. She gave us interesting feedback and I got the opportunity  to ask her to review my portfolio. She liked my 2D work of the antagonist character I made for a third year module. She suggested that I could provide further evidence on its function and purpose. However she did like my development process for the character. Here I took the 2D work I made in semester 1 and used it as reference material when making the 3D version of the character. Alex suggested that I could try the high poly to low poly approach.
In her talk, She discussed how she tackled the visual test that the Chinese room had given her as part of her interview process. She began researching what looked like authentic props from a certain era based on the brief, she also considered how it was used and what type of person used it in a way to suggest storytelling.

While most of her advice was aimed at those students who focused on 3D, it was interesting to see the tips she had given such as using bevel effects to remove the jagged edges on models you see in AAA games.

The following are links to research material related to visual storytelling.

• http://www.researchgate.net/publication/220366670_Enhancing_the_Accessibility_for_All_of_Digital_Comic_Books
• http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1055&context=englishdiss
• http://screencrush.com/comics-changing-movie-adaptations/
• http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/project/7850EFB1-F20B-4E5A-A695-3DA2BB229C99
• http://samples.sainsburysebooks.co.uk/9781136884740_sample_862021.pdf
• https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=S3oH_VdH3BcC&pg=PA135&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false
• http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1067/1255

I managed  to speak to Simone the next day on the Wednesday afternoon talk about the comments she gave me. Her guidance was helpful.

Research Notes

Here are some notes I took about a series of essays about H.P.Lovecraft.

Donald r. Burleson ,on Lovecraft's theme touching the glass

http://www.graphics.com/article-old/writing-visual-thinkers-narrative-structures

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=e-aWWTZeergC&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=comics+simplify+complex+stories&source=bl&ots=agWevNnkr9&sig=irh3b-80dGQIJtW3Iuo4e2WnUJQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBWoVChMImp31mfWcyQIVBEYPCh2JQQN-#v=onepage&q=comics%20simplify%20complex%20stories&f=false

http://www.slideshare.net/DanielaMolnar/narrative-image-the-how-and-why-of-visual-storytelling

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=sane

He wrote a large variety of stories for magazines through his lifetime, some of which include The Call of Cthulhu (1928), The Shadow Out of Time (1936), The Dunwich Horror (1929) and Dagon (1917). However this sub-genre shares similar themes related to cosmic horror. 
The term Lovecraftian Horror was used “as a catch-all for those tales of Cosmic Horror that parallel the Cthulhu Mythos” (Rawlik, 2013) since they shared similarities. 
Some films and games have also been inspired by the works of Lovecraft. Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth (2005) and Dagon (2001) both retold the story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1936) despite bearing different titles.

For example, Ian Edington’s comic adaptation of H.G Well’s War of the Worlds (2006) showed a visual depiction of how the Martians, the fighting machine and the setting were represented while following the novel’s story.

“Wordless picture books allow readers to construct diverse interpretations.” This can be positive the reader , but it can also distance them from the original intention of the work.

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/exploring-wordless-picture-books

Although they can be very descriptive, comics may have difficulty communicating the narrative especially translated are in another language that one may not understand. Therefore it should be just as important for a comic to understand how to tell a story with or without dialogue, especially if the reader’s native language is not represented in the narrative, understanding is hindered.