Week 1 : Exploring the vocabulary of comics. What are the artistic possibilities of comics? What can comics teach us about cinematography, framing and composition, editing and multimedia installations?
Key text: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud ( and useful summary )
Other useful books about creating comics:
(Making Comics : Storytelling secrets of comics, manga and graphic novel – Scott McCloud )
( Framed Ink – Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers – Marcos Mateu-Mestre )
( How to Draw Noir Comics – The Art and Technique of Visual Storytelling – Shawn Martinbrough )
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( And the other graphic novels listed above from left to right – )
MAUS – Art Spiegelman (featuring the true story of how his parents survived Auschwitz, winner of Pulitzer prize for literature )
Epileptic – David B.
Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid in the World – Chris Ware
The Trials of Francis Bear – Gregory Mackay (Melbourne comic artist)
Ghost World – Daniel Clowes
Black Hole – Charles Burns
The HipHop Family Tree – Ed Piskor
The best graphic novels ( non-fiction ) of 2012… ( and 10 more from 2011 )
Comics and Storyboarding as Research and Planning for Video
Exploring Storyboarding – Wendy Tumminello
Storyboarding can help us think through our cinematography, and any potential video production issues.
We’ll be exploring video in much more detail later – in the meantime, the Lynda.com tutorial series is available for free to RMIT students… it’s highly recommended that you take advantage of this great resource.
Presumably most design students are skilled with Adobe Photoshop, but if you need to brush up, anything you learn about Photoshop layers / blend modes / masking / compositing etc will be helpful with the software we’ll be looking at this semester:
– Adobe Premiere (video editing)
– Adobe After Effects (composition, visual effects, animation, colour grading)
There are lots of Lynda courses available for both, from introductory to advanced levels, all broken down into small bite sized video clips, for easy learning at your own pace.
See also, free tutorials from Creative Cow ( Premiere / After Effects ) and Video Co-Pilot ( A great series of basic tutorials for After Effects ).
VIDEO and INSTALLATION EXAMPLES
Artists working with video projections and space in interesting ways…
STARFIELD : an installation where a swing is used to create a large interactive starry sky.
(A Kinect is installed behind the swing and video projector, enabling an animated galaxy of stars to be controlled by the rhythm of the swing.)
Mini-documentary on projection mapping, with key artists.
Article about Amon Tobin’s projection mapping
A history of Australian Live Video Projection.
The Light Surgeons showreels: Installation / Video Production / Live Performance
HC Gilje (lots of lovely works.)
Anti-VJ (collective of video installation artists, with many great projects under their belt)
1024D (co-designers of the popular madmapper projection mapping software. )
Rafael Lozarno Hemmer (lots of great installations involving clever use of light + video)
Other Links:
delicious.com/jeanpoole/perceptioninmotion ( bookmarks specifically for this subject )
delicious.com/jeanpoole/video ( wide-ranging collection of video-related bookmarks )
Examples of my video: https://skynoise.net/projects
What is acoustic ecology? The Acoustic Ecology Institute
vjforums.com – one of the central gathering points for VJ discussion. (A good place to discover best practice for multimedia installations, as well as evolving software and hardware).
NEWS:
RGBD Augmented 3D Filmmaking Workshop, Mar 16th @ ACMI. $120/$90. ( see also : rgbdtoolkit.com/tutorials.html )
Support an Australian high-grade experimental comic anthology : Blood And Thunder…