A Better Art Style

After talking about the chosen art style in class, I am going to change my style a bit. It still involves me drawing, but I will be going along the route of comic book styles, rather than WW2 posters. I feel that comics are more fitting towards my own drawing style, so this should be more fun to draw than from the poster style, and the colours used between the two styles are relatively similar.
I looked a little bit at popular pop art artist, Roy Lichtenstein, and his influences.

Russ Heath is a comic book artist whose famous works include war comics. I looked at his art mainly for his drawings of planes, which could be used to help me with my own illustrations.

Another artist I found who did some war comics is called Jerry Grandenetti

Joe Kubert is another war comic book artist, althought his style differs a lot from the other two.

The colours used on all of these comics are slightly similar to the ones used on propaganda posters - they are bold colours that stand out a lot. I really like the comic book style, so I thought I'd look at some more conventional comic book art to see how they are coloured.
One comic book artist like this is Jack Kirby.

Laying out my Ebook in iBook Author

This is all early stuff on iBook Author for me, but I thought it would help me get an idea of where everything will go on my pages once I've done some of the animating.
So far I have split up the story into three chapters, each having a section of video to go with them.

The background would be in the style of a 1940s. The map on the side would be the video, although I don't know if the video, when clicked, can be made to fill the whole page.
After that I thought of the map becoming interactive, with a few text boxes about the areas on the map.

This chapter will feature some illustration as a background maybe. I don;'t really know where to put the video with this one, though.

For this last part, I was thinking about adding photos primarily. With a bit of audio/video.

I am finding it difficult to work around the limitations on iBooks Author, but hopefully I'll come up with something when I go back to lessons tomorrow.

Assets I Have Gathered

Over the past few weeks I have gathered some imagery that will help me create me ebook. Although I am going with a mostly illustrated design, I can throw in some pictures on some of the pages between the animated segments. I can also use some of the imagery to help with my drawing.

A picture from a newspaper exert that I have edited in Photoshop to make it sharper.

The same srea from the photo above, that was restored later. Again, enhanced in Photoshop.

My Granddad (middle) working at the garage before the bombing.

Map of the local area. Can redraw this for my map animation segment.

Two photos of Newick from the 1950s. Although after the bombing, they may be useful for my illustrations of the town.

Thoughts After Pitch

The feedback I got from my pitch was positive overall. I got good feedback for the story, and the art style I was aiming for on my story. However, I have a few things to think about after getting some comments about where to go after this.
The first thing I have to think about is the navigation. I haven't really done too much about it, and I need to think about this a bit more. I got suggested a timeline of events idea, where you can scroll through what happened during the day.
After my map intro video, I was thinking about making the map interactive. Because I have the information about where the bomb hit on the day, I could make small info boxes about the other bomb hits, without it taking focus away from the main story. As there is no autoplay on iBooks Author, I could make it so clicking on the Newick part of the map could make the story part start playing,
Other than that, I haven't really thought much else about how to make it more interactive... I'll do some sketches and see where I can go from there.

My Animatics

I have made a couple of animatics before my pitch, just to show what some of my animation could look like from my storyboard drawings.

 

This map scene would be either at the start of the story, or could be the intro sequence. This part is a map of Sussex, showing the main points that the bomber hit, with the last point being the start of the story. The plane moves across the map to each point, and stops at Newick, where the map would then stop and zoom into the main story.

 

In this animatic, it starts showing the sky, as it happens just after the map zooms in to the village, showing a peaceful day. It then pans down to show my granddad's story, which starts with him walking along the road to do some work.

Storyboards

Before making my animatics, I have storyboarded where everything should go beforehand. So far, my storyboards are very basic, but they give me an idea of where to animate everything for my animatics at this point.

This first part is a map scene, a plane will fly over parts of Europe until the map zooms in on Sussex, where the plane will then fly to Newick.















This scene starts the main part of the story. It starts in the sky, and then panning down to the town, where my Grand dad is walking to work. A man then shouts, that there is a plane overhead.













He then gets shocked, and sprints to the nearby bomb shelter. The plane then drops them bomb, causing an explosion.

This part show the explosion happening, and the glass being blasted from the windows.

Although I have not drawn it yet, I have planned to show my Granddad getting injured, and then being sent to hospital after the incident.

What my Ebook Could Look Like?

I started to experiment with one of the WW2 posters I found of the British countryside, and I took a picture of the countryside in East Sussex to replicate the style.

This is the image I edited.

This is the art style I replicated.

This is my replica.