Interactive comic evaluation

For this project, my influences were the interactive comics 'Dead on Arrival' and 'Hotel', as well as the interactive adventure videos on Youtube. I decided upon an A-to-B journey to allow a beginning to end narrative to my story, and I decided to use photographs I took myself as my primary source material which gave me full control over the images I used as I could take the photographs to fit my storyboard. 

My own past experience gained from previous Flash animations I have done, as well as looking at the work of others, my interest in graphic novels, and the classroom demonstrations that have been part of my course have all contributed to the skills and techniques I used for this project. As well as this, I discussed the project with other students and with my lecturer to help develop my work. My own experimentation played a part in my development of this project, a good example is the method I used to simulate the character walking.

The photos allowed me to feel the ambience of the locations I chose and I could then take and edit the pictures to reflect this. I manipulated the images in Photoshop and in Flash to achieve the results I needed. I decided not to use sound in my comic as I didn't want to distract from the imagery and I also wanted to keep the feel of a more traditional, paper-based comic.

This project was hard work, but I have enjoyed it. I will be using some of the techniques I learnt and developed, for example, i found that using a storyboard allowed me to have a very clear idea of what I needed to do right from the beginning, and I'm pleased with the cinematic effects I utilised. The Flash coding I learnt, such as buttons, is something I am looking forward to utilising in future work.

Overall, I'm pleased with how my comic turned out. I like the way I coded it and I feel that the pans, fades and cuts I used are effective in both telling the story and in moving it on at an appropriate pace. The technique of vertical mirroring I used to make my protagonist appear to walk is, I feel, very effective. I could have managed my time a bit better to allow for more scenes, shots and animation, but I feel that I have produced a good piece of work.dead on arrival, photo work.