Graphic Narrative Evaluation

Does your final product reflectyour original intentions?

My flatplans outlined the basic layout of assets and characters within my scenes. All of my pages match my intended layouts, but I changed a few assets and details within my scenes. One of the changes I made was to not include the mother character in the first page. This would have taken up precious time, as she would have only been used in a single page. Instead I place Little Red’s character outside the door, setting off on her journey. I also decided to change some of the images located on my text page, such as the teapot into flowers, and the footsteps into paw prints.

While planning, I also noted that I was going to illustrate some of my images and then vectorise them. I decided against this, due to the limited timespan I had to complete my project. Instead I used various shapes and tools to create my own characters from scratch within Photoshop. This not only saved me time, but it also gave me more flexibility on the customisation of my characters. This was especially important when changing facial features and expressions.

How well have you constructed your images?I have constructed my images by using shape tools within Photoshop, to create original assets. This made it easy for me to edit each individual detail without losing any of their losing their vector properties. I also used rotoscoping for some of the detailed objects within my scenes; one of which being the grandmother’s cottage.I also used texturing on some of my objects to give them a touch of realism, or to create a repeating shape pattern. On my house and cottage assets, a square-like texture was used to simulate bricks. This allowed me to keep it simple and clean, but with enough detail for the audience to understand what it is. However, I had to keep the opacity of the textures low and subtle, so that they didn’t interfere with the comic, cartoon style I was attempting to create.

My characters are very flat and have only a small amount of shading and shadowing. Drop shadows were useful to separate layers from one another. This allowed me to keep my characters flat in style, but with overlapping layers in a 3D space.

How well have you used textto anchor your images?

I used separate pages for my main scenes and text. I placed my text on separate pages, due to the amount of words I needed to fit on each page. If I were to have a single page for both my text and scene, it would be very crowded and everything would overlap. The only way I could’ve solved this would have been to make my text a very small font size. This is not ideal in a children’s book, as younger audiences find larger text easier to read and understand. In order to keep my text pages interesting and not too plain, I added small illustrations and images. I tried to relate these images to what the text was describing. For example, I used blades of grass along the page that states, “All she could see was the grass that was green”.I chose the serif font ‘Neuton’ because in my research, I found that serif fonts are the easiest for young audiences to understand.

Is your product suitable for your audience? I believe that my book is suitable for those aged 7 and above, as stated so in my proposal. My book is aimed at an older child audience, due to the amount of text on each page. Some of this might be too difficult to read and understand, for those under the age of 7. For example, a 3 year old would probably struggle to understand the sentence “Red shuffled forward with unease and distress” without the help of an adult to explain in simpler terms.I have also kept all the characters clothing and colour schemes classical, similar to the original tale of Little Red Riding Hood. I think that this will be ‘appealing to the adults who buy the book for their child, as they will be able to relate to the well-known, common characteristics of my book, such as the bright red hood that the main character wears.I also referenced that my book would aim to be gender neutral, with a slight male bias. While writing up myadaptation of the story, I took out some un-neededcharacters (such as the woodcutter) to shorten it. Dueto this, all the characters in my book are now female.This could create a slight female bias, contrasting my initial audience choice of a male bias. In addition, as the book is entirely cartoon-like, many of the encounters with the wolf are not scary. While writing my proposal, I though that some of the scenes could stereotypically be more appealing to a slightly bias male audience.

What do you like/dislike about the techniques you have used?

When creating my characters, I used various shape tools in Photoshop to create a skeleton to build upon. Once I had a basic shape for my character, I then started to add details and colour, including body and facial features. To finish off my characters I added some darker coloured shapes with a low opacity to create shadowing. I liked using this subtle technique, as it didn’t take away the minimalist style, but still kept the images interesting. Another technique I used while creating shapes for my scenes and characters was the warp tool. This was useful for creating custom shapes for character clothing and body parts. Even though the shape library in Photoshop is fairly large, there wasn’t a shape for everything I needed. The warp tool helped me solve this issue and edit pre-existing shapes into custom ones. When creating my page

seem as if it had been sketched into the book. This proved to be very effective, and added a sense of realism to the page. The Photoshop tools I used included, the ‘Charcoal’ filter and a ‘levels’ adjustment; with the blending mode set to ‘hard light’. This was a fairly quick process, but it created a very effect.

with the book and script assets, I used a filter on the my original wolf cartoon to make it

One technique I wish I would have used more of is rotoscoping. Although I used it to create my cottage outdoor scene, a chimney and a bed, it would have allowed me to put more detail into the inside scenes in the cottage. I could have rotoscoped more furniture into the inside of grandmother’s cottage; for example a bookcase or wardrobe. Although this may have made the scene a little more crowded, it would have added extra detail, and made the scene more realistic. As there is not much texturing or shadowing, this page seems to be slightly less detailed than the rest of my pages.

To keep my book’s style consistent, I should have added some drop shadows and highlights to the trees, and some grass blade shapes as I have done in all my other pages. As I didn’t create this page using the shape tool, the edges of each asset are jagged and un-smooth.

Another technique I used while creating my pages was to add guides and lines within my documents. I liked this tool as it helped to ensure that all my text was correctly positioned and objects were spaced evenly. The grass blades helped to add

What do you like/dislike abouthow your final product looks?

I like the clean, simplistic style I have used for my characters and scenes. I have managed to keep this style consistent throughout every page of my book. I also like how I chose to separate the text and the images from each other. This gave me more space to work with, and add extra detail to my full pages scenes, without needing to worry about leaving spaceor choosing certain colours in order to place my text over the image.I don’t particularly like how plain some of my text pages are. Although they have small images relating to the text, some are not too interesting to look at. To improve this, I could have used a larger variety of colour and complexity. As shown in the example on the right, the page only uses black, and the shape is fairly basic and too simplistic.I also think that some of the side view’s of my characters seem a little strange and out of proportion. The facial expressions don’t look as appealing as I would have liked. To fix this, I could have taken other side-on cartoon views from the internet, and taken inspiration to adjust the facial features’ positioning and size. This would have allowed me to create a more realistic character face.

Why did you include the content you used?

I used a serif font, as I discovered in my research that these were the easiest to understand for children. The flicked edges and joined lettering helps to portray movement from letter to letter, allowing the children to read and understand the words within the story.To create 3D space within my images, I created highlights and shadows on my characters and objects. This was done by creating a lighter or darker shade of colour, and overlaying it on the edge of an object. I also used perspective to enhance the realistic environments I was trying to create. This can be seen in Grandma’s bedroom on the table and bed legs, where they have been stretched out to create the illusion of 3D.

For my forest scenes, I tried to keep the samecolour palette of Green shades. I used multipleshades within the tree leaves to show overlapping.This was done to ensure that my book wasconsistent, so the audience knew that each forestscene was located in the same place.

What signs, symbols or codes haveyou used in your work?

The colours within my book are very bright, and use flat shadowing to create the effect of 3D space. Most of the shapes are rounded, and do not have many harsh lines. This creates a friendly vibe throughout my book, and helps to reduce the fear factor, introduced by the wolf characters. While Little Red is walking through the forest, although it would probably be quite dark in reality, I used bright greens for the Grass and the Trees. This helped to draw away any frightening visual messages within my book. My characters are designed with rounded edges, and flat shapes of colour. This creates an easy to understand style for my target audience.I included a very hard to spot, subliminal message in Little Red’s clothing. If you look carefully, you will see a paw print on the decorative border at the bottom of her dress. This foreshadows the fact that Red is in fact a wolf, as described at the end of the story, to any of those who spot it.

What representations can befound in your work?

When shortening my book, I had to remove some characters that were not important to the core storyline. One of which, being the woodcutter. As there is no one who needs saving in my adaptation, this character was not necessary. The one problem that this created, was it turned my entire cast female, and removed a little of the character variation that was previously in the story. Although, when the first wolf appears in the story, it could stereotypically be seen as a male character, until this is explained near the ending of the book. I tried to combat this, by including a flower decoration on the wolf, to show her as female. This helps to reduce confusion for readers when they discover that she is Red’s Mother.Age played a large part in my story. All three characters (Mother, Little Red and Grandma) were of different ages, and the story depicted the progression from Childhood to Adulthood. This was done by the Grandmas informing Little Red that she was a wolf at the end of the story. This portrayed her as growing up, and making the next step in becoming an adult. It also portrayed the Grandma as being the wise informer, with lots of experience from her lifetime.My story does not have any race or religion references, and is not an important factor within my story. It also doesn’t include any social groups.

What style have you employedin your products?

In my research stage, I found that many modern books included very large images; Usually ones that take up the entire page. I used this technique in my book and decided to add extra pages for my text. I also found that most of the story text was black with a light background. I kept to this style in order to keep my book easy to read for children.I chose this flat style of visuals to ensure that the book didn’t seem to complicated towards the parents looking to buy the book for their children. If the book has very detailed images and paragraphs of text, they would be unlikely to invest their money into a book that could possibly be to confusing and difficult for their child to understand.However, making the book too simplewouldn’t match my target audience of olderchildren. I had to find the ‘middle ground’between simple and complex. I did this byincluding very subtle textures to some of myflat shapes, such as my bricks and the woodenfloor. I believe that I completed this task, andcreated a book that both appealed to my targetaudience and their parents.

What were the strengths and weaknesses of the pre-production and planning

While researching, One of my strengths was the ability to spot common features found in modern storybooks for children. While planning, I found many children’s books used flat cartoons with a limited palette of colours per scene. I tried to stick to this convention, and made all my graphics flat and smooth. Some I included textures to if it was necessary, such as the bricks and roof tiles.

By using the timescale plan I had set myself in my planning stage, I was able to plan out which assets would take the longest, and work out how much time I would need to dedicate to each page. I stuck to my plan for the majority of the time, but I spent a little longer than expected when creating my characters. This is mainly due to the decisions I was making while creating shapes for body parts and clothing. I changed my mind fairly often, but due to the extra time I gave myself for editing and touching up at the end, I was able to complete my book to the deadline.

Historical and cultural context

Generally, other books including the tale of Little Red Riding Hood have a very old, classic style to them. They do not usually include many images or cartoons, and they are mainly made up of fairly long and hard to understand text. I have taken a modern spin on this, and created my pages with large flat cartoon images, which help to illustrate the rhyming couplets on the adjacent page. Historically, the story of Little Red Riding hood was used to portray the progression from childhood to adulthood. I used this to my advantage, and based my adaptation around the idea that Little Red grows old enough to learn about her true self, in this case, being a wolf.I ran into a few issues with this adaptation, as I had to make sure it was simple enough for my older children target audience would understand the multi-stranded story and the ending twist. I added a storybook page, where a wolf is holding a storybook, depicting a fabricated tale on how Little Red’s family became wolves. This story is kept simple, so that is doesn’t distract the child from the main story.

Peer Feedback

• Summarise peer feedback and discuss– Responses you agree with– Responses you disagree with