Digital Graphic Narrative Planning

Use this booklet to help structure your planning and collate your planning documents.

Considerations:

There are lots of things to consider in this project. Fill out each section in detail to show you have thought about each one. You should imagine that this is a live project, so considerations like cost, quantity and codes of practice must be thought about in that context rather than just as a college project.

Costs: How much it costs to actually make the project, this takes lots of things into mind, like how much all the paper costs that you use. This doesn’t apply to me because I will just be using Photoshop on the computers, and printing costs won’t be taken into consideration. If we were doing this for a real publisher they would pay you up front for some of the costs, but then they would take some of your profits, but also a percentage for doing well in sales. Available resources:I will be using applications such as Photoshop, using rotoscoping to its full advantage, the internet, cameras to take photographs of scene that I might want to add into my story. I’ll also be using Dafont as a source for getting my fonts together and adding them into my work.

Quantity:I will be making this book for mass production, I was considering making it a limit edition book where I would only print around 50 to 100 copies, but then decided that it would probably be better going out as mass produced book of around 1000 books.

Audience and Target Market:The age of the people I am targeting are older children, around the ages of 6-9, these are the ages that kids are starting to learn how to actually read full books and appreciate the pictures within the books. The gender as well will be a big part of it as well, and I will be aiming it towards both genders because it doesn’t actually have a certain gender it will be aimed towards. The social class I will be aiming my children’s book would fit into ABC1, this is because this social class will be able to afford things that aren’t a necessity.

Quality Factors:This all comes down to the quality of work that you produce, and there’s many factors that will affect this, whether or not you have the time to put into the work, or whether or not you have the energy to put into your work. Sometimes work will start to lack because your energy and patience is being drained by lots of other things going on. IT also comes down to whether you are actually good at using the programmes on the computer, so your work will lack if you aren’t actually that good at rotoscoping or using the shape techniques. But at the same time you might choose to draw your illustrations instead because you find it more relaxing and easier to do it that way. Codes of Practice:Publishers cannot cancel a contract that has been set up with an author without proper reason. This would mean for me I would have to keep up with the time schedule that has been set on submissions. I would also have to meet the standard and quality set by the publisher, failure to meet these standards would result in a cancelation of contract, but they could not just cancel it without having proof of bad quality of work. Another thing I would have to watch out for would be defamation or illegality, which would mean not creating any illustrations that would be classed as illegal.

Regulation:Any books that could be classed, as a toy would be have to be compliant with the toy safety directive 2009/48/EC is sold in Europe. The way books are classed as toys are if they have anything inside them like pop ups or touchy feely things inside them.

Copyright:You have to watch out for copyright when using these fairy tales because they might have a copyright law on them from the author. But because most fairy tales were wrote such a long time ago most of the time the copyright law has run out on them. The copyright law lasts for around 70 years, but because most of them were wrote either in the early 1900’s, late 1800’s, this means we are out of the copyright time of 70 years, which should be okay. This section doesn’t really apply to me as I am using a nursery rhyme as a platform for my story, because so many people have made different versions or the story hasn’t been changed just told in many ways I don’t have to worry about copyright. I will have to watch out for the copyright laws on certain images, because I’m not drawing my own images this is something I will have to watch. Ethical Issues:You have to watch out for the ethical issues, this is watching out for being stereotypical in your work or including anything that might be seen as racist. In today’s world people seem to be offended far too easily, so you would have to watch out for adding say an ethnic person as a bad guy, this could be seen as racism. I will have to watch out for this because I am making Jamaican mice, even though this is nice and child friendly, some easily offended people might see this as an insult to Jamaicans.

Resources:A successful project relies on good planning. Considering all the resources you will need for a project and then assessing which you already have and which you need will help ensure you are ready to start your project.

If there is a resource you don’t currently have, then consider how you are going to get it before you go in to production.

Resource:Do you have it? What do you need to do to get it?

 Computer  Yes  

 Photoshop  Yes  

 The Internet  Yes  

 Camera for taking photographs  No  Book a camera to take out.

 Fonts  No  Using Dafont.com to get my fonts for my work

 Character inspiration and background  No  Need to get more backgrounds off the internet.

     

Production Schedule:Delivering your project on time is vital. In order to do this, you need a solid plan of action. This will help you divide up your work in to manageable chunks to be tackled one at a time. It will also allow you to plan which tasks need to be done in which order. It will also allow you to track your progress each day. If you are falling behind, you will need to modify the way you work. If you work faster than expected, you can clearly see what the next steps you need to take are.

Each session is a half day of college.

Session 1:

 Getting inspiration for characters and saving them to my memory stick so I don’t have to go online and find them every single time

 Start to rotoscope some of the characters.

 

 

Session 2:

 Carry on rotoscoping characters.

 

 

 

Session 3:

 Start doing different angles for the characters and switching them around.

 Get all fonts that I will need of Dafont.com

 

 Session 4:

 Start on the text and what the words should say, incorporating the script

 

 

 

Session 5:

 Create page one with background, characters, and text.

 Create page 2 within this session as well.

 

 

Session 6:

 Create pages 3

 Create page 4

 

 

Session 7:

 Create page 5.

 Set aside extra time if I haven’t created the other pages yet.

 

 

Session 8:

 Create page 6

 

 

 

Session 9:

 Create page 7

 Create page 8

 

 

Session 10:

 Add finishing touches

 

 

 

Health and safety:Your health and safety and that of those around you is very important. Just like in industry, an accident could prevent you from working. Whilst we don’t work in a highly dangerous environment, there are still risks. Some are short term, such as trips and spillages whilst others, such as long term damage to eyesight or back problems, may affect you much later in life.

Consider the risks based on the activities you will be undertaking during the project. Explain how you could prevent them from happening.

Ensure you reference appropriate pieces of legislation, design to protect people at work.

Health and Safety Issue How can you prevent it?

 Eye strain from being on a computer too long

 This comes under the display screen equipment regulations 1992, this just means take a five-minute break every hour.

 Computer malfunctions If anything starts to happen, inform the IT department about the thing that is going wrong.

 Vapours being in the air Don’t use sprays in a room with not a lot of ventilation because it may cause harm to other people.

 Stress Make sure you take plenty of breaks between doing the work; don’t try doing it all at once.

 Open containers

 Don’t drink open containers around the equipment because you might spill them onto the computer and break them.