Time Capsule: Part 3
Going into the last portion of the time capsule assignment, I knew that creating an effective comic strip would require a lot of planning. I created a plan to draw my comic that had three steps: organize the story, organize the comic page, and add in images and other graphic elements.
Step 1: Organize the Story
The first step of creating my comic strip was to organize my story. I needed to outline the plot, characters, and sequence of events. I needed to figure out how I’d frame the story around my time capsule in a way that would be effective and would flow like a narrative. I started on this step of the process by looking at the bigger picture: what is the larger setting of the story? Obviously the year would be 2145, but what would that year look like in the context of my time capsule? I decided to think about 2145 as a utopian year on Earth, where the inhabitants of the planet would look back on 2020 (and the previous/immediately subsequent years) as archaic and times of mass confusion, greed, and divisiveness. Using this idea, I decided to frame the story of the physical time capsule as a museum opening. The museum would be full of artifacts from the 21st century, including my never before opened time capsule.
Now that I had the outline of the story figured out, I started to draw out what it might look like on a comic strip. I did this in order to figure out how much of the page I would need to cover each part of the narrative, as well as plan out what comic conventions I would use and when. See the original outline below:
After working through this outline a few times, I was finally comfortable enough to move on to the next step — organizing the comic page.
Step 2: Organizing the Page
Now that I my story was organized and I knew how I wanted my final comic page to look. The next step I needed to take was to draw each of the panels that I had planned out in the last step on a new sheet of paper. I used a thick piece of construction paper, a ruler, and a pencil in order to complete this step. See the mapped out page below:
Step 3: Add Images and Other Graphic Elements
Finally, now that the page was organized in the way I wanted it to be, I needed to add the actual comic to the frames. I knew going into this assignment that I wanted to hand draw the images in each frame, and that hand-written dialog would crowd up the images and make the comic almost unintelligible. In order to make the final product look as clean as possible, I decided to upload the image of my comic to Photoshop and add speech bubbles and written text there. This was easy to do since I had already mapped out each frame and the events that would be unfolding in each one. Below, see my comic after drawing each frame, and then after adding dialog and text via Photoshop.
Ultimately, my comic story is about learning from your past and applying those lessons to your future. I thought this theme was fitting because the same applies to the items in my time capsule, and even the time capsule itself.