Evaluation!

1. Graphic Narrative
Evaluation

2. Use this template to help you evaluate your project.
You should give specific details about your work.
You should provide both written and visual examples to explain your project.
You should find areas to praise in your work. Be specific about why you think they are
good or why you are proud of them.
You should also find areas that could be improved. Look for areas that you could make
better if you went back to them. Be specific about what you would improve.
Add additional slides as you need to. Don’t be restricted by what is here.
Any blank slides should be deleted before submission.

3. Does your final product reflect your
original intentions?
My flat plan and final product are identical as I changed the layout of
some of my pages when I got on to doing the flat plans. Below is one of
the pages I decided to change because I added three other pages to
include the Merchant that sold each Martian the Hay, Sticks and Bricks.
This page combined two pages into one were the Big bad Alien climbed
onto the roof and then fell down the chimney and into the pot of boiling
goo. If I had, had more time I would have liked to have extended my story
so I could have included a page for the alien climbing onto the roof, a page
for the Martians positioning to pot and another page of the Big Bad Alien
falling into the pot of goo. The main
reason for me not doing this was
because in the time frame I had I
feared the quality of the image may
have dropped.

4. Another thing that changed throughout my book was the idea of the Martians
living in little igloo type buildings. The images below best show the styles of
house I originally intended on making and the style of house I end up doing.
In my storyboard plan I thought it best to make the houses into igloo shapes
and make them out of materials that you would find on the surface of Mars,
which meant making them out of such things as Dirt, Sand and Rocks. Then
while making my flat plan I decided that as it is a children's book it doesn’t
really matter if the houses are made out of realistic materials and so I decided
that the houses should be made from the same materials as the original story.
This was because I want to keep close to the original story so that people
would know it was an adaptation of the Three Little Pigs and because it makes
the story easier for children to read a grasp if there is sense normality to it.

5. How well have you constructed your
images?
The pages in my book are well structured to make each page nice to look at. I have tried
to make each page have different shots and angles although it did turn out that the
pages were either a long shot or a medium/close up shot. If I were to do this again I
would try to use some other shots to create some diversity and change between the
pages. This would help the reader as it would make the illustrations more interesting to
look at. Pages 8 and 11 are good examples of the two shot lengths that I used and
shows that there was not much variation which is something I would focus on when
doing this project again. The texture I used in this book are also show off on page 11
(the page with the brick wall) as I used a different technique to create this one.
Unlike all the other pages where I use
Rotoscoping to create the scenery,
characters and props in this one I use the
Filter Cutout. This creates a slightly more
detailed look on the rotoscope effect but
doesn’t look to different this effect.

6. How well have you used text to anchor
your images
I believe that the text on most of my pages accompanies and explains
what is happening in the illustration very well. However, on one of my
pages I think that I have put a bit to much text on the page and that this
page could have been split into two or maybe even three pages. The page
below (page 11) is the page in question. As you can see the text explains
how the bad alien climbs onto the roof, the little martians put a pot of goo
out, and the bad alien falls into the pot. This page is good but I do think
that if I had made a page for the bad alien climbing onto the roof and then
and a page for the martians putting a pot of goo on the
fire then this would have allowed me to put the text an
illustration that it would accompany better.

7. Is your product suitable for your
audience?
In my proposal I said “I am targeting my book at children from age 5years+” and I feel
as if that is what I have done. As my book is very easy to read and each page doesn’t
have too many words on them it means that the child will be able to read it generally
easily but could struggle with some pages, for example on page 11 I have put quite a
lot of text which could have, given more time, been split up onto another page.
However I still think that 5years and up is a suitable age for the book. Also I mentioned
that I didn’t want to make it so simple because adults may also be reading this book to
their children and so it needs to appeal to them so they would buy it for and read it to
their child.
In my proposal I mentioned that “The book will be mostly aimed at male children” I feel
that this demographic hasn’t changed after making the book as many of he characters
in the book are male, in fact the only woman in the book is the mother martian and
she is only in one frame of the book.
Although, I also said “this doesn’t mean that females can’t read it” and I still stand by
that claim as the book is based on the classic Three Little Pigs which was read by both
genders, so this has lead me to make my book appealing for females to read.

8. What do you like/dislike about the
techniques you have used?
Throughout my book I have pencil drawings and rotoscoping to create
the characters, scenes and any other props. I found that the pencil
drawings where the part that I disliked the most as they where the
hardest part of the whole process and made the process of making the
book longer. This was because when drawing the sketch I needed to
make it detailed so it would be easier to rotoscope when it was
scanned in and imported into Photoshop. The image to the right is an
example of on of the images I drew for my book. This is an image of the
“Big Bad Alien” that terrorizes the little martians throughout the book.
As you can see this image is slightly different to the one in my book as I
had to make some tweaks to make him fit in with the art style of the
rest of the book.
After drawing my characters I used the scanner to scan these into my
PC and import them into Photoshop so I could use the Polygon Lasso
Tool to select the different parts of his body and rotoscope them. I then
used the Colour Overlay Tool to make the body parts and clothing on
my characters the colour that I needed. I then used the Polygon Lasso
Tool to select a little bit of each body part on the left and right side to
create the highlights and shadows.

9. What do you like/dislike about how
your final product looks?
I believe that the best feature of my book is the use of rotoscoping to
create my house assets because they are the cleanest looking assets in my
book. Compared to my characters which are my least favourite asset in
this book. This is because I have used the same character model for the
Mother, Merchant and Three Little Martians with a few little tweaks. This
combined with a little amount of poses that each character has makes the
book look repetitive and get a bit dull.
On the other had I do like the page layout as it is very clean and laid out in
such a way that it makes easy to read. I like this layout but I would have
liked to use a double page spread layout as this would have give me more
room to create each scene, but I decided against this as I thought I
wouldn’t have enough text to put on its own page.
I also did not like that my scenery did not change that much throughout
my book and the only difference was the change when the shot change
from close, medium or far. I believe that this could have been done better.

10. Why did you include the content you
used?
In my book I used a font called “Sanchez”, I used
this font as it is a serif font which makes it easier
to read as the little flicks that you get on a serif letter make the letters
more distinctive which can make the brain identify each letter quicker
whereas with a Sans-Serif font the brain has to spend more time trying to
identify the letters. This makes reading this book a lot easier for a child or
adult.
The colours I used throughout my book where mostly
greens, reds, and browns with a few exceptions. The
image to the left best shows off the different colours
used when making my book. This also shows off one of
the effects I used to create the gust of wind the Bad Alien
blew which was a simple effect of using the eraser tool
on 0% hardness to softer the edges of the gust so it
didn’t look like to much like a blob of grey on the screen.

11. The images I used to create my characters where my own which I drew up with pencil
and paper and then scanned into the PC to be rotoscoped and made to fit in my book.
The martian sketch that I drew up ended up being the
template for all of the Martians throughout my book, in
hindsight I do wish I had create a few more drawings of these
martians to give the book some variation in character so they
would all look exactly the same just with different clothes,
eyes, hair, mouths etc. The other drawing is of the bad alien
which I also think I should have made more of but instead of
looking different he should have been stood in different positions.
All my other images where either created by my in Photoshop or rotoscoped by me
using images of things I found online. An example of an image I made my self would
be the piles of hay and sticks that replaced the houses on the pages where the bad
alien blew the houses down. These where quite simple to make as they where just
made up of shapes like the leaf shape.
An example of an image I got online is this cottage which I
used as a base for the houses in my story. Each house in
my story was changed in colour but not shape. However,
looking back now I feel I should have changed something
about each house or even used a completely different
house picture per little martians house to give the book
some variation.

12. What signs, symbols or codes have
your used in your work?
In my book I used bright colours as I thought this would make it look more
happy and make parents want to buy it for there child as the book looks
light and happy and not dark and scary. I used a simple jagged edge style
as this again helps the book have a cartoony and lighter feel to it. Also if
the characters had been super realistic the book may have looked as if it
was for an older audience. The locations in my book are the inside of the
third little martians house and the surface of mars. The locations I used
where very limited but as the whole story took place outside I did not
need to change much about them until the story moved inside the third
little martians house. My characters where I feel designed well but could
have been done better, for example if I had more time to draw a few
different martians instead of using the same martian model for them all
then I may have had a little bit of variation and the martians would look
exactly the same, with small tweaks.

13. What representations can be found in
your work?
As my book is set on Mars and has only martians and an evil alien in it, it
does not contain that much diversity in the sense of gender. The only
female in the book is the martian mother and she only shows up in one
frame. However I have included a way of telling that a person is a certain
age, I have done this be increasing and/or decreasing the height of certain
characters. In my book there is a slight show of race as the Martians are
green and the Evil Alien is red, I feel like this happened by coincidence and
not on purpose as I only coloured the Martians green as that is the classic
martian colour and I coloured the evil alien red to show that he was the
bad guy. Also my book doesn’t contain any religious differences because I
haven’t mentioned religion thought-out my book. I thought this would be
best as the child reading it wouldn’t really need to know the religion of
the characters in the book. Also if each character had a religion then it
could cause issues with people from those religions being offended.

14. What style have you employed in your
products?
In my book I have used my own style as I drew most of
my characters in my book however I did get some
inspiration from the martian picture below which gave
my characters the look that they have. While creating
them in Photoshop though I edited them to make the
look different and not be an exact copy of them for
copy right reasons.
While making my Evil Alien I decided to create a character from my mind
and so this doesn’t really have any original image that it was inspired
from, instead it was made up from a mixture of pictures and my
imagination. The assets throughout the book where made by using
images I found on google as a template and changing them in Photoshop
to be my own instead of copy’s.

15. What were the strengths and weaknesses
of the pre-production and planning
A strength of my planning documentation and pre-production is that it
gave me a time scale and a idea of what I was going to create and the time
scale that I set myself so I knew what I needed to do and when to create
my booklet. I did find the pre-production particularly helpful as it gave me
an idea of the kinds of character models I was going to use and it gave me
time to practice the techniques and tools that I would use to make the
illustrations.
A weakness I had in my work was that I didn’t stick to my plan. Even
though I thought my plan was good and was well set out, I still found it
difficult to stick to it and found my self running certain parts of the project
over the time I had allotted to it. This made it very difficult to create my
booklet and made it so that most of the pages where made in the last two
sessions.

16. Historical and cultural context
My work is quite similar to the original version of The Three Little Pigs as I
have kept the original houses, huffing and puffing and most of the
Characters are similar with slight tweaks, for example the Big Bad Alien as
all the same traits as the Big Bad Wolf and even has a very similar name.
One of the traits the Wolf and Alien share is the Huff & Puff. Originally I
was going to change this to something more to do with space like, Zap or
Blast but in the end I decided that it was best to stick with the original
script so that the reader would know that they where reading a variation
of The Three Little Pigs.
My book however resembles the newer adapted version of this tale rather
than the old original version as my version has the Three Martians run
from the Alien to the next martians house were as if I had gone with the
original the Alien would have eaten two of the three martians and the
third martian would have cooked and eaten the alien.

17. Peer Feedback
• Summarise peer feedback and discuss
– Responses you agree with
– Responses you disagree with