Illustration and Visual Narrative - Final Project: Animated Visual Novel

01/07/2023 - 14/07/2023 / Week 13 - Week 15
Vanessa Kei Kurniadi (0360525)
Bachelor of Design in Creative Media
Final Project: Animated Visual Novel

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LECTURES

All Lectures Completed in Week 13

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FINAL PROJECT: ANIMATED VISUAL NOVEL

Continuing from Project 3, based on the selected story, we have to create a one-page introduction of our visual novel with at least one animated panel. The story must be arranged in visual sequences that make sense and are easily understood. We should consider the choice of panel arrangements and transitions and determine as well which panel(s) will be best visualized as animation. 

For this, I chose the 1st Act of my triptych of Eleonora. I learned from my previous 2 mistakes in Illustrator. In this project, I'm gonna try out the brush tool. But first, I have to decide on how I wanna make the comic, and so I first went to Clip Studio Paint to make my sketch.

Ms Anis told me that making a detailed is a mistake since I'm wasting too much time. But for me, or at least when doing the final work in Illustrator, it is a crucial thing to do. Doing the details in CSP will help me so I don't have to think too much while meddling with an unfamiliar tool.

Here's what I made:

fig 1.1 sketch

I then proceed to do it in Illustrator. The method I'm using is to place the sketch page on an A4 artboard, lock the sketch, and delete the artboard. That way, the sketch will stay within the correct size, and the artboard won't bother me.

fig 1.2 Lineart

Then, for the animation, just like the animation for my Typography, I duplicated the 3rd panel, modify the wanted changes, duplicate the new panel, and change it again. After I did everything, I exported them and move them to Adobe Photoshop to see if the animation is working. I missed several details that I had to move, so I went back to Illustrator and fixed them.

fig 1.3 Animation frame

I tried putting the speech bubble to every panel and made a mistake, so one of the bubbles made a jaggery movement that I don't want. So I had an idea to put the bubble in an individual panel and put them on top of each panel.

I then proceed to color them and put some decorations if needed. Freepik has once again helped me to save some time and give some color to my work to make them look more pretty.

Here's how it seems after adding the colours and the decorations:

fig 1.4 Colored artwork

I checked the animation in Adobe Photoshop and everything seems good, so I went on and exported the GIF:

fig 1.5 GIF

Final look:

fig 2.1 Final Look JPG

fig 2.2 Final Look GIF

fig 2.3 Visual Novel Outline View

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REFLECTION

Experience

I'm finally getting the hang of it and know what tools are best. Being able to use assets from Freepik also helped me a lot to save time and effort, as well as make them so much prettier. The colouring still takes ages to do, cause I know the fill feature is not my best friend in this task, so I still had to do them manually by using the pencil tool (for some reason pen tool is also amazingly annoying for this task). Nevertheless, the result is quite satisfactory this time.

Observation

From my observation, while working on this project, the brush tool is the most suitable one to use. If the strokes are wrong, proceed to use the pencil tool to fix the strokes. The eraser tool ruins the strokes for some reason, and I don't know how to fix it. The pencil tool also works well to block and colour a shape.

Findings

I found a new tool to help me work on this task: recolour artwork. It can change the individual colour of a shape. It helps with recolouring the tree I found from Freepik, and works wonders for me. I also found myself enjoying the process of making the animation. It's a long work, but the result is just satisfying to see.