99 Ways to tell a Story

"99 Ways to tell a story: Exercises in style" is the title of a book written by the American cartoonist Matt Madden who was our teacher this week. He gave us five assignments (each per day) that were all based on his book. We practiced some difference ways to tell the same story. Matt gave us a very simple script, which we had to use for our template comic of 1 page. In the script there is a character in a classroom sitting drawing. Another character enters the classroom and the first character gives his drawing to the second character and says: "She's all yours". 

    

My template comic: 

We all got a genre, which we had to base our next page on. My genre was: samurai. Here the things we had to focus on was characters, costumes, props, types of stories, visual style/atmosphere and historical precedent.

We had to change the perspective or point of view. I drew the classroom seen from a closet.

The newt assignment was to pick an artist, cartoonist or illustrator we wanted to copy and then draw our template in that style. I chose the Norwegian cartoonist Jason, and used the characters from his comic "Vent Lidt".

  

The last assignment was really fun to do. Here we got 3-5 obstructions from a classmate - A class mate made a list with some rules we had to follow while creating the comic. This type of assignment was inspired by a Danish documentary we watched in class. The documentary is about the Danish film director Lars Von Trier who gives Jørgen Leth obstructions while creating a new version of the film "The Perfect Human". 

In this assignment my obstructions were: 

Only digital 

Silhuet (black/white) 

No frameboarders 

Only three panels/tears 

Adventure/magic genre (witches, trolls etc.)