World Building w. Martin Rauff-Nielsen

We have had a two-week World building workshop mentored by the Danish writer and roleplayer, Martin Rauff. We had to create a world, a story taking place in it, and choose a media platform. My group did a concept for a feature animated movie called "Remembering Nivaska". 

The story is about our main character, the old lady Giana, who by an accident gets dragged into the mysterious world of Nivaska. A fantasy world with giants and unknown creatures, ruled by the Fish King Nepol.

Some of my drawings for the film: 

CHARACTERS:

Creatures

 SETTINGS:

The harbor

Giana and mud monster

Giana and Nepol

It was a group project, so we all had different tasks, but you can check out what my classmates did for this project here:
Mathilde - http://mathildesportfolio.blogspot.dk/
Julie - http://juliehaugeandersen.tumblr.com/
Clara - http://clarajetsmark.tumblr.com/

Pantomime with Mårdøn Smet

This week Mårdøn Smet who taught us in Fraquin style last year, was back. This time he has been teaching us in pantomime, which shortly told are stories without words. This is hard because you have to find other ways to make your story points clear, so you have to focus more on face expressions and body language. 

Each of us had to create a 2-page comic about the Greek philosopher, Diogenes. He was one of the founders of cynic philosophy and lived a very simple lifestyle - it is said, that he lived in a jar. 

As a guideline for out comic, each of us got one of Diogene's anecdotes.

(I will put in my anecdote later) 

Not finished watercolor 

Adaptation with David Hine

The last two weeks we were taught in adaptation (Adapting one media to another) by the English comic book writer and artist, David Hine. In this case that means that we have been adapting short stories to comics.

We have been working with short stories by the American author and poet, Edgar Allan Poe. He is best known for his gloomy and macabre stories, often about madness and alcoholism.

I have been working with the short story, "The Black Cat", which is quite a horror story. My goal was to have twelve finished rough sketches, but I am planning to finish it completely.

Some of the thumbnails with captions

 

Style exercise: John Buscema w. Lawrence Marvit

We practised the style of the American comic book artist, John Buscema. The exercise consisted of drawing after models the entire week. We had to use the models as references for building up characters, so they were all dressed up in cool costumes. Character inspiration was from the comic books "Conan the Barberian" and "Prince Valiant". Each drawing was five or six minutes.

Exam

We just finished our exam assignment, which was to create a two-page comic based on the premise:
"Afterwards I could clearly see that it was a mistake"
Here is my comic, "The Creeper"

INFERIOR

The exam week has just started and we are DONE with the magazine. It was sent to printing last Friday and now we are just waiting for the print house to confirm that everything is ok. 

My awesome team and I have created four independent superhero stories and we have all had a different role in each story; writer, artist, inker, and editor. 

It has been a fun, challenging, and great experience to be a part of a team, creating this magazine and I am proud of the result :)

We have also created a webpage where you can read our four stories about the superhero, Captain Cosmos. The link is just above, so go ahead and read it!

The frontpage of the magazine made by Emil Friis Ernst from my team

MAGAZINE week 1

We have just started the 6 week long project: Magazine.

The class have been divided in 5 groups with 4 persons in each. Each group have got their own genre from this list:
Romance
Humor
Superheroes
Horror
Science Fiction

Each group has to produce one magazine that all includes at least 4 stories out of the genre they have got. The four persons all get a certain role in each production.
The roles are:
Editor
Writer
Artist
Finisher  

This means that we won't get to draw the story we are writing, we won't ink the story we are drawing and so on.

My group has got superheroes, which is difficult because this is a genre that I have never been familiar with. To be honest. But I see it as a really, really great opportunity to learn and I have already used quit some time studying Alan Moore, Bob Kane and Frank Miller.

So this week we got the chance to use the things we learned about concept development with John. These first two weeks Lawrence is helping us with our concepts and story development. We have already started writing manuscripts so it is going pretty fast.

We have 4 stories that are all including a classic superhero. But the idea is that the superhero is not really the central part of the stories. The stories all have different main characters, who have in common that their lives are pretty miserable.

The four stories have the working titles:
SUPERFAN
SUPERVILLAIN HEIR
SUPERLOSER
SUPERHATERS

I am writing "Superfan", which is a story about a girl who is obsessed and in love with a superhero who saved her when she was a child. She is spending all her time dreaming about him and one day she gets the chance to meet him again. After the reunion she decides that she will not live without him and she figures out an extreme way to get him to save her one more time so that she can ask him out for a date.

Next week will be about scriptwriting, sketching settings and characters, and Thursday we will start drawing.

  

Low Concept

The last assignment was to come up with a low concept. Here we had to "steal" an idea from one of our classmate's high concepts and create characters for a new story. In this assignment we had to focus on our main character(s).

 

I "stole" an idea from Aske who had a concept where a part of his story is some children playing in a ruin after the world's destruction. That inspired me to an idea of a new story about a boy called Willy. After his city has been completely destroyed (by something?) he gets out of his hiding place only to find out that he is the only survivor and is completely on his own in the ruins of his city. In despair and frustration he uses some of the things from the ruins to build a dog figure, which becomes alive. Now Willy starts building other figures who all starts moving around and acts like humans.

 

 

Here are some of the characters:

 

High concept

The second assignment was to come up with a high concept, which is an "easy sell" concept. We had to find two stories from  a movie/book/song etc. that could "meet" each other in the concept. Then we had to have two genres and write a "what if..."-pitch.

My what if...-pitch sounds like this:
What if animals could adopt their children away?

Genres: Teenage drama and comedy-adventure

The two movies I use as a reference is "Juno" and "Ice Age".

My story is about the spoiled, irresponsible teenage raccoon, Fanny, who accidently becomes pregnant with her flirt, Leon. Her family believes that Fanny is not at all ready to take care of a kid so they decide to take Fanny on a dangerous journey across the North American prairie to give the unborn young to a beaver couple who is willing to adopt it. 

Character and environment sketches: