Creative Brief:
All these different relationships have different aspects, but there are few things that are common to all relationships. One of those crucial things is loss. Loss makes a person behave in ways that he might not anticipate, ways that are not in his nature, and ways that he might even regret. My story presents loss as the second core idea.
The third idea is what comes in life after loss. It is when one tries to cope with loss. Through this I want to show that no matter what one tries to do to cope with the loss of a relationship, there is something, or someone, that always keeps a part of that relationship alive. And therefore, I want to find out if there is anything like ‘fully coping’, because from what I know, one can really never fully cope.
My story is also based completely on true events, events that happen every day to everyone, events that combine together to form our daily life. I am inspired by people around me, and I want to show things as they happen. And therefore, taking the above three core ideas, I want to create a story to show one situation, and how different characters in the story react to it, what it says about them, and how it changes their way of dealing with their life.
Log Line:
An old man’s unsocial nature and peculiar routine raises questions and curiosity amongst the people of the new neighborhood he has just moved to.
Synopsis-
In a small, yet bustling town, an old man moves into a new neighborhood to cope with the loss of his recently deceased son. But the people in his neighborhood are not aware of this, and when they try to approach him in a friendly way, get taken aback at first, and then curious about his aloofness and unusual routine. After a few more attempts, the old man reacts strongly. This leaves the relationship between them almost cold and distant, and this is accentuated by his new visitor, whose visits become more frequent, therefore adding to the neighborhood’s suspicion.
Motivation:
We all go through relationships of different kinds, and we all go through losses in those relationships. I have seen people in my life, people I have known dearly, and people I haven’t known all go through loss, and I have seen them suffer, and then I have seen them cope. There are various aspects to relationships, and similarly there are ways to cope with loss.
People do the strangest things and react in the most unpredicted ways to cope. The story I am presenting in my book, is an attempt to portray one such aspect of relationships, layered with loss and coping with loss. My motivation stems from watching, dealing and reading about loss. It stems from reality as it is, and life as it goes on. I have experienced relationships and loss closely, and from afar, and this is an attempt to make my readers feel the importance of both.
My story is about losing a loved one, gaining another and the sacrifices we unknowingly or knowingly make in our relationships.
Research Questions:
During the development of this story, the questions I faced, were all product of one core question - Why do I want to take a topic such as Loss, for my story? What makes me want to study the idea of people and the relationships between them, and therefore the loss of those relationships?
Beyond this, the other things that were raised as questions in my head were –
1. Why this story? Why do I want to use the story of an old man to show the idea of relationships amongst people and the importance of loss?
2. Why a graphic novel? There is always a question about the use of medium to depict a story. What works best, what might not, and when is it time to decide what will do full justice to the story?
3. Who is my audience? People who read my story, will they be of a certain age group? Will my story be understood by only a group of people or will it address to everyone, at some or the other level? And why would people read my story? What will bring them closer to understanding the value of my story and therefore the value of relationships and loss?
Approach/Process:
For my book, I would be going through different stages starting from writing the story to printing the final book. The steps are discussed below-
- Ideation and writing the story are the initial steps, after which I have written my project proposal.
- After the proposal, I will move on to scripting the story, that is, converting it into a format where I will be describing what the contents of each frame in the book will be.
- Along with the script, I will be working on character sketches, and backgrounds, while also working out a rough color treatment for the same.
- Following these steps, I will get into the storyboard stage, where I will lay out the whole script into thumbnail format, and all the frames, and how they are going to be laid out on the pages, will be decided at this stage.
- Once I am done with the storyboard, I will begin drawing the final pages, in pencil, and eventually ink them as I go along.
- Coloring will follow the above step, and that’s when I will be choosing different kinds of combinations of medium, depending on the requirement of the story. Here I will also be leaving spaces for the text and speech boxes.
- Once all this is done, I will scan the pages in, and work on the final color corrections, and finalizing of the pages in terms of text, too. Also at this stage the planning for printing and binding the book will be taking shape.
This is the tentative process that I will follow, with minor changes, if any. I will also be continuing the reading and research for the topic side-by-side. All this work will also be documented on my Diploma Project Blog as I go along.
Treatment:
Visual Style:
The book will be primarily hand-drawn in pencil, then inked and the individual pages will be scanned and colored on Adobe Photoshop/Corel Painter.
I will also be using traditional methods of coloring wherever required, that is, using acrylics, or pastels, depending on the story. There will be text and speech boxes, which will also be rendered along with the coloring stage, and text will be hand-written, or typed, depending on the requirement of the script.
All in all, the artwork in the book will be rendered in mixed-media, and finally digitized and printed, and the binding and size, etc, will be worked upon as I move forward with the pages of the book.
References and Inspiration:
Books: The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
Into The Wild – Jon Krakauer
Blankets – Craig Thompson
Moonward – Appupen
Delhi Calm – Vishwajyoti Ghosh
The Zahir – Paulo Coelho
Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi
Maus – Art Spiegelman
Films: Stranger Than Fiction – Marc Forster
Last Lear – Ritoparno Ghosh
Gran Torino – Clint Eastwood
Into the Wild – Sean Penn
Dhobi Ghat – Kiran Rao
Edward Scissorhands – Tim Burton
Learning Outcomes:
1. To study, explore and portray human emotions in terms of a visual form, by using the idea of loss, as it happens in reality. This will include understanding the feelings of the character, and portraying them appropriately, in a way that the reader can, at some level, connect with the characters in the book, and therefore understand the importance of relationships, and loss.
2. To explore a visual style which will be able to achieve appropriate visual quality that is required in the story, and even to portray reality as we see it, and different points of views, distinctly. This will include choosing appropriate camera angles, perspective, handling character and his surroundings (both from the old man and the neighborhood’s point of view), and choosing a color palette that would portray all of the above perfectly and hold the viewer’s attention till the end.
3. On a personal level, I would learn to raise questions, understand my thoughts and lay them out better in the form of narrative art.
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