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- Aspman, Oskar
(author)
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Experimental Comics Narratives
- 2019
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Thoughs and observations from workshops in the classroom and assignments from the course Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative. During the years I have been working with the course Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, I have tried different ways of encouraging students to take steps towards a more experimental approach to the narratives they create. Most students are really interested in comics but have a limited oeuvre. I felt that the stale and very basic storytelling techniques the students used were not only limited, but also limiting them in what kind of stories they could tell. The better we know a language the better we can use it to tell stories, and this goes for the language of comics as well. One obstacle that makes this outcome hard to reach is the time span, the course is 30 hp, thus only half a year in length. You can come to learn more advanced techniques of storytelling by reading a lot of comics, but the students can’t possibly read that much during the short time we have. I have used three different methods to encourage them to use experimentation as a way to explore new and different kinds of storytelling: 1) by bringing them advanced comics to read and then discussing them in the classroom, 2) by cutting and pasting in basic comics so that the students physically move the frames and thus change the story, 3) by letting them follow the proto-history, pre-history and history of comics and giving them assignments where they get to try different styles and fashions from the history of visual storytelling. All three of these ways produced results, the most long-lasting of which was the history assignments. In my presentation I will discuss the observations I made in the classroom during these exercises and my thoughts about their outcome.
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| 2. |
- Dittmar, Jakob, 1971-, et al.
(author)
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Teaching Methods for Drawing and Visual Narratives
- 2021
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Due to Covid19, all teaching on our comics courses has been moved online, including workshops and exercises on drawing, image composition, and development of visual narratives. As the focus is on sketching and sequence composition processes, as critique and reflection is closely connected to work-in-progress, the move to distance teaching has removed the partners in these processes and conversations from one another. With tight budgets, no dedicated software-licences are bought, but the idea is to use what we have and add as little necessary freeware as needed / possible. While lecturing on and introducing to theoretical backgrounds, techniques, and examples on distance has continued to work quite well, the need to optimise student learning on online design assignments and workshops has been a challenge. It was understood before we had to move all teaching online that developing drawing skills as well as advancing the understanding of pictorial sequential narratives depends on continuous feedback between teachers and students as well as peer-learning between the students. But in practice, this has been the biggest challenge. We have been forced to develop alternative strategies and methods for teaching visual composition processes, showcasing as well as exercising comics-production processes. Didactic strategies have been developed to overcome the restrictions caused by online low-resolution visuals, the inability to unobtrusively observe and participate in design processes, to involve all students actively in critique-sessions, etc. In due consequence, we are putting together a kind of tool-box for teaching and workshopping on visual gestaltung online. We would like to present the results and invite the participants of this workshop to play through and discuss them to help us understand what is needed to make them work for other teachers on other courses that teach visualising / drawing / visual narratives.
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