Visual Text Project 

Project, Evidence, Creator’s Statement + Image: Tuesday, Jan. 24, @Class Time + Reflective Essay: Tuesday, Jan. 24, As Part of the FINAL, @6:00 

The Basics 

You’ll create a visual text displaying many of the qualities of visual narrative that we’re talking and  reading about, and you’ll write a reflective essay about what you’ve accomplished. Your completed  “text” doesn’t have to be professionally slick. Instead, your goal is to learn about visual narrative by  producing it in some form. Artistic talent might be an asset here, but it isn’t necessary or required. (There  might even be truly rudimentary stick figures involved in what you make, and that might be the greatest  choice.) 

Collaboration is Allowed (and Even Encouraged) 

You may form a team for the purpose of completing this project. Teams may have no more than four  members, and each member must write his or her own reflective essay, addressing both his/her  individual contributions and the project as a whole. The team will turn in one final product and may  choose to turn in one collective creator’s statement or to write individual statements. 

Required Products 

1. The Project, submitted digitally (maybe scanned or photographed) in a file format that can be  read without specialized software (with few exceptions). Note: If possible, please don’t staple your  visual texts. Leave the pages loose. 

2. Evidence of Your Process, including (for sure) an original script or plan of some kind and also some  process evidence you gather along the way. (Photos of work in progress, notes for production,  storyboards, draft versions, or whatever else will serve to show your process.)  

3. A Short Creator’s Statement, for the course archive. 200-500 words. Don’t forget this! 4. A 2-4 Page Reflective Essay, which will be due as part of the FINAL, rather than with the project. 

Technology: You Don’t Need Extraordinary Skills 

You don’t need to draw. You could use images created with a digital camera. You don’t need to know  Photoshop or Illustrator. You could use a program like PowerPoint to add text to images. You don’t  necessarily need to use a computer. You could create with “offline” materials, like pen and ink and tape  and scissors, so long as you can photograph or scan the final product. You may want to consider using a  free trial of Comic Life, which creates comics-style pages; search it up, and take a look at what it offers.  The little online app Canva also has some good comic-making options worth examining. (You also might  get truly ambitious and try to create a film with a soundtrack, for example, that includes all your images;  but you should only tackle that kind of technical challenge if you’re excited about it and confident you  can make it work.) 

Please…Don’t make this project the occasion for learning a complicated new piece of software with a huge  learning curve!  

Choosing Your Raw Material 

The text you create doesn’t need to be long. As the work we’ll examine in class shows, even a single  comics page, or a two-page spread, can be extraordinarily intricate and worth studying. I’d rather see  you create less material in an interesting way than see you take on a massive project that is too hard to  manage in the time allotted. Below are some kinds of material you might consider using. (Comb through  the anthology and the supplemental packet for more ideas and inspiration, and also consider searching  online for the artists that catch your interest. Very often, comics artists are publishing a substantial  amount of work on the Internet, these days.) 

Short Stories: You could choose an out-of-copyright story (something published before 1928, alas) or a  story that you have the right to use (your own story, or the story of a friend, or something already  placed in the public domain by its author). You might end up doing only a small portion of a story, or a  scene from a story. Consider, as you think about this, the tiny stories created by James Kochalka and  Ben Katchor. 

Idea/Essay Piece: Think here of what Lynda Barry does in her work, or of something like comics essays  by Peter Bagge (which you might find at Reason.com). 

Poem (or a Series of Poems): You might create a visual treatment of a poem, or of a series of poems.  As with short stories, be sure you’re legally allowed to play games with the poem. (See, for example,  Julian Peters’s treatment of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”)  

Documentary or Reporting Project: Probably quite limited in scope. Your goal would be to represent/ express at least one important point about the subject of your documentary. Consider Joe Sacco’s  work, or Nina Bunjevac’s, or Drew Friedman’s, or Julia Wertz’s. (Look those folks up!) 

Comic Strips: This is really a variation on the “short stories” category, but think of Ben Katchor, Kate  Beaton, or Sophia Zdon (or of Charles Schulz, whose Peanuts strip had such an enormous effect on the  shape of modern comic strips). You could produce a series of strips (though you’ll want to think about  innovating with panel shapes and sizes in ways that weekday comic strips don’t usually innovate).  

Other Ideas?: If you can make a good case for your idea, we’ll find a way to make it work. Quality + Grading + Number of Images / Frames / Pages / Anything This is a tough one, and it’s where being in a class like this demands that you tolerate less explicit  boundaries than you might expect in more traditional classes. I want you to be ambitious, and I want you  to show me several interesting things about your understanding of visualized narratives. I want you to be  able to liberally and intelligently make use of course vocabulary to describe what you’ve created. If what  you’ve created doesn’t quite do or accomplish what you hoped it would accomplish, I want you to be  able to talk about that, too, in your reflective essay. Once again, don’t get hung up on your own artistic  limitations! So long as you can talk intelligently about what you had in mind and how it did and didn’t  work, a project that doesn’t quite meet its own ambitious aesthetic goals can still be an excellent project  in the context of this course. In fact, an intelligent discussion of the shortcomings of your visual text  might in some cases make for a more interesting reflective essay than a dull discussion of a project that  comes out more or less perfectly, judged purely on aesthetics. See the attached rubric + “Things to  Include” (below) for more insight into the grading criteria.

Things to Include 

Here again, there will be much variation between your projects, so it’s hard to say exactly what each  project will need. However, the best projects will probably include all of the following: – An excellent fit between the raw material of your project and the form you give it.  – Thoughtfully constructed images (or, at least, images that add up to a thoughtfully constructed  whole). 

• Successful BLENDING of text and images, so that the images enhance the text and the text  enhances the images. (We ought to be able to say that the meaning is conveyed by the  combination of images and text, rather than by one or the other alone.) 
• Significant play with panel sizes for the purpose of meaning-making. (Your panels might be all the  same size, I suppose, but you should be able to talk, in your reflective essay, about how that was a  purposeful and correct choice for your material.)  
• Smart and various use of transitions between panels, “McCloudian” transitions and otherwise. 

DON’T FORGET! Evidence of Your Process 

Documenting your process could be as easy as snapping a picture now and then. It might mean saving  alternate “developmental” drafts of your work occasionally. Just be sure to plan ahead so that you’ve  got some kind of documentation of your work from start to finish. 

DON’T FORGET! Descriptive Statement / Screen Shot for the Course Archive

The model for this statement is the kind of brief note you might find beside a museum artifact. Provide a  brief (200-500 word) introduction to your project, noting its title, creator(s), materials and technologies  used, and relationship to your other work and interests. For example: “Bob Loblaw was a junior  journalism major at Whitworth University when he created this visualized poem. He used a series of  images shot collaboratively with John Doe, a Spokane-area photographer, as the basis for this project.  He also included music by Sally Musician and the Spokane Valley Five, used under a creative commons  license. He combined the music and images using…” 

Also include a single image from your project (or some kind of appropriate Photoshopped  image) that could be included as an online “link” picture for your project in the course archive. Pick an  image you think is representative somehow of the project as a whole. Please submit it *as an image*,  rather than embedding it into a text document. 

DON’T FORGET! Reflection on Visual Text Project (30% of Final Exam)

In a 2-4 page reflective essay, examine both the results of your work on the visual text project and the  composing processes behind it, highlighting your discoveries about the expressive opportunities and  difficulties presented by this kind of composition. Draw liberally on course vocabulary as you write, and  be sure to point out what you consider your best and most interesting visual storytelling moves. If  helpful, you might include screen captures from different phases of your work, to demonstrate your  choices (or to illustrate your more general points about how visual communication works), and you might  include copies of your developmental materials—scripts, storyboards, and so on. Note that this essay is  an opportunity to reflect on both what did work and what didn’t work; your discussion of what you  learned by not achieving quite what you wanted may turn out to be just as valuable as your discussion of  what went right.