Well, that went okay I guess, in its own anticlimactic little way. I seem to have sorely underestimated the class, even after the praise I laid upon them yesterday.
Today’s assignment was to make a three-panel strip, just to measure the individual student’s ability to tell a story in pictures. So no demands to entertainment value or narrative accomplishment; it’s what goes on between-panel that counts, and legibility.
I then gave a half-hour lecture on the importance of clarity in communicating a story by means of composition, cropping and economy of linework, and ran quickly through McCloud’s six transitions.
After a few show-and-tells we repeated the exercise, applying the new knowledge beautifully. Now, a lot of students had done perfectly the first time around, but in the second attempt there were next to no slip-ups.
Even more impressively, most managed to wring a story or at least some subtle humor out of the space and time given by the assignment!
More than any class I’ve taught before, and judging from what I’ve seen the past two days, these are imagemakers already, with great intuition when it comes to visual narrative.
So tomorrow I have to up the ante a bit. We’ll lunge head first into longer-form comics, tackling layouts and more complex storytelling, AND have changing, daily constraints.
Tomorrow is last day before weekend, so I’ll give a short introduction to storytelling before giving the class a genre-mixing task of telling a simple story through three alternating genres.
See how they like them apples.
Monday will be the day of my big History of Comics slideshow, but hopefully I find the time to test their post-weekend, longterm memory with new assignments, too!