Sequential Art - Visual Storytelling in Comics and Animation

This will be a rigorous and exciting exploration of how stories are told through pictures, either on the page or on the screen. It will be fascinating to students who have ambitions as illustrators, comicbook artists or storyboard artists, but also will be of great interest for anyone trying to write for a pictorial medium. This will also give any student, regardless of their intended career path, an opportunity to exercise their observation, problem solving and collaboration muscles.

Scod and the class will be analysing and discussing the work of some of the great masters of comicbook and animation, and learning about some of the fundamentals of pictorial storytelling and storyboarding.

We’ll warm up by doing some short individual drawing exercises. We’ll then put our imagining caps on to invent an example scene together, with the intention of then taking that sequence and working on how we’d tell that story in pictures. We’ll do that as a group first, then, time permitting, do some individual solves on another case study.

It’s a fun session of rolling up our sleeves and nerding out with an industry veteran. ten to thirty students is primo.

Topics covered:

• Individual Exercise: Warm up drawings
• Discuss: Why do we make art?
• Discuss: What are our favourite cartoons or comics? Why?
• Let’s look at some examples and discuss how (and if) they work
• Fundamentals of composition. The Action Line. Screen direction. POV. Pace. Atmosphere.
• Individual Exercise: a simple story. How did you solve it?
• How are comics and cartoon boards different? How are they the same?
• Group exercise: let's invent a story then draw it up as a sequence.
• Individual exercise: let’s do another one.
• Questions and summary