Appropriate and modify photographic content from the web to create a story, or take your own photos to make a story. Use Photoshop to transform and collage images in some way. Integrate words into your photos. Your sequence should contain at least ten photos. Remember to think about the elements of narrative we talked about early on– setting, character, narrator, action/tension/motivation, time, narrative arc, etc. Think about what each photo can infer, and the connections/”attractions” (as John Berger would say) between each photo and the one before and after it. You can use text as captions, or integrated into the photos as speech bubbles and boxes (like a fotonovela) or as notes (functionality in flickr).
Suggestions/constraints, if you are having trouble getting started (OPTIONAL):
1) Appropriate a character– for sources, look at awkwardfamilyphotos.com, the flickr what’s in your bag pool, or search for self-portraits on Flickr, and through your sequence, expand to describe an afternoon in this person’s life, as you would imagine it. Refer to the handout on character I gave out two weeks ago, notes from “The Plot Thickens.”
2) Choose a setting or location, appropriate photos of this place from Flickr or other sources, and tell the story of a trip or journey through/to this setting.
READING for next week: read “Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth” by Chris Ware, and “Understanding Comics, the Invisible Art” by Scott McCloud. You have ordered these books, but there is one copy of each available on reserve at the library.