Presenting Our Six Ideas to An Industry Panel

We developed each of our ideas into a vague plot and compiled these ideas - as well as our general goals for the project - into a PowerPoint presentation to show to a panel of industry professionals, and a selection of our peers, to get relevant feedback on each of our plans.

Katy produced some initial style and character design illustrations to help to support the ideas.

The PowerPoint can be found below, complete with full explanations of each story...

(Please note - the presentation includes a font that is only accessed through PowerPoint - and not the Google viewer, so the layout might be affected by this.)

Katy and Gee Comic Presentation from Georgia 'Gee'​ Oliver

Dinosaurs Development: Plot and Character Designs

Due to the fact I want to take this in a more non-fiction, educational direction, plot development isn't relevant. I have decided, however, to maybe include short comic strips to explain dinosaur behaviour.

Katy and I discussed the design style that would be best for this, considering our younger target audience, and decided something simple would be best. We also agreed it was important to use references during the designing of this, so that inaccuracy does not hinder the educational value of the book.

George and the Dragon Development: Plot and Character Designs

Katy and I sat down to design the characters, discussing features such as fitting the designs to the correct time period and making them accessible and fitting for the younger target audience. Though unplanned, working out the designs informed our plot (and vice versa).

Main plot points:
- George is working in the local stables, tending to and grooming the horses.
- She hears stories of a princess trapped in a tower just through the woods out of town, guarded by a fierce dragon.
- She watches knight after knight set off through the woods to rescue the princess, and return telling stories of the dragon that forced them back.
- When she's grooming one of the knights' horses, she notices that the horse has no signs of being near dragon fire like the knight had described. More so, the horse barely showed signs of being far into the forest...
- She notices more and more inconsistencies in the stories.
- Determined to prove herself right, she sets off to see if the stories are true.
- When looking for a horse to carry her the long distance, she finds it too risky to steal one, so ends up settling for Matilda (Tilly), one of her father's dairy cows.
- She travels through the woods and as she nears the edge she begins to hear growling and stomping from the apparent dragon. She finds discarded armour from the cowardly knights along the way.
- When she finally arrives, she finds the dragon to be a sweet, happy cutie! And the princess seems to adore him! George gets talking to the princess and explains what the townspeople think and what the knights had said about her dragon. The princess is hurt by this, so decides to join George in her mission to prove the liars of the town wrong.
-They ride back into town on Tilly, dragon in tow, and have fun spooking all the townspeople, before explaining the situation and letting the princess find new friends!

Deciding Which of the 7 Ideas to Remove

Despite only needing six initial ideas to present to our industry panel, Katy and I have come up with seven. This was purely due to the way that ideas develop and how inspiration can come about at different times. Recently, we have spent time discussing the logistics of each of the stories and which story would be the most sensible to drop based on things like; how much research needs to be done for the story (and how accessible this research is); how long the story would need to be; how complex some of the art elements could be; how it could be communicated to the target audience, and how well it would translate to animation.

After discussing these points, we found that one of my ideas - our fact/myth ancient Greek story - would probably be the least successful, so we decided this would be the idea we would not continue with.

Successful Artist/Writer Duos

Despite both of us having quite a lot of group work experience (both with each other and with others), neither of us have ever worked in a situation quite like this. For this reason, we each decided to look into a duo who had done this successfully.

I chose to look into the relationship between Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie - a British writer/artist pair who have two extremely successful independent comic series, and have work long term with Marvel in the past. They are often viewed as a bit of a package deal within the industry due to just how well they understand each other and the quality of the work that comes from this. They attribute this to the fact that their work relationship is just an extension of their friendship, so it's very easy for each of them to get their ideas across to the other as they know each other so well (shown here https://youtu.be/NQYmDH_PoQU).

From this, I feel it will be fairly easy for Katy and I to become a successful working pair, as we have a strong friendship and a very good knowledge and understanding of each other's art and writing styles.

Initial Thoughts on Hosting Animated Comics

In the past when producing animated work, we have just published them on YouTube. While this works well and is financially sensible, it doesn't make much sense when trying to earn money from a comic. Over the course of the project, I will need to find or develop a way to host the animated parts of the comic in a way that only people who have purchased the book can access them.

One way to do this would be building a website with a password to enter (that would be included inside the book). This is fairly simple and very accessible, but the fact that the password could be shared causes some issues. It could also be harder to navigate, as the reader would have to find each animation on the website as they were reading the book.

Another way is having QR codes on each animated panel that, when scanned, would bring up the corresponding animation. This is a very clean and clear way to approach this for the reader, but would require either the addition of a random third party app, or us building our own app. Because of this possibility, I looked into app creation online. The pages I found most helpful can be found in my Useful Links post.

The Choice to Include Animation

Soon after discussing our initial ideas, the conversation of what we'd like to get out of this project and how we'd like to align it with our future careers (even moreso than just splitting the roles to focus on our preferred field) came up. From this, we found that it would be a brilliant opportunity to produce an animated comic. This would give Katy an opportunity to build her animation portfolio, whilst allowing me to learn more computing techniques and marketing ideas to find the best way to host the animation.