The Future of Media

The future of media, literature, comic and game.

In this post I want to talk a little about my personal view on the future of media, literature, comic and game. Personally I can’t really separate any of them with others, as they all have part of each other. Video game, or even paper top game normally has a story which drives the plot of imagination, and that’s literature. Comic, especially graphic comic is basically literature with fancy images, and they are all form of media.

I believe that in the future the different between each of them will be less and less noticeable. Student will be playing game for its greatly written story, and people will be reading more and more books with images. I think today’s world is full of information, data and knowledge, and it will be harder and harder for people to accept information without any visual help. Voice, sound and music will become more and more popular in form of media. Comic, especially online comic will likely to have sound effects or even theme sound to enhance the reader’s experience.

I believe in the future the goal of media will no longer be to deliver the message, but how to make people to accept that message. It will be like trying to read a 3,000 words paper in 5 sec; you can only get that much out of it. People are going to live in a world that they will see lots of advertisement, commercial, shots and images every day. The goal of the media artists will be to create things that people can get it as fast as possible. Shorter the better and faster the viewer can get the message the faster he can move on to the next 3,000 words.

As a game design major student, I can see gaming and net working is moving closer and closer. It’s all about connecting people together, and playing game is one of the easiest way to build friendship with others. I also see the potential of advertising and gaming working side by side. Video game can create a perfect digital market that concentrates all the same type of people together, and this will be create for any marketing or advertisement that’s designed to aim for a specific group of consumers.

When I am KING

For the online comic week I read the When I Am King by Demian Vogler. It is a extremely graphically designed comic, full of iconic shapes and image story telling. The story is light hearted and kind of like the funny on the news paper. All the characters and environment are made of simple shapes. No words or dialog, only images to express what the characters are thinking or talking. It has a unique way use of icons and they simply become part of the world itself.

What I think it’s really interesting is the use of scrolling bar, and the comic is designed to be read like an animation. All frame starts from the right and going to the right, and unlike paper comic there is not going down. It almost made me feel like reading a animatic script. The motion is cool, and I almost wish he could have done the entire comic in one long never ending scroll.

The story itself is as I said light hearted and there isn’t a real goal to the plot, I think he just draws whatever comes to mind. However the image that’s used in the dialog box is smartly designed and communicated well with humor.

I believe that traditional form of comic will never be truly over, just like we are still making black and white film today and see it as an art style. Perhaps more and more artists are going to move their work digital, but there will always be people that appreciate the traditional form of comic and art. Maybe one day in the near future that paper comic will be seem as a form of high art, and will be display in the museum with oil paintings and sculptures.

Arkam

This week I finished Batman: Arkham Asylum, and I have to say it is one of the best and coolest graphic novels I have ever read. The story is complex, deep and has some kind of psychiatric feel to it, which is perfect for the story. The art style is amazing, and every single frame can be a masterpiece of artwork. The collage style make the whole story feel like a puzzle of the mind, and as reader we too need to challenge ourselves in order to understand. Arkham Asylum is dark, bloody, sad and crazy. It’s really interesting to see the different between when Batman first came out, and how it has progress and change through time. It is not a super hero comic anymore, and surely is not for ten years old kid. It is a almost realistic and close look of human’s inner darkness, and even for an adult you will still need to go back to things to pick up little messages that the artist carefully left for the reader.

I had the copy of Arkham Asylum for a while but never had the chance to open it, so this reading is a perfect opportunity for me to finish something I was looking forward for a while. I have always been a batman fan because he doesn’t have any super power, and I can relate to him much more than any other DC heroes. Arkham by itself is an interesting enough place to build the story, not to say when you put in all the old faces like the Joker and Two-Face. Batman in a way is not too normal himself compare to Joker, and in the Asylum is a perfect place for him to face his own darkness.

Arkham isn’t like any Batman I had read before, and it is a unique and interesting take on the graphic novel. The story is complex enough to make me wonder and think about it for a while. Sometime I will need to start from the beginning in order to fill in the questions, and answers to those questions were always hidden in little places. Arkam is a great example of how great and beautifully done a graphic novel can be, and hopefully more and more comic will direct its style toward it. 

COSMIX 2011

The talk from the 1 person immersive was an interesting one. I went to the morning talk on Friday, and had some thoughts after the talk about the future of our media. The technology part of the dome was really cool as it’s the first time I had ever really got to know about such media. I can totally see in the near future we will be going in to fully digital environment, and there will be no more frame in a movie or a game. People will be able to just walk and look around freely in that environment, and even interact to it. Imagine creating the world of Avatar in a fully realistic 3D dome and allow the audiences just walk around the environment, and touch the strange alien plants. I didn’t went to the Saturday show so I don’t know how the actual work looks like, but from what they show us on Friday I can tell it going to be really realistic watching that in a fulldome.

The part about story writing for the dome is really interesting too; I like how she talks about her own personal experience. I had so many classes about storytelling before, but doing story telling for a fulldome it something else. How do you fully use what you have? And as there is no actual frame, it’s hard to stage what’s going to be where. I believe that in the future story writing is going to be more about the environment and the situation as a whole instead of focusing on the story itself. Audience will be able to experience the situation for themselves instead of seeing other characters doing it, which means that script and story writing will be totally different from today. Writer will need to work even closer to technician and artists in order to actually create the perfect experience for the audiences. The progression of the story will be depends on the audiences, and everyone will have a different story of their own. This will make it worth re-visiting the experience again and again, and each time the audience will experience something different due to his personal experience and knowledge of the story. Video games had done this for a while now, but not for movies or novels. Imagine in the future we will be able to watch a movie again and again and base on our interaction to the movie we got different ending and different story happens inside the world of that story. Writer will need to create a more fully develop world before focusing on the main story, and in the end what’s more important to the audiences will be the small things that they experienced differently than others.

Woman's Comic

For this week’s women’s comic I read the Love and Rockets by Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez. It’s not a comic done by women, but it more like a comic that attract lots female readers. The most memorable story I read is “LOCAS vs LOCOS”. It’s hard to pick up the characters and story right away because I have no idea of its story in the past. It has a very strong black and white style with graphic style usage of black space. The story focuses on dealing with problem and social life of some young boys and girls. The main characters are girls, and all of them have very strong personally that make each of them unique and believable. I believe that’s one of the main reasons why this attracts many female readers.

It has a strong punk and anti-culture style in the characters. The story isn’t sometime crazy or unique, but it’s about daily things we all need to deal with. The catch is realism and in depth personality and emotion of the characters dealing with those little things. The dialog is a little long for my own taste, but it also helps to build up the story and personality of the characters. One thing I have to complain about its art style is that all the character feels like the same person with different clothing and hair on it, sometime I can’t really tell which is the girl, and which is the boy.

In some other comics I found the female characters all share the same personality, and the male character is the one that has unique personality that develop throughout the story…but In Love and Rockets it feel the other way around. The male characters still have unique and personality, but the female characters is the one that make the story truly shine.

Half of a perfect circle

Asterios Polyp is one of the best graphic novels I have ever read. The story is good, but what makes it GREAT is the art. There are countless different art style going on in Asterios, and they are there not only for the visual, but for the story telling as well. Different style means different personality, condition, feeling, emotion and situation. Polyp himself is mostly a poly constructed person, which representing he is all about function, logic and close to “emotionless”. His world is all about making sense and everything need to function in the way that they are suppose to. (That’s why when his house got burn down by lighting he take it rather hard as none of those things are suppose to happen)

There are a range of different type of storytelling using different types of element, lines, colors, shapes, facial, word and more. One of the most interesting things I found it’s the mix of style when Polyp first meets Hana. They were drawn in two totally different art style (representing personality), and when they start to talk they both has taken the other’s art style and mix within their own. It is visual story telling at its best; not even the best facial emotion drawing can tell a person’s emotion that clear. Polpy’s dialog bubble is always squire and Hana is circle, again, its visual story telling using every element that’s on the page. There in a scene where Polyp visit Hava in the classroom where she is teaching some students, and when they meet the box around that shot become circle to represent they are now a whole instead of individual.

 The use of flashback and what could have been is another great element of the book. Having the “DEAD” twin brother to tell the story of Polyp is a really interesting and fresh style. I realize there is no black ink at all in the whole book, and I think that’s really unique for a graphic novel. I am not sure what was the reason or purpose behind it, but it’s sure interesting to see that. In the end I think Asterios Polyp is more about the icon, shape, lines and color that’s connecting to the reader instead of reading the story itself.

ブラック・ジャック

Black Jack is a manga written and illustrated by Osamu Tezuka in the 1970s, who was also the creator of Astro Boy, Kimba and many other famous Japanese manga. He was basically the Japanese version of Walt Disney…well not in term of style. I had been always a big fan of Osamu’s work, but for some reason I never like Black Jack that much when I was a child. I think I was scared by the strange look of the character when I first read it, and never had a chance to return to it ever since. Black Jack is considering the best character that Osamu had ever created by Osamu himself, and I can’t agree more.

It is more of manga for teen and adult, and there are many medical references that children will just never understand. Perhaps that’s one of the reason I never read Black Jack when I was little. The character is a unique hero type, which is always on the grey line of being a hero or a villain. As a black market doctor Black Jack mostly ask a crazy high amount of payment in return for his surgery, and that’s one of the biggest arguments that put him on the border of being a villain. He makes an argument against that by asking how much is worth of life. If you think your life is the most important thing then you shouldn’t worry about how much money you spend, and any price that can save a life is consider to be way too cheap. I personally totally agree with him, as it doesn’t matter how much money you have, as once you are dead it’s all over anyway.

Osamu used a stereotype characters in all of his manga, and basically draw the same type of people with one model and repeat them over and over again throughout all his mangas. This allow the reader easily understand the situation and can focus more on the story.

Black Jack had changed its style more and more toward children after the death of Osamu, and slowly become something that’s almost too childish for adult to read. However Black Jack had became an animated series…well two totally different styles of animated series. One is a realistic and dark Black Jack focusing on the realistic world and the darker side of the story, the other one is a cute and funny style focusing on the lesson that children should learn after watching it.