The entire concept of the Zenith project was that students could use the skills they’d developed over the course of their time at Freestyle to make something completely new and original/that they wanted to make, outside of our regular projects and assignments.
For this project, from the get-go, I knew that I wanted to make a comic. My goal in life is to become a comic book author – and therefore, I thought that using the Zenith project as an opportunity to practice actually making comic pages would be a good idea. Though part of the motivation behind me choosing this particular project was also the fact that I did the same thing last year as well, during the Explorations Unit – and was unable to finish even a single page. I wanted to prove to myself that I could get further than that, this time.
Ultimately I did prove that to myself, but only by the slimmest of margins – and, well. I did finish a single page!!
I didn’t do much research in particular when it came to making the comic? I’ve always been a fan of comics, so my ‘research’, I suppose, could be considered the years that I’ve spent reading and learning how to write stories, how to draw, and how to format panels together in a way that looks good. My skills still need a lot of work to be even half-way decent, but that’s an issue not of not doing enough research but rather simply just not enough practice, or experience.
For this project, I collaborated with Jessica Lohse. She and I worked together in order to write the story of our comic during the world-building unit, and later, we got to work actually turning that story into something visual. I began by rough-drafting the entirety of the first chapter (which ended up being around 40 pages). It was quite a bit of challenge figuring out how I wanted to lay things out in a way that looked nice and flowed well, but ultimately I think I did a pretty decent job.
As I worked on the rough draft, Jessica went about making the settings that would be visited in the chapter in the 3D animation program Maya.
By making a rough model of the setting, this meant that I wouldn’t have to worry about proportions, or different angles of the setting when sketching – I could take screenshots of the model from all sorts of angles, and then either reference or trace over them. And while it still took way too long for me to actually complete those backgrounds, I think it’s really undeniable that Jessica’s work helped to shave off a lot of time – so I’m really glad to have collaborated with her.
The 21st century skills I improved upon the most during this project were probably Visual Literacy and Technological Literacy. When making a comic, you need to be able to format your art in a way that can be understood by the audience, or reader – so while I was paneling and planning out the comic, I was constantly thinking about how different panels would come across, or in what ways I needed to adjust pages (and their orders) in order to make the story more understandable. Ultimately, I think I ended up doing a pretty good job – the biggest issue for me was actually making the finalized version of those concepts – which is where Technological Literacy comes in. The use of 3D assets to help make the settings was definitely a new touch to making comics that I hadn’t attempted before – and quite honestly I think it’s something that I will maintain far into the future in order to help reduce my work-time on a single page, as well as for convenience. Another big thing that had to do with technology was figuring out how to use new programs and their features in order to create the file format, as well as the look or aesthetic that I wanted. I used the program Clip Studio Paint, said to be one of the greatest programs for making manga of all time, which was an adjustment that I had to get used to, as it’s not a program I use often. Another thing that I needed to learn was how to work with half-tones, or screentones. There are all sorts of screentones that can be imported into an image, as well as screentones you can implement by changing the layer settings. So a big part of the project, for me at least, was figuring out how to use all these new features that I’d never tried before. And I will definitely use these new skills I’m starting to develop in the future, when I make more (or finish this) comic.
For the project objectives, I think I was definitely able to accomplish the one of elevating my skills and experiences. I’ve made finished comics in the past (well, I’ve made one finished comic in the past) and it was… not great. My attempt last year also ended in failure, with me deeply unsatisfied with what I had made. This time, while the majority of the chapter still remains unfinished, I still plan to actually finish it – and then continue to write and draw the next chapter in the future, even if I do end up moving at a slower pace than I initially hoped for. I still have a lot of hope for this project – and while the finished page-count is ridiculously small, this one finished page looks better than any other comic attempt I’ve made in the past – which is a sign, to me, that I’m improving, So I would say that my experiences and skills have been made at least somewhat better.
If I could do the project over again, I think the biggest thing I would change (if it’s even possible of being changed) would be just how busy I was during the time we had to work on the Zenith. I was juggling extracurriculars such as dance, and half-way through our project time I went on an exchange trip to Japan. Afterwards, I was busy with AP Testing, finals, senior activities, and managing all of the other final projects that come with the end of the year. So if I could change anything, I would change just how much I have going on outside of the project when I’m working on it – that way I’d be able to center my focus more on it. If it had been my only big project at the time, then I think I would have gotten so much farther in the project. So that’s what I would change.
One thing I would like a reader of the comic to remember about the story is the characters. Often, my stories depend heavily on character-building, and the relationship between the characters, and how those relationships change over time. (As well as how characters change over time due to those relationships.) So if my readers could look at the characters, and the world, and be able to think, “I wonder what happens next,” that would make me very happy.
Ultimately, I ended up finishing the first page (shown above), and got partially through making the second and third pages.
Of course, due to the fact that this is a story concept we’ve been working on together for a while (and I in particular have been working on for four years now), we also produced a lot of other material for the story/concept as well!!
So, here’s some of our additional material:
We also had to present our work to the juniors – so if you’d like to hear Jessica and I talk about our project with visuals, here’s our video presentation!!