We made it guys! The final stretch of the project! While there is still more work to be done within the week, we are on the edge of the completion for this pitch. Moreover, a ton of progress has been made during this week as we will get into here.
Recap
The main highlights of the previous week included starting on the drawings for the villain pages as well as reaching out to Professor Andrew for feedback. After receiving even more feedback from Professor Andrew, numerous changes were made.
What Changed?
All of the paragraph text has now been set to the standard 60pt for the full document opposed to having 70pt for areas where less text was needed. This was partially done as a way to further increase the size of images in the “setting” page as well as the panel images within the “characters” pages.
Speaking of which, I have also changed the format of the text-box displaying character facts to something more akin to classic comic books. Per Professor Andrew’s advice, I also included the species as a note in there; which was a great suggestion and helped further condense the text in the character pages.
The “episode concepts” section meanwhile was parsed down to one page only with certain episode ideas cut out for space. This was another suggestion from Professor Andrew, and at first I was hesitant to do so; but I decided to give it a try for reasons I will go into more shortly.
Finally, after receiving some note about the background of the document from Professor Shanks, I decided to go back to my original material pattern, do my best to sharpen the original image, then apply the filter over a slightly brighter shade of blue. Personally, I see great improvement in providing better contrast to the pitch content as well as having a much higher-resolution background. However, depending on feedback, I may try one more idea for the pitch background.
What’s New?
Now we’re getting into the big stuff from the past week.
To start, I wrote descriptions of the story inspirations; making notes of specific examples.
The “world” page began development with new artwork made specifically for it. I decided to color the characters shown in the artwork akin to a classic “UPA” style to communicate how colorful and varied the world is while also saving myself some drawing time. The image below it is from artwork made prior to the project.
The “theme” page was also completed as a way to better highlight what makes this idea special and why this series is important to create.
The “target audience” page also began creation; but is very much still in progress.
Finally, we get to the villains. Overall, three main villain drawings were completed within the past two weeks; admittedly a smaller amount than written in my pitch script, but time only allotted me to complete this number for the week.
Furthermore, when trying to arrange the images onto the page, I struggled to achieve a visual balance with the intended six villains per-page. I had already received critiques of some of my images being rather small, and I did not want to repeat my mistakes here. And given that I was requested to parse down my episode list, I decided there was less of a need to have every single villain drawn (at least for the time being). From there, I placed three villains per page as it was the easiest to balance with text; though the visual style of these pages are still far from complete.
What I did complete however was the page for “The Benefactor”, who acts as an overarching villain for the series. In this case, I carved a silhouette within Illustrator and set a description and name beside him. I felt this helped in establishing the Benefactor as an entirely different force than the other villains listed and the large silhouette helps communicate his looming presence.
Overall, while there is still work to be done, a lot of progress has been made.
What’s Next?
I plan to get in touch with Professor Andrew over the project one more time, then after feedback, finish the project along with all other necessary materials.
With this being my last report on the project, I want to say how proud I am of how much I was able to achieve with this work and I want to thank everyone who followed me on this journey and provided feedback for the work. I really appreciate the engagement. I hope all of you will join me to see the completion of this work!
Meanwhile, you can view the current draft here!