Points of View

Good day all.

I have just finished creating the final piece(s) for my Points of View project. Trying to figure what needs to be done to get it to look like it does now was rather challenging – there is still so much I do not know about software.. Spent the last couple of hours just rampaging throughout the world wide web searching for answers to questions that I never even thought would come up. But alas, all is finished and I am able to present my final piece for the project – a flipbook that tackles the topic of death.

For reference, here is a screencap of a proposal/plan for the project:

The proposal merely outlines my ideas but does not really touch upon all the in-depth part of it which is why I am typing up this post right now. My topic is Death and the three points I chose to explore are: • Death is a product of time; • Death is a leap of faith; • Death is a realm of mystery. 

I had quite a bit of trouble trying to figure out what I wanted to do for the project, would even say that I spent more time stressing out about it rather than actually working on it, haha. My initial ideas were rather simple and generic, only after a couple of tutorials did it finally hit me that I was going about it completely wrong. The first few weeks were spent focusing mainly on the black and white of Death, then, eventually I added some grey into my thinking process but even then nothing was progressing and then the realization struck me – what I was truly missing was colour.  Once I came to that conclusion, I was officially on the right track. 

With that short introduction out of the way, let’s get into the actual work. Here is the final piece:

Final Pieces

Click here to view the flipbook!

(Navigation is very simple, click on the arrows within the window to flip through the booklet. For a better experience, view in full screen.)

Had it not been for the lockdown, I would have turned it into a physical booklet, for now, the best I could have done was make it into a digital flipbook. If I had had the opportunity (and the time) to make a physical copy of it, I think I would go with a simple widespread design. 

Several panels and parts of the book would benefit from it being made this way. Especially these sections:

I will be looking into creating a physical copy of this after the deadline, will upload pictures of it here onto the blog once it is done.

Due to the fact that this is a single piece for a project which required 3 separate ones, I should talk about which parts of the booklet represent which point of view.

The book in itself is essentially an amalgamation of these 3 points of view. Whilst working on it, I focused on trying to encapsulate the 3 points in almost every page/sequence. There are several references/ideas hidden throughout the sequences in the book. For instance:

• The skull in the beginning is a reference to Memento Mori. I went with a generic adaptation of death as that is what I saw it as before starting to work on this project. I have mentioned in previous posts that the main reason I went with this topic is because I wanted to get over my fear of death and I felt that this was the way to do it. This booklet captures that journey rather well – going from a grim and threatening beginning to a more hopeful or neutral ending. You could say that the entire book poses as a representation of the “Death is a product of time” point of view – 1) You die once your time here is over; 2) Dying is a process that takes time; 3) Coming to terms with death may take a long while (it surely did for me); 4) Regardless of your worries, you will still end up being submerged in the realm of death (eventually)

• The flow of compositions and story are meant to represent the passage of time, hinting at death linking in with death. 

• The eventual shift to surrealism is meant to represent the uncertainty of what is awaiting us on the other side. 

• The characters from the comic are based on cells, the part where they “die” is accurate to the death of a cell – coming apart and vanishing.

• The reason the comic may not seem like it is consistent all the way through is because I wanted to capsulate the sense of the characters leaving the earthly world, slowly dematerializing and becoming one with death.

• In the comic, when the characters jump off of the ledge, a light can be seen coming in from the back of the room, meaning someone else is about to go through the same thing. The black shadow insinuates the end, it was the blue character’s time to leave for good, so the shadow scared them into jumping.

• The corridor is meant to represent life flashing before your eyes, each picture is meant to represent a memory. I wanted to leave the canvases blank for the viewer’s imagination, the only one I distinguished was the one where the character was holding their children in the photo. The reason for that is that I wanted to go with the narrative that they finally realized that they have died as well as they came to the realization of what they are leaving behind, hence the breakdown.

• The characters in the picture are surreal because the main character is losing their sense of material world physical laws as they are transcending into the unknown where the same laws do not apply.

• The characters have a main colour and a few extra sets of colours for different emotions. For example, with the main character, I wanted to capture their neutral (blue/teal), scared (hints of purple and brown) and frustrated (red/orange) states.

Sectioning/Labeling

These are the sets of pages/spreads that best represent each point of view:

• Death is a product of time:

“Memento Mori reference, a hint at the Grim Reaper who is known to collect the soul of those whose time on Earth is over.”

“Coming to terms with it takes time.”

“Additionally, our bodies are “designed” to live a amount of time, once it reaches its limit, it begins dying.”

“Regardless of your worries, you will still end up being submerged in the realm of death (eventually)”
• Death is a realm of mystery:

• Death is a leap of faith:

• The rest is a mixture of the points. I did not want to section everything off so as to leave space for interpretation. I had the idea of adding keywords, but after my last tutorial I had to drop the idea as it made it more interesting and it just looks better without words.Research

Most of my research was done at the very beginning before I had everything figured out. I spent a lot of time researching the idea of death and the afterlife, watched several documentaries and read some stories about people who have had NDEs (Near death experiences) and got to see what might lurk on the other side. I applied a big part of it across the entire booklet, most of it went into the creation of the comic as it best represents the concept of an “afterlife” in this piece.

Playlist of the videos I watched for research.

Watching these videos was very beneficial, it shone a light on something I had never thought about, sparked some ideas and eventually lead to the final piece you see today. I took a lot of notes in my personal project journal but since most of it is just rambling, I do not think there would be much use of posting everything onto here, but here are some snippets that I found the most interesting:

Will need to remind myself not to write so much next time as this took up a LOT of my time and was fairly unusable. It was helpful developing a concept but I really did not need to write that much.

Mood board for when I was trying to figure out which route I would like to take with the project (before final idea).

The idea of it was to make up an image of references of how different artists across different periods of time tried to capture death in their work. Some may seem obscure, some may seem generic, some may seem incomprehensible, but that really is the essence of death. It is just as absurd as life (if not more).

Supporting Sketches

This is something I could have done more of. It was even pointed out to my by my professors that I simply write too much. They did not say that it was a bad thing, but I do understand how sometimes that can be what will hold me back when creating something. For the next project I want to try and sketch straight away instead of making pointless 40 page essays in my journal, haha.

Some book spreads, had to scratch a few spreads and ideas. Most notably – the clocks as they resembled Dali’s iconic melting clocks.

Comic Narrative Rough

Comic narrative rough with added colour values. 

To some extent, I really like this simple flat colour composition. It seems like it would work well on its own, but I am glad I went for a more polished/extended style.

That is pretty much it for the project, I will be typing up a 500 word evaluation in an upcoming post. Have to get back to working on my A4A reflective piece now, will be making a post on that later as well, so stay tuned! Apologies for the very abrupt ending, time is just really not on my side these days, haha. Hopefully you have enjoyed the post regardless, thank you for reading! See you in the next one.

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